This exhibition is a conversation across time.

The multi-disciplinary works of mother and daughter Heather and Kate Dorrough explore the nexus between the arts and crafts movements, female creative lineage, body and landscape, river and fertility, and environmental issues and activism.

The exhibition encompasses fibre art, paintings, prints, ceramics, sculpture and video and the official opening, including an artist talk is Friday, 12 April at 6pm.

Drawing on the Hawkesbury River landscape over the last 20 years of her life from where she lived on Dangar Island, Heather Dorrough (1933 - 2018) created a large body of prints and paintings.

The exhibition includes her earlier fabric hangings and low relief sculptures that were her most significant works and heralded the shift at the time from a craft-based tradition to the arts, 1970s to 1980s.

Originally trained as an Interior Designer, she worked in London and New York before arriving in Australia in 1962 and began making fabric and fibre works after the birth of daughter Kate.

The practice of Sydney-based artist Kate Dorrough (b.1964) sustains a conversation between paint and clay, launching an inquiry into the interplay and tension between the gestural mark and the hand built ceramic form.

Dorrough's work as a painter and ceramicist has led to an extensive career exhibiting work at leading galleries in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, as well as a number of residencies and prizes.

In this exhibition her work will directly respond to her mother's, creating a dialogue and an interplay exploring memory and the personal recognition of her mother as a mentor.

Also starting in April and as part of the 2024 Tamworth Regional Heritage Festival the Gallery is host to the Tamworth Regional Museums combined exhibition - Navigating the Past.

Navigating between the past and present can be an insightful process, especially as we uncover links between how we do things now and how they were done in the past.

The connections between objects used in the past and their modern-day counterparts illustrate how social transformation impacts the design of everyday items.

More personally, objects we are familiar with from our own past can evoke memories of places, times and relationships, spark realisations and shift our perspectives.

Join us as we look through 11 collections and see what some of their older objects can tell us both about their modern equivalents and about ourselves.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the support of the various museums and community groups in our region, including the many volunteer museums and archives.

To see all the latest information on the Heritage Festival visit www.tamworthheritagefestival.com.au