THIS year the Shepparton Festival turns 25. To celebrate this incredible milestone, the festival will soon be launching an exciting 17-day winter festival program running from June 11-27.
This year’s theme is ‘Unify’. In August last year, festival creative director, Jamie Lea, announced the ‘Call to Create’, inviting visual artists in the Goulburn Valley to interpret the theme.
“My wholehearted thanks to all those who responded to the festival’s ‘Call to Create’, we were blown away by the diversity in works and found it incredibly difficult to select the chosen artist for 2021,” Jamie said.
The Festival is proud to announce Marion Langford as the chosen artist for this year’s winter festival. Her textile piece, ‘Unify: The Fabric of our society’, was born out of an opportunity for the artist herself to reconnect and unite with other creatives after a challenging year.
“When I think about unify, I think of the coming together, the threads of our lives, of community, our story line, our sense of place, and how we are all interconnected,” Ms Langford said.
The festival team and board would like to express their gratitude to all the artists who submitted work – Beck Gladman, Dery Theodorus, Natalia Collins, Barb Rigano, Marion Langford, Erminia Villani, Philip Hickingbotham, Jasmine De Lai, Amanda Paino and Davidson Lopes da Rosa.
Each artist participated in a short video discussing their response to the festival theme. If you’d like to see the artworks and hear directly from the artists, head to the Shepparton Festival Facebook page or visit sheppartonfestival.org.au.
