Threads Between Us: At Equinox

Threads Between Us: At Equinox is a multidisciplinary group exhibition bringing together seven artists whose practices explore creativity through the feminine lens. Working across diverse mediums, each artist presents works shaped by lived experience — reflecting processes of transformation, embodiment, and creative inquiry.

Presented at the turning of the equinox — a moment traditionally associated with balance and transition — the exhibition offers a space to reflect on creativity as a connective force. Through distinct artistic languages, the artists explore how personal experience, material practice, and intuitive process intersect to create meaning.

The exhibition celebrates both individual expression and the collective energy that emerges when artists share space, dialogue, and creative inquiry.

Opening Night

Friday, March 20 | 5:30–8pm

Garage Gallery — Byron Community College, Mullumbimby

Opening night will include curated grazing, drinks partnerships by Konpira Mura Wine, Yulli’s Brews, and Peace Love & Vegetables, and live music by Bell and the Blue.

Exhibition on view: March 20–25

Participating artists:

Ali Marie Parker · Fiona Trease · Mia Forrest · Danielle Dovrat · Becca Laws · Anya Gerashenko · Emma Drinan

Digital Catalogue

A digital exhibition catalogue featuring selected works and artist information will be available below for viewing and download.

  • Viewers are welcome in to the Garage Gallery.

    4 Burringbar St, Mullumbimby NSW 2482

  • Artist Rebecca Laws will open the evening with a brief ritual acknowledging the equinox — a moment of balance, transition, and renewal. This offering invites guests to pause, arrive in the space together, and honour the creative threads that connect artists, artworks, and community.

  • We are delighted to welcome Bell and the Blue, a soulful folk duo whose warm vocals and acoustic melodies will gently soundtrack the evening. Their music weaves together folk and soul influences, creating an intimate and atmospheric accompaniment to the exhibition.

    First set: 6:00pm

    Intermission: 6:35–6:45pm

    Second set: 6:45pm

  • The evening will gently come to a close at 8:00pm. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who joined us in celebrating this exhibition — the artists, collaborators, and community whose presence helps bring these creative moments to life.

The Artists

Mia Forrest

Mia is a multidisciplinary artist located in the Northern Rivers, Australia where she lives with her husband and three children on the edges of an ancient Gondwanan rainforest, a world Heritage-listed ecosystem.

With an enduring reverence for nature as muse, her work explores how natural phenomena and ecological systems can inform a methodology translated into visual, sonic, and generative forms, spanning across textiles, pigments, digital, and work on paper.

Anya Gerashenko

Anya Gerashenko’s art is shaped by three worlds that formed her identity.

Born in communist Russia, her work carries echoes of Slavic symbolism and mysticism. At eleven she moved to sunny Los Angeles, where the bold colour of pop art and a sharp sense of humour helped shape her fearless creative voice.

Now living in Byron Bay, Australia, she draws inspiration from spiritual knowledge, a deep connection to nature, and the raw beauty of the Australian bush that surrounds her.

Her work is playful, courageous, and unapologetically original—blending Slavic roots, pop art energy, LA humour, and the wild serenity of the Australian landscape.

Ali Marie Parker

Ali Marie Parker is a photographer and mixed-media artist whose practice draws from spontaneous human moments and the evolving textures of the natural world.

Working with alternative photographic processes—including cyanotype—she incorporates organic materials such as plants, water, and earth into her work.

Her pieces explore the relationship between human presence, natural materials, and a deep curiosity for the unexpected outcomes of creative experimentation.

Rebecca Laws

Rebecca Laws is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between tactile making, gathering, and ritual. Working across materials and forms, she approaches creativity as a language of lived experience — one that extends beyond the studio into spaces of connection, food, home, and shared presence.

Raised in the Pacific Northwest of Canada, Laws grew up closely attuned to the natural world and within a strong matrilineal environment, shaped by the influence of her mother and aunt. These early experiences continue to inform her work, which often draws on the stories, resilience, and quiet power of women across generations.

Now based in Byron Bay, Australia, Laws lives and works between cultures, geographies, and creative disciplines. Her practice explores the subtle thresholds between personal memory, collective history, and the cyclical rhythms of nature, translating these influences into works and experiences that invite reflection, connection, and transformation.

Danielle Dovrat

Clay becomes a quiet language of home, memory, and everyday ritual in Danielle’s work. Each piece begins by hand—slowly shaped, considered, and guided by an intuitive process that allows the material to lead as much as the maker.

Working primarily with hand-built forms, Danielle creates functional ceramics designed to live within daily life. Bowls, vessels, and objects emerge from a balance between utility and presence—pieces that can be used, held, and also appreciated as small sculptural moments within a home.

Her practice is grounded in slowness and connection to the tactile nature of clay. The process of forming, glazing, and firing becomes a way of translating imagined forms into physical objects, where subtle textures, organic shapes, and layered glazes give each piece its own quiet character.

Emma Drinan

Emma is a self-taught artist based in the Byron Hinterland. In her artworks, she draws inspiration from the bold, vibrant simplicity of Matisse and the fluidity and grace of the female form.

Emma is a mother of three, with a background in classical and contemporary dance and she has a bachelor in Naturopathy. These experiences have enriched her perspective and deepened her connection to the female form and its strength, which she loves to capture in her artworks.

Emma has had twpo solo art exhibitions in Sydney, one which was sold out on the opening night and has also been included in a digital exhibition in New York.

Fiona Trease

Fiona is multidisciplinary artist-mother creating at the intersection of ink, fabric and magic.

Through The Alchemist Project, I ritualise creativity as a daily practice. My work moves between lino print, fiber-art, textile, storytelling and symbolic design. I am drawn to the esoteric and the elemental: the Wheel of the Year, myth, the quiet power of repetition, and the way symbolism can hold memory, intention and transformation all at once. My work is designed to feel like a talisman ~ something that carries meaning, marks a season, or honours a threshold.

As a Manifesting Generator (2/4), my process is cyclical and intuitive. I follow creative surges, work in devotion, and return again and again to the idea that rhythm is everything.

At its heart, The Alchemist Project is about story, mothers and makers and craft with depth. It is about remembering that creativity is not a luxury ~ it is a way of living in conversation with the world around us

Artist Q&A

In honour of International Women’s Day, the artists participating in Threads Between Us: At Equinox were invited by Byron Community College to respond to a series of questions reflecting on their creative practices, influences, and experiences as women working across the arts.

These conversations offer a glimpse into the internal worlds that shape each artist’s work, revealing the personal reflections, processes, and perspectives that sit behind the works presented in the exhibition.

Explore the artists’ responses below.

  • Your work is part of Threads Between Us: At Equinox. What does the title mean to you personally?

    To me, the title holds softness and strength at the same time. Threads can be delicate, but when woven together, they become something enduring. Much like sisterhood, shared experience, and the quiet support we offer one another.

    Danielle Dovrat 

  • Celebrating women's strength and collective power. How does your work reflect the feminine experience?

    My work reflects the feminine experience through embodiment, transition, and collective gathering.

    For this exhbition, I’ve created a threshold installation aligned with the equinox — a symbol of balance and transition. Viewers are invited to physically pass through the work, releasing what no longer serves them and embodying the next phase of their becoming. It speaks to the initiatory nature of womanhood — birth, reinvention, identity shifts — and the constant movement between endings and beginnings.

    To me, the feminine experience is resilient, intuitive, embodied, and always becoming.

    - Becca Laws 

  • The exhibition speaks about transformation and lived experience. Has your creative practice evolved alongside your life as a woman? In what ways?

    I’ve been creating for as long as I can remember.

    Different seasons call for different mediums. In times of transition, I find myself reaching for something new ~ cloth instead of canvas, ink instead of thread. Learning a new medium is like meeting myself again ~ Awkward. Curious. Uncertain. Expanding. And the pieces born in those seasons? They carry the imprint of who I was and who I was becoming. They are time capsules of evolution. 

    - Fiona Trease

  • Are there particular women - ancestors, mentors, artists, mothers, daughters — who have influenced your work?

    I feel the lineage of women whose labour was largely undocumented: mothers and grandmothers who stored knowledge in domestic repetition, textiles, gardens, and daily rituals. Mothers who found the time to express themselves through domesticity. I still have memories of my mum with a mandolin, an airbrush tool, a watercolour book, always tending to her garden, felting, sewing… and seeing her with these little practices gives some sort of silent permission as a young one to explore too. Artistically I am guided by women who made sense of their world through abstraction - Agnes Martin, Anni Albers, Vera Molnar, Helen Frankenthaler, Hilma at Klimt.

    - Mia Forrest 

  • Many women juggle multiple roles. How do you hold space for your creativity?

    While I still have my children at home with me everyday, I don’t have the luxury of escaping to a quiet studio space. Instead, I’ve learned to create within the beautiful chaos of everyday life. I’ll spread my paints and artworks across the kitchen table while my children play around me, allowing myself to dip in and out of the process as needed.

    I’ve stopped waiting for the “perfect” studio or uninterrupted stretch of time. Creativity, for me, lives in the in-between moments, in the small pockets of the day where I can show up, even briefly. Holding space for my art means embracing flexibility, letting go of perfection, and trusting that those scattered moments still add up to something meaningful.

    - Emma Drinan 

  • What message do you hope other women take away when they experience your work?

    My practice is rooted in nature’s details — flowers, animals, bodies, textures, fleeting moments— translated through a process that embraces unpredictability. I don’t chase perfection; I follow light and document to what unfolds naturally. Through that, I hope people recognise that our rawness is strength, our flaws lead to adventures, and like the natural world, we are meant to evolve in spontaneous cycles, not straight lines.

    - Ali Marie Parker 

  • If your artwork could speak directly to women this International Women's Day, what would it say?

    Don’t be afraid to be original. Be bold. Be different. Be unapologetically you.

    Perfection is a construct - don’t let it silence your art. The things you call imperfections are often the very things that inspire someone else.

    Looking a certain way, fitting into a mould - that’s a construct too.

    Your power is in your uniqueness.

    Take up space. Create anyway. Be original.

    - Anya Gerashenko