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The Spiral Gallery: Non-Market Creativity And Belonging In An Australian Country Town, Gordon Waitt, Chris Gibson

Chris Gibson

This paper seeks to explore creative practice in an Australian country town, and in so doing, to unsettle market-orientated interpretations of creativity that privilege the urban. Instead of focusing on creative practice as a means to develop industries, we focus on how creativity is a means to establish a cooperative gallery space that helps to sustain a sense of self in an otherwise antithetical social and cultural context. The example we discuss is The Spiral Gallery, a women's co-operative arts space established in the 1990s in the small (but somewhat iconic) country town of Bega - in a place where …