Crafting Magic: Eyes #1-4

Crafting Magic is a multimedia group exhibition that grew out of a series of artist residencies and weekly workshops at Tamworth Central in late summer 2025. The program unfolded as a relay of gatherings, where a single workshop structure and its related deck of cards (also called Crafting Magic) was revised, reshuffled, and recast from week-to-week by different 'journeyers.' Initially composed and modified by Neil Mulholland (Edinburgh) during his own residency in Tamworth in July, this open workshop structure held a shifting context for collaborative storytelling and responsive modes of artistic production to emerge. Through this platform, the materials, sites, props, and atmospheres of Tamworth were repurposed as ingredients for the fusing of magical phenomena.

Across works in painting, sculpture, print, sound, video, weaving, fermentation, and more, the resulting exhibition in Tamworth Central's Station plots out various direct and indirect responses to the Crafting Magic workshop system, through projects and gestures that inquire further into how magic animates everyday life, how we give power to objects and use them, and how such processes become socialized as wonder or belief. In the context of the present research paradigm for art, this exhibition also seeks open up a conversation about how revisiting the histories and theories of magic could reframe an understanding about the methods through which contemporary artistic production constructs its knowledges, and conjures its effects.

More information about the Crafting Magic workshop system can be found here.

Curated by Neven Lochhead
Workshop designs by Neil Mulholland, Neven Lochhead, Maria Simmons, Peggy Fussell and Jung-Ah Kim
Program commissioned by Carolyn Butts