Mary-Lou Nugent

This is the first time I’d attempted a challenge such as this and I found it immensely rewarding. I tried very hard to introduce new processes and to explore a range of media each day, from textiles (my own hand printed fabric) to using flowers, seed pods and petals, gouache, crayon, ink, and collage plus a digital work (‘Prototype’) taken from a photograph I took of my collection of Sunbeam Mixmasters.

Perhaps the most rewarding one though was the one I developed for ‘Collaboration’, where I approached other Design Challengers to send through a small square work which I combined into one and shared back to participants to fully illustrate the concept of collaborating.

Overall, this challenge has inspired me greatly and I’m now drawing almost daily in new journals and have started other online design challenges. I also loved connecting with fellow artists through this project.

I am a textile artist with a great love of painting and generally just ‘making’. I completed a Diploma of Textiles in the early 80s but have been engaged in full time work as an arts administrator since then (I also have a Diploma of Secondary Arts Teaching and a postgraduate Diploma in Art History and Curating) I have worked for many decades in the arts, both in Alice Springs and in Canberra and for the previous 20 years have worked at the NGA where I am the Manager of the Touring Exhibition program. I am very keen, though, to focus on developing my textile and painting practice with intent once I move on from this role.