Image: John ‘Bundy’ Bannerman, Venomous, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 152cm, image courtesy the artist.
Image description: A painting depicting a central image of multiple large Sturt Desert Pea flowers in white, red and pink colours surrounded by smaller red Sturt Desert Peas on a green background.
The Guildhouse Wall-to-Wall exhibition program partners with artists and organisations based in South Australia to foster opportunities in reaching new audiences.
Access2Arts featuring Dan Withey, John ‘Bundy’ Bannerman and Jekio Blackstreak
4 February — 1 May 2025
Guildhouse, Lion Arts Membership Hub
About Access2Arts
Access2Arts is the peak body for arts and disability South Australia. Their purpose is to foster an inclusive arts community that develops, embraces and celebrates the unique talents, skills and perspectives of people who are d/Deaf or disabled.
Over the last couple of years, Access2Arts have held a continually evolving project called “The Exquisite Familiar” which engaged disabled artists from Adelaide, the Barossa Valley and the Eyre Peninsula. Artworks created in workshops by these artist cohorts have been exhibited in The Studio in The Art Gallery of South Australia, at MOD. Museum, at Nautilus Arts Centre as part of SALT Festival, and at Hahndorf Academy.
Wall-to-Wall artworks of three artists from the “The Exquisite Familiar” cohort, Dan Withey, John ‘Bundy’ Bannerman and Jekio Blackstreak.
Based in the Eyre Peninsula, Jekio Blackstreak is a multi media visual and textile artist with lived experience of neurodivergence and psychosocial disability. Through their works, they often aim to explore the fractured nature of an identity at conflict with itself.
Instagram: @insanityexplained
John ‘Bundy’ Bannerman
I was an outback Road train truck driver for my family business. I’ve moved to Adelaide and took up painting as a hobby at Duthy Street Art supplies with encouragement from Megan and Kate.
I have painted for two years and had my own business as Pink Bear Art.
I like to paint the outback in subject of depression of myself.
I like painting the outback – Sturt Desert Peas have always been close to my heart. Not many people from the city have seen one in the wild and I feel blessed to have seen them so many times. They are normally red with a back pod, but when there is a lot of water lying around the pollen will mix with the pollen from other nearby flowers and change the colours – mainly white ones but sometimes you’ll get different pinks and light reds. There are always hidden things in the outback, the creatures in this painting represent both my love for that environment as well as a time in my life where I felt I had to be wary of hidden dangers.
Instagram: @bundy.pinkbearart
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pinkbearart
Dan Withey lives in Tarntanyangga-Adelaide.
Born in Birmingham, England, Withey migrated to South Australia in 2004 as a teenager. Following completing his degree in illustration Withey has worked as an artist. He is represented by Penny Contemporary, Tasmania.
Withey’s art practice draws on graphic art, storytelling, illustration, and patterning to explore thresholds: between the imagination and ‘reality’, representation and decoration, inner worlds, and the public subject. Primarily working in acrylic paint, along with ink and pencil, Withey creates vivid, playful and surreal compositions that recall the absurdity of dreamscapes and traverse the domestic to the fantastic.
Veering between abstraction and figuration – sometimes in a single work – Withey’s paintings adopt a humorous, even irreverent attitude. The strangeness encapsulated in Withey’s paintings is the experience of contemporary life, existential angst, and its effect on the human subject.
Favouring clean lines, fine detail and flat colours, Withey builds complex compositions that explore spatial rather than pictorial or geometric techniques of representation.
Central to Withey’s formal approach is the juxtaposition of scale, strong colours, and detailed patterning. Recurrent tropes include birds, cats, robots, rainbows, nature, architecture and simplified human forms and emblems of renewal.
Instagram: @danwitheyart
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daniel.withey.71
Artist website: www.danwithey.com
Please note: Wall-to-Wall is open Tuesday-Thursday, 9:30am-5pm.
