Molly Rose Duggan is working on making art more accessible in the community. Photo: Jessica Knight.
Like all artists, Illawarra’s Molly Rose Duggan is always looking for ways to share her artwork in the community.
The 21-year-old moved from Tasmania in her teens and is studying a communications and media and creative arts double degree at the University of Wollongong.
She’s used social media to promote her art and has built a community of Illawarra artists on her Instagram account. Molly’s also been reaching out to Sydney artists too and plans to get more exhibitions in the city this year.
“Now that I’m studying marketing, I can see how it’s all interlinked in that way, especially communications. With art, you’re just trying to communicate a message to people,” she said.
However, it was a creative community project in her second year that really opened Molly’s eyes to the possibility of a mobile art space to reach an ever-wider audience.
Molly and a group of her peers came up with the idea of an art showcase modelled on an “open house exhibition”, where artists or collectives turn their living spaces into exhibitions, but the group was struggling with a setting.
“I wish I could do that but unfortunately, I don’t have a house. I just live in a uni apartment,” Molly said.
Eden Hobbs, another artist in the Wollongong community, offered the group the use of a shed and Shed Show was born.
Using her Instagram account and skills gained from her degree, Molly spread the word about Shed Show.
The show displayed Molly’s work and that of 11 others.
She said she was shocked at the outcome, especially after Wollongong artist Clare O’Toole also signed up for the showcase.
More than 100 people attended the show last October and Molly said the group was “absolutely beaming” with the outcome.
“I definitely would do it again. We just need to find another shed!”
Molly’s ultimate aim is for Shed Show to become a mobile gallery.
“I understand that art can be very competitive and that’s the way it’s been institutionally and systematically sustained in society. But the only way to push other artists up is by working together,” she said.
“We deserve more rights. We deserve more opportunities from institutions and the government. The only way we can do that is to band together, be strong and make beautiful things that people can’t ignore.”
Molly was exposed to art from a young age.
“My mum is an artist and she had a studio in this massive house that she and my dad built on this big property in Tasmania,” she said.
“I was in an environment where drawing, painting, creativity and creatively thinking was very much encouraged. I was able to find my own style.
“My mum was so supportive. I’d sell sculptures in the post office; because it’s in Tasmania, you can do stuff like that.”
She recalled attending an exhibition at MONA (Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art) as a child that changed her perspective on art.
“I was eight or nine and I saw this sculpture where it was this child in a cage with taxidermy mice crawling all over her. [The girl] would have been the size of me when I saw her. I think that’s what made it so disturbing.
“After seeing that, something clicked in my head and I was like, ‘Oh wow, art can be disturbing’ and it’s almost like that’s the best part about it, the most emotion you can get from art.
“I like creating extreme confusion, or strangeness pouring out of art. They’re always the pieces that I respect the most. I [used to] try and paint the weirdest thing someone’s ever seen and that they won’t see again.”
Molly said she wanted to send a distinct message about the world around her.
“I like focusing on the working class, the blue collars, normal people, art that’s speaking about the world that most of us see. I [also] want to paint a lot more stuff that has to do with Australia, post colonialism and looking at our beautiful native wildlife.”
If you have a shed that might help Molly and her fellow artists, reach out to her here. Follow Molly’s journey and projects on Instagram @molly.r.duggan and @shedshowcase.
