Image credit: Kinfolk Imagery

Unfolding Rewrites the Story: First Nations Artists Transform Paper into Power at MPRG

Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery is currently displaying one of its most significant exhibitions.

Unfolding arrives with the quiet power of a seismic shift—an exhibition that doesn’t just present works on paper but reframes the medium entirely through a First Nations lens. Showing at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, this major showcase brings together more than 100 works by over 80 First Nations artists from across the country, each exploring paper as a site of identity, memory, resistance, and renewal.

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Curated in collaboration with Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri artist and curator Jenna (Mayilema) Lee, Unfolding digs into the material history of paper—its contradictions, its burdens, and its possibilities. Paper has long been the stuff of bureaucracy, the vehicle of colonial record-keeping, the silent witness to policies that attempted to define and confine. But in the hands of First Nations artists, that same material transforms into something defiant, tender, expressive, and fiercely alive.

Lee captures this tension with clarity, describing paper as “alluring because it holds contradictions. It is the material of colonial paperwork, the bureaucratic pages that catalogued, restricted, and attempted to define us. Yet in the hands of First Nations artists, paper becomes something else entirely: a surface for resistance, renewal and possibility. Each work on paper unfolds to reveal a new facet, a reminder that this most everyday of materials can bear the weight of history while opening space for newer, truer tellings.” It’s this duality that threads through the exhibition, where paper becomes a site for truth-telling as much as artistic experimentation.

Unfolding draws from the depth of MPRG’s Permanent Collection, which, across its 55-year history, has centred works on paper as a core collecting priority. This focus has resulted in one of the most significant collections of First Nations works on paper in the country, with pieces spanning drawing, printmaking, painting on paper and even sculptural forms. Through acquisitions, prizes and donations, nearly 170 contemporary First Nations artists are now represented.

The story begins in 1997 with the Collection’s first First Nations work—Sally Morgan’s Swamphen at Lake Joondalup, a vibrant screenprint gifted by Ingrid McGaughey. The late ’90s acquisitions continued with Mitjili Napurrula’s Watiya Tjuta (Many Trees) and Gloria Petyarre’s Untitled (Awelye), both purchased through acquisitive prize exhibitions. These early works, importantly created by women from different parts of the continent, marked a turning point that shaped the gallery’s ongoing commitment to First Nations artistic practice.

Today, more than 400 works in the 2,500-piece Collection are by First Nations artists—and every one of them is a work on paper. As co-curator Stephanie Sacco notes, the result is a uniquely cohesive narrative, one that foregrounds the significance of the medium to First Nations storytelling and artistic innovation.

 

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The exhibition itself reads like a tapestry of voices, textures and histories. Iconic artists—Queenie McKenzie, Fiona Foley, Sally Morgan, Gloria Petyarre, Brian Robinson, Robert Fielding, Danie Mellor, Nici Cumpston, d harding, Teho Ropeyarn, Lisa Waup, Dominic White and many more—sit alongside emerging practitioners. Their works expand across style and Country, united by the shared intimacy of paper, a material that allows for immediacy, vulnerability and depth.

Beyond the gallery walls, Unfolding extends into a dedicated activity space designed in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Sammy Trist, a proud Taungurung woman of the Kulin Nation. Her contribution threads creativity through community, with an insect ochre painting workshop which launched the space on Sunday 30 November. The hands-on experiences, artist talks and a long table discussion invite visitors to deepen their understanding of the stories and practices represented in the exhibition.

As contemporary culture is never confined to one form, the program also pulses with sound. On Friday 23 January, First Nations DJs Fosters and Pvrtal bring an electric takeover, blending melodic afro, shuffling house, disco, techno and First Nations samples into a night built for movement and connection. It’s rhythm meeting Country, heritage meeting dance floor as an energetic reminder that culture doesn’t sit still.

Unfolding is not just an exhibition; it’s a statement. A reclamation. A celebration of artists who take one of the most everyday materials and turn it into a vessel for deep cultural weight and radical possibility. At MPRG, paper becomes more than paper—it becomes a living archive, a call to listen, and an invitation to see the world through stories that refuse to be flattened. 

Unfolding runs until Sunday 15 February 2026 at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Find out more here.