Maggie Hensel-Brown has a hard rule, working with needle lace: “I don’t make anything practical,” she says. “Nothing you can wear. Nothing you can use.” But when Newcastle Art Gallery approached her with a commission for a new, large-scale work to celebrate its reopening following an extensive capital works expansion, there were some inevitable practicalities. “I don’t usually do commissions but because it’s my hometown gallery, it felt special to take this one.”
Hensel-Brown’s large-scale work for the windows on Newcastle’s busy Darby Street is one of several major new commissions by the Gallery, alongside works by Fayen d’Evie and fellow Novocastrian and Awabakal descendent Shellie Smith. Major acquisitions include Megan Cope’s acclaimed Kinyingarra Guwinyanba (Off Country) (2022), which will suspend 44 sculptural oyster poles from the Gallery’s new central atrium. The works will be unveiled during the launch of the New Annual festival (26 September—5 October). The Gallery’s first major exhibition will open in early 2026.
Having taken nearly four years to complete, the significance of the Gallery’s expansion and downtown location is not lost on Hensel-Brown.
“[Newcastle] isn’t a huge city but it’s an amazing place to be creative so having an arts institution in the middle of it, [the expansion] feels really special as someone who grew up here.”
Hensel-Brown’s meticulous punto in aria-style needle lace work (also showcased in a solo exhibition at Sydney’s King Street Gallery on William, from 23 September—18 October) is highly acclaimed for its witty, anachronistic renderings of modern life—computers, phone chargers and messy floors—and the imagery for the Newcastle commission draws on its function as an obscuring ‘decal’ over a window looking into a workspace. “I wanted the messaging of the work to reflect that, but it plays with the idea of having a lace curtain as well.”
To create the work, Hensel-Brown sourced threads from local op shops and second-hand craft suppliers. “A lot of them are probably cast off from other people’s projects, so there’s now this lovely woven thread of Newcastle DNA in the work, which also feels fitting.”
New commissions
Newcastle Art Gallery
From 26 September
This article was originally published in the September/October 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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