Hysteria runs rampant in Puritan Salem, Massachusetts. A group of young girls and a slave were found dancing in the woods and conjuring spells. After one of the girls falls ill, the town suspects it is the work of the devil and local witches. However, all is not what it seems. John Proctor, a local farmer, suspects that the local witchcraft is not witchcraft at all, but the invention of a scorned teenage girl. Neighbour turns on neighbour as Proctor fights to restore sense to the town and save many from the hangman’s noose.

Presented by Saga Productions Theatre

Written by Arthur Miller

Directed by Raquel Gardener & Alexandra Runge
 

For their 2022 Gala Event, Manningham Concert Band is presenting the multimedia extravaganza Last Night of the Proms!

Join them for a night of multiple and exciting guest performers and soloists.

Featuring music from the UK and her colonies, including all the sing-along British classics. 

JamFactory ICON Angela Valamanesh: About being here is Angela Valamanesh’s exploration into the interconnectedness of life on earth – between human, animal, and plant beings. This life view, first felt intuitively by the artist; is reinforced through her ongoing research at leading libraries and scientific institutions both in Australia and abroad. 

“I believe that art like science can help teach us about who we are, what we are made of and in doing so show us the importance of recognising that we are part of a whole.” Angela Valamanesh

Inspired by the symbiosis between science and poetry, Angela Valamanesh’s artworks elicit intrigue and a strong sense of personal investigation as she manipulates seemingly familiar anatomical, botanical, and parasitic forms in beguiling and unusual ways.

Primarily known for her biomorphic ceramic sculptures, this exhibition also celebrates the artist’s evocative drawings, watercolours, and mixed media works from her developing style of the late 1990s until present.

Historically, links have been made between the human form and plant species, not only structurally but also through language: the family tree, our roots, or a severed limb, while early medicine made connections between plants that resembled parts of our bodies and their therapeutic effects on those body parts.

About the exhibition

JamFactory’s Icon series celebrates the achievements of South Australia’s most influential artists working in craft-based media.

JamFactory ICON Angela Valamanesh: About being here will tour to 14 venues nationally and is accompanied by a 40-page catalogue featuring images by Michael Kluvanek with essays by Dr. Mike Lee and Wendy Walker.

Other public programs

Artist Talk with Angela Valamanesh

Saturday 3 September, 2.00pm to 3.00pm.

Free event.

Find out more and register online. 

Ceramics Workshop with Holly Phillipson

Available sessions:

• Friday 2 September, 10.30am to 1.30pm
• Saturday 3 September, 3.00pm to 6.00pm

Tickets: $40 general admission, $30 concession.

Find out more and book online.

About the artist

Angela Valamanesh was born in Port Pirie, South Australia in 1953 and currently lives and works in Adelaide. Angela holds a Diploma in Design in Ceramics from the South Australian School of Art (1977), a Master of Visual Arts from the University of South Australia (1993), and a PhD from the University of South Australia (2012).

Her drawings, ceramic objects, and watercolours are the result of an incredible depth of research, referencing complex scientific, historic, and philosophical ideas. Angela’s imagery stems from micro- and macro- biology, historical anatomical and botanical illustrations, natural history collections, and rare books.

Valamanesh’s oeuvre is populated with the animal, vegetable, and mineral with glimpses of microbes, bacteria, pathogens, and spores. Valamanesh’s works elicit ambiguity and present a strong sense of personal investigation. In the artist’s own words:

“It is important that the work is not prescriptive but offers the viewer the opportunity of personal engagement with the work and time to reflect on their own personal experiences.”

Instrumental in Valamanesh’s bourgeoning visual arts practice was her Samstag Scholarship undertaken at the Glasgow School of Art. This residency resulted in the seminal work For a long while there were only plants, 1997, and is the point of departure for this exhibition. This artwork – a watercolour, pen and ink work on paper and dipped in wax – is a repository for images and ideas that have fuelled Valamanesh’s practice ever since.

Presenting partner
JamFactory

JamFactory ICON Angela Valamanesh: About being here is a JamFactory touring exhibition.

Government partners
Australia Council for the Arts
The Visual Arts and Craft Strategy
Department for Innovation and Skills

JamFactory ICON Angela Valamanesh: About being here has been assisted by the South Australian Government through the Department for Innovation and Skills and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, Contemporary Touring Initiative.

Angela Valamanesh acknowledges the assistance of the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts.

Angela Valamanesh is represented by GAG PROJECTS, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.

Photo credit: Michal Kluvanek.

All day volleyball session for children aged 10 to 16 years.

Volleyball skills, games and activities.

No prior experience required.

Registrations are essential.  Contact Manningham Stadiums on 8841 4555 to secure your spot or to find out more. 

Active Manningham will be running a free mat Pilates class.

Focus on improving flexibility, strength, core stability and body awareness. Low impact, repetitive moves for a full body workout.

Due to limited spaces registration is essential.

Kaleidoscope of Characters comprises nine cabaret acts across a season of 7 performances. Each night will feature a group of performers each presenting their self-devised cabaret.

Performance Schedule:

Wednesday 15th November:

• Brotherband with their EP "Little Fish" and Support Act: Charlie McCosh

Thursday 16 November:

• Emily Dingle in Self-Fulfilled Prophecy
• Imogen Whittaker in The Last Word

Friday 17 November:

• Lady Whisper in The Art of Seeking Attention
• Emma Blake in Basic Witch
• Pas x Rory in These Gays, They’re Trying to Murder Me

Saturday 18 November:

• Helmet Von Püsh in Püsh Presents “Taste.”
• Jenn Biggs & Jess May in Body of Work
• Pas x Rory in These Gays, They’re Trying to Murder Me

Wednesday 22 November:

• Emma Blake in Basic Witch
• Latecha Khairy in How Did I Get Here?

- Jenn Biggs & Jess May in Body of Work

Thursday 23 November:
- Imogen Whittaker in The Last Word
- Emily Dingle in Self-Fulfilled Prophecy

Friday 24 November:
- Helmet Von Püsh in Püsh Presents “Taste.”
- Latecha Khairy in How Did I Get Here?
- Lady Whisper in The Art of Seeking Attention."

Join us to acknowledge Sorry Day and learn more about First Nations People and cultures.

This event will feature:

• a video of Aunty Doreen Garvey-Wandin's Sorry Day address
• a Cultural Regeneration Workshop with Alana Marsh
• closing comments by Manningham CEO Andrew Day
• a viewing of the Manningham Art Gallery Exhibition Serving Country

Catering will be provided by Mabu Mabu. Please advise if you have any dietary requirements by Monday 23 May by contacting spcs@manningham.vic.gov.au.

Painted Country presents the work of five Australian First Nations artists - Nellie Ngampa Coulthard, Brenda Napaltjarri, Clara Napurrula, Rene Sundown and Adrian Jurra Tjungurrayi.

Drawing upon their rich artistic, cultural, and ancestral knowledge, each artist paints unique depictions of Country, refracted through memory and lived experience. Using restrained colour palettes, the artists each capture the subtle shifts of light, native flora, ancestral stories, and culturally significant sites across the vast desert regions of Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory.

Presented together, these diverse artistic perspectives and practices converge to reveal a rich and nuanced portrayal and understanding of the Australian desert landscape. Atmospheric and harmonious, these works transcend naturalistic representation, evoking deeper resonances.

Working from Iwantja Arts in South Australia and Papunya Tula Artists in the Northern Territory, the artists uphold and carry forward ancestral and artistic traditions through their practice and deep cultural knowledge.

With special thanks to the Artists; Iwantja Arts, South Australia; Papunya Tula Artists, Northern Territory; and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, who partnered with Manningham Art Gallery to curate this major exhibition. 

Adrian Jurra Tjungurrayi is an emerging Pintupi artist whose rhythmic, tessellating compositions recall his familial cultural and artistic lineages and herald the bold future of Papunya Tula painting. Tjungurrayi paints Yunala, the name of both a desert flora with an interlacing root network and a significant site on his ancestral Country, expressed in meandering lines and geometric forms. Adrian's soft tonal gradations conjure the salt lakes of his Country, resulting in a highly sophisticated and contemporary aesthetic.

Brenda Napaltjarri is an emerging Pintupi artist from Walungurru (Kintore), in the far west of the Northern Territory, Australia. Napaltjarri’s powerful practice recalls the concentric and inwardly focused energy of her father’s work, the late Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi. Refining her father's practice further, the elegant simplicity of Napaltjarri’s radiating circles emanate a visceral energy, undulating with hypnotic motion.    

Clara Napurrula is an emerging Pintupi artist from Walungurru (Kintore), in the far west of the Northern Territory, Australia. Napurrula is recognised for her precision and elegance, painting fields of finely dotted lines that shimmer and surge across the canvas. Napurrula is the daughter of renowned Pintupi artist Wintjiya Napaltjarri (c. 1932 – 2014) a pioneer of the women’s Western Desert art movement. As a second-generation Pintupi artist, Clara Napurrula’s practice serves as an important continuation of the women’s Papunya Tula art movement.

Nellie Ngampa Coulthard paints the landscapes of her childhood, Yankunytjatjara Country near Oodnadatta, South Australia. Coulthard’s paintings are refined in technique and composition, accenting bold pinks, golden browns and burnt oranges and defined by the outstretched linear branches of the Acacia Murrayana Wattle that sit at the heart of her compositions. 

Rene Sundown is a senior Yankunytjatjara artist from Indulkana, in far north South Australia. Sundown paints delicate fields of cream and gold that recall the subtle shifts in colour of the Ngura Tali, Sand Dune Country near Erldunda in the Northern Territory where she was raised.
Her refined palette evokes the shifting dunes and sun-warmed grasses of the central desert, intersected with bold linear compositional markers delineating sites of cultural significance.

Image Credit: Nellie Ngampa Coulthard, Tjuntala Ngurangka - Country with Wattle (Acacia Murrayana), 2023, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 152 x 167 cm (detail). Courtsey of The Artist, Iwantja Arts and Alcaston Gallery.

​Deborah White is a Melbourne-based artist who works across performance-based photography, video and mixed-media installations. 

Everlasting Happiness entertains the utopian idea of love as a political concept. The underlying philosophy of this aspiration is to love the most distant. This is not a sentimental notion of love. It is a robust kind of love with a revolutionary power. Viewing the actions of love as a deployment of force, this work intertwines supernatural wonder with the spectacle of war.

The playful and vibrant performance-based video depicts an anarcho-mystic quest battling against the pathology of the post-truth world. Featuring fictitious characters that defy the rational world, the video is infused with flower power, music and animal warriors that open the heart to hope and joy. All the characters are performed by the artist—serving as a self-reflection on the internal struggle to love unconditionally.  This work strives for the idealistic desire of a utopian non-place of the imagination. (Sound design is by Jamie Coghill.)

Video still from Everlasting Happiness (2023).
HD digital video, 11:15 mins, 1 or 3 channel, looped, variable dimensions.

Image courtesy of the Artist.

Beyond the Table: The Dinner Party Reimagined  is a reimagining of a traditional dinner party, with a nod to 1970s nostalgia and celebrating one of the key gathering spaces in our homes, the humble dining table.

The installation is on display at Manningham Art Gallery as part of Melbourne Design Week, Australia's premier design festival featuring events across Melbourne and regional Victoria.

Emerging Manningham artist Isobel Goodman responds to and selects works from Manningham Council’s ‘Potters Cottage Collection,’ a grouping of vessels created by the Potters Cottage co-operative. The co-operative was founded in Warrandyte in 1958 to advocate for and sell handmade functional Australian pottery.

Goodman hand builds her signature papier mâché and plaster sculptures – organic and abstracted forms to reference a dinner party table setting – vases, cutlery, plates, and candlesticks that play off and create a contemporary juxtaposition against the Potters Cottage vessels from the 1970s. 

Surrounding the central dining table presentation is a display of paintings from local Manningham artist Jade Piltz. These works depict bright, layered and abstract domestic objects that encapsulate the exhibition’s celebration of communal gathering and ritual. 

During Melbourne Design Week (15-25 May) visitors can take home a flower to celebrate this exhibition. 

Artist Bios: 
Isobel Goodman was recently awarded a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Melbourne. Her practice focuses on sculptural exploration and the body’s navigation of space and environment through the perspective of APD (Auditory Processing Disorder). She invites audiences to examine their relationship between the physical self and how we navigate the world around us.

Jade Piltz is a Warrandyte painter and ceramist. She is fascinated by our innate search for belonging, our desire for meaning and relationships to change and transition. Using mark making, she explores the ways our interactions with surrounding spaces and objects, narrate and inform our lives.

This Exhibition was supported by Gabriela Mello, owner and director of Warrandyte Pottery, through artist mentorship and technical and conceptual support and curated by Lucy Beattie Hughes, Manningham Council’s Creative Industries Officer.

Jade Piltz, Alone, Together (detail), 2024,  acrylic on canvas, 168 x 122cm. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by: Emily Brookfield.
 

 
Melbourne Design Week is Australia’s largest and leading annual design festival and takes place from 15 to 25 May 2025.

The 2025 program spans 11 days of 350+ events, exhibitions, talks, and installations throughout metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria.

Melbourne Design Week is a vital platform for emerging and established creative practitioners, offering the Australian design community and audiences the opportunity to engage with a diverse program of talks, tours, exhibitions, installations, and workshops. Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and is curated and delivered by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).

Visit designweek.melbourne to view the full program.


 

Active Manningham is running an online workshop to assist sports clubs understand marketing, promotion and social media.

MK Consulting will facilitate the session. Topics covered include:

• Effective marketing strategies for community sport.
• Understand how to tailor your marketing and promotion to reach diverse audiences.
• Learn how to maximise your club’s social media impact.

Active Manningham is running an online workshop to assist sports clubs with membership retention and acquisition.

MK Consulting will facilitate the session. Topics covered include:

• Unpacking the latest participation data and trends impacting membership in community sport
• Understanding barriers and motivating factors for sports participation to increase retention
• Learning how to grow and diversify your membership base.

A terrible water shortage has crippled the Gotham-like town that serves as the setting for Urinetown.

In a mad attempt to regulate water consumption, the government has outlawed the use of private toilets. The citizenry must use public, pay-for-use amenities owned and operated by the corrupt and iron-fisted Caldwell B. Cladwell. The privilege to pee is expensive, draining and dangerous. Anyone who refuses to pay to pee is immediately and without question hauled off to Urinetown.

What is Urinetown? Nobody knows, for those who are sent there are never heard from again. But it's really a love story and there's a revolution all before the end of Act I. Will the revolution succeed? Can true love be found in Urinetown? All these questions and more are answered in Urinetown.

Auslan interpreted performance: Friday 8 September, 8.00pm to 10.00pm.

Presented by Phoenix Theatre Company.

Supported by Manningham's Community Grant Program.

In her site-specific project Lumina, Izabela Pluta builds on her ongoing interest in temporality and place, using photography as a dynamic process to investigate the fluid intersections of time, memory and impermanence.

Come and see this art exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art until 5 October 2025.

Visit the Heide website for opening hours and information about how to plan your visit.

A 6 week art therapy group for kids in grades 5 and 6, who have experienced or witnessed family violence.

Making art can help us to tell our stories and make sense of our experiences. Plus, it is a fun creative way to get to know ourselves better as well as others in the group. Helping us to appreciate who we are, our special talents and gifts, and to see these gifts in others too.

Art therapy helps us to:

• express thoughts, ideas, and emotions
• manage difficult feelings, like anger and worry
• learn to problem solve and build resilience
• grow confidence and self-esteem
• improve social skills

A fun, safe and supportive space that encourages listening and caring.

Participation is free and all art materials will be provided. No artistic skills necessary!

This program is provided by Doncare in partnership with Anglicare Victoria.