Country Style 2025: Heirloom

Six extraordinary artists and artist duos join forces for the sixth edition of Michael Reid Murrurundi’s annual group exhibition in collaboration with Country Style. Co-curated by the magazine and Michael Reid Murrurundi, this year’s exhibition takes Heirloom as its theme, threaded with reflections on love and learning while exploring the ways in which cultural inheritances are carried across generations through creative practice.

From First Nations painters who treat the canvas as a conduit for the intergenerational transfer of stories and cultural knowledge to contemporary photographers who cast their kin as collaborative muses, the six artists assembled for our 2025 Country Style exhibition remind us that creativity never exists in a vacuum; it lives on a continuum and invites dynamic cultural exchange.

Speaking to the ways in which the heirlooms we inherit or pass down to others become cherished reflections of the ties we hold dear, their vibrant, evocative and visually charged work acts as a powerful force for channelling ideas, inspiration, cultural legacies and celebrations of family.

Heirloom brings together for the first time some of the most important and celebrated figures in Australian contemporary art, presenting new works of sculpture, photography and paintings by Raylene Walatinna and Betty Chimney, Tamara Dean, Mai Nguyễn-Long, Regina Pilawuk Wilson and Hayden Wilson, Serena Bonson and Jeremiah Bonson, and the late Polixeni Papapetrou.  Many of these artists are the subjects of expansive editorial profiles that will feature in a special Art Edition of Country Style magazine, published to coincide with our exhibition at Michael Reid Murrurundi.

Maningrida – Country Style 2025

Completing the extraordinary constellation of contemporary art stars assembled for our 2025 Country Style exhibition, Djinaŋ/Marung artists Serena Bonson and Jeremiah Bonson have produced a spectacular exhibition of new sculptural figures.

Living and working in Maningrida in the Northern Territory, both artists depict Warraburnburn – the Warrawarra clan’s name for the Wangarra (ghost spirits) that play a key role in community stories, indicating cycles of death, life, transitions and rebirth. Sleeping by day and emerging at night to hunt, dance, sing, laugh and play, these spirits are rendered by the Bonsons with carved stringybark in striking black and white.

The duo’s Warraburnburn figures will play out through the gallery as a spectacular, immersive, forest-like installation, reflecting the role of contemporary art-making in carrying stories across generations and connecting to a cultural tradition spanning many thousands of years.