08/05/2026
Clay + Bone / Split Decisions
Parris Dewhurst & Julie Williams
Hill End Art Gallery
11am - 3pm
Saturdays & Sundays
Until June 28
Parris Dewhurst is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, drawing and collage, whose practice is shaped by close attention to the natural world.
Working with iron-speckled clay and gold-toned glaze, her ceramic forms draw from Hill End’s mineral-rich landscape. These works respond to what is often overlooked and reflect on the impact of human activity and habitat loss.
Her practice is grounded in slow, attentive processes. Coil building and rhythmic surface engraving echo time spent walking through remote bushland, observing, listening, and moving at a different pace.
Parris has returned to Hill End for nearly two decades, where the landscape continues to offer a place of connection and quiet reflection.
Julie Williams is predominantly an oil painter who delights in experimenting with different media, she is also a painting teacher who divides her time between her studios in Hill End and Sydney. She participated in the inaugural Hill End Gallery exhibition in 2004 and has had solo and group exhibitions in regional NSW and Sydney, with her fellow artists and friends from Hill End ever since.
Julie has also exhibited in Tasmania and in many parts of South East Asia (during her five years while living in Singapore). Her work is held in many private collections and the public collection of Bathurst Regional Gallery.
Since graduating from the National Art School in 2003, she has used archival research and plein air study to investigate and immerse herself in the rugged, raw, historical landscape that upon first sight, she had such an immediate strong connection to. The town is wrapped in a rich history of immigration that gave Julie a sense of belonging that she had been searching for since her own migration from the UK at the age of 20.
Her interests in the Chinese diaspora, the strong local community, artistic heritage, geology, historical maps, town leases, mine leases and historic houses owned by friends appear in her drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, textiles and ceramics.
These works have seen a return to ‘plein air’ and a desire to further abstract her initial visceral response to the landscape that lives deep in her heart and mind. She has continuously used a motif as personal metaphor, often, the void of a mineshaft and the split in Split Rock to showcase her conceptual ideas and communicate her spiritual beliefs and sense of ‘Being’. Portals and gateways to deepen her esoteric practice.
With the exhibition, ‘Split Decisions’ Julie is thrilled to share, her passion and desire to articulate the life force and magical landscape of her unique Hill End journey, with so many friends and family who have supported her over many years.
