The Shed Art category in this year’s Meander Valley Art Awards reflects the creativity and innovation that underpin rural life.

It recognises that everyone has artistic impulses, quietly creating stuff in sheds, garages and spare rooms that embodies some personal or political meaning.

Your creative place could be a shed, shack, sewing room, workshop, hospital, down the back paddock, or on the beach.

Metamorphosis is an open exhibition, a great opportunity for many first time, emerging and student artists to be involved in the long running Meander Valley Art Award exhibition.

It’s hard to define what constitutes shed art, so here are a few ideas: Art from trash, Folk Art, Industrial Art, Steam Punk, Junk Art, Recycled Art, Repurposed Art.

Materials used may be metal, paper, fabric, plastic, glass, steel, wool, resin, wire or fibre that are new, found, scrap, foraged or salvaged; and then sculpted, painted, whittled, riveted, welded, soldered, tied, wrapped, glued or screwed to create a visual or sculptural artwork.

There was a time where art was thought of as bucolic landscapes painted in oils and smooth marble statues in galleries and museums in capital cities around the world.

That has changed, not all artworks are created by known artists by those who are trained inside the established “art world”.

We all know the big names and our own local art identities.

The chef, retired nurse, teacher, grazier or fruit picker who creates in private to solve a problem, relax, work through illness or grief also produce art.

These are people who make art for themselves, perhaps considered by friends as “being arty” but usually without recognising themselves as artists.

Tasmanian David Walsh has applied this concept to museums , where his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is a “subversive adult Disneyland”.

Visitors work their way through a labyrinth of stairs, witnessing and engaging with carefully positioned objects conveying messages of sex, death and life in a variety of rooms ultimately emerging from the depths into the light.

He rethought the idea of a museum and provided new ways of experiencing and interacting with artworks.

The Meander Valley Art Award is supported by the Meander Valley Council, ARTS Deloraine and the Launceston Art Society.

The entry categories carry significant prize money.

Entries close on 16th September 2022 and will be on display in the Westbury Town Hall from 1-16 October 2022.