Mario Minichiello presents Homeward Bound at Straitjacket gallery

Minichiello and his wife, illustrator Liz Anelli, came to Newcastle 11 years ago, with Minichiello taking a post as a professor of design at the University of Newcastle. The couple returned to live their in home in Cambridge early in 2023.

The exhibition is entitled Homeward Bound, a nod to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's hit folk song, written by Simon, an American, while waiting on a railway platform in England in 1964.

"This exhibition is a journey to and from home," Minichiello writes in the show's invitation. "It's a sense of being in between places and finding new meaning in each. One is the place where I grew up England and the continent of Europe, the other is a place that changed my view of the world, where my home is with my friends, Australia."

The works reflect stories from both Newcastle (here) and England.

"The stories, the visual narrative, are telling about experiences in both places," Minichiello says. "It is what songs, and all art does. It's playing back the experience that you translated that may have some universal context to other people."

Minichiello arrived in Newcastle this week, bringing the 36 works with him. The sizes and prices vary, and all are unframed.

The work is fresh: full of colour, life, places, people. The works include a bright rooster - an ode to his late father, who loved chickens; a prawn fishing scene in Newcastle; a pair of trees over a child's grave in Kentford, celebrating the cycle of life; doves over poppy fields in Flanders Fields, which turn into hawks as they go higher in the sky.

"The majority of it is a homage to love and friendship, and the sense of being welcomed home," Minichiello says.

For Minichiello, the trip here is about the show and catching up with friends, and giving a piece of himself to Newcastle. "It is so impressive how many people do collect art in their homes in Newcastle," he says. "The tag of creative city is apt."

Also showing at Straitjacket is work by Sydney artist Stephen Smith. The essence of Steve Smith's images and the dream-like entities in his paintings and drawings are taken from observations on his daily travels around Bondi and other suburbs of Sydney.