It all started with Robert Loughran having a dream in which the "creative types" of his family tree came together to show their bond of art.
This week the reality, Familiart: a group exhibition of 8 artists bound by family, opens at Finite Gallery in Caves Beach.
Loughran (a Lake Macquarie-based painter) invited daughter Julia Loughran (textiles), Julia's daughter Niamh Armstrong (an art student at the Australian National University), Julia's son Ivan Armstrong (a south coast forest firefighter and photographer/artist), his eldest grandson's partner Shannon Bakic (who draws houses around Newcastle), his daughter-in-law Catherine White (jewellery artisan), his daughter-in-law's older sister Vicki White (painter and multi-media artist), and daughter-in-law's brother-in-law Eric Lubbecke (visual artist and former political cartoonist).
"It's only really natural, we have known each other as a family for some time," Loughran says.
Vicki White, who joined the clan about 12 years ago, says "it's lovely to connect through creativity, our shared interest I think is really nice".
Lubbecke says when his sister-in-law married into the Loughran family tree, he and Robert Loughran "really clicked".
They both migrated to Australia about 50 years ago, Loughran from England and Lubbecke from Austria.
"I think we connected on that level, his family's overseas and mine as well," Lubbecke says.
"You only see them once in a blue moon, whereas Vicki's family, we see them all the time."
Vicki and Catherine grew up in Taree, in a family of busy makers perhaps born of necessity, but done with joy.
"Mum had a knitting machine," Catherine White says.
"She used to sell, through the local swimming centre, her knitted bikinis.
"She also supplied school jumpers.
"We just grew up doing that kind of thing, I knew from a young age."
For White, schoolgirl interests led to full-time study in Sydney, then a career in fashion, soft-furnishings and interior design that took her to London for a while.
"I was making handmade bed linen, bed valances, decorating my bedroom from a very young age, I look back and laugh about it," she says.
But, all these years on: "When you're passionate about something, nothing brings you greater joy."
White never let go that initial family-honed connection to "make beautiful things".
A side course that was part of her original fashion degree back in the early 1990s, sparked that same natural connection.
It was a short introduction to jewellery design.
While she worked in other industries, White went on exploring jewellery making, eventually continuing her study with jewellery manufacturing at Design Centre Enmore.
She has recently established her own studio at Warners Bay offering limited edition and one-off ranges, mostly in oxidised sterling silver, some pieces with gemstone.
Her "industrial, sculptural forms" draw textural inspiration from nature.
White, Vicki White and Lubbecke have a collaborated before, sharing a studio space in St Peters, inner-west Sydney, and exhibiting in a collaborative space within the garden-woodlands of London's Holland Park.
Lubbecke, a Walkley award-winning cartoonist and illustrator at The Australian newspaper for three decades, says those trips to London allowed him to "actually see" family, who travelled in from Europe to take advantage of the moment to reunite.
His art at the Caves Beach show is based on a poem written for his late mother, Mother Moon.
Vicki White, who has been a finalist in the Doug Moran, Portia Geach and Blake prizes, created a mixed media work for the exhibition about her recovery from a crippling illness.
The work contains nostalgic imagery drawn from the farm her mother grew up on, where she and Catherine visited as children.
Along another limb of the family tree, Wickham-based Shannon Bakic has also brought to the creative fold the familiarity of her early world.
Bakic's field of artistic enterprise, linocut-look original drawings of old houses around Newcastle, seem like statements of time fixed and times gone.
The idea came to her from a tile painted with a black-on-white depiction of a terrace house, which her late "Poppy" had acquired at a garage sale.
It was Bakic's grandmother who enjoyed poking about garage sales, with the tile the one and only purchase Poppy ever made at one.
The tile sat atop her grandparent's fridge for years, and now resides with Bakic.
Despite Loughran not setting a dictating theme for the show, or perhaps because of that, the group's body of work speaks to the art of making family.
"We thought 'just do our own thing'," he says.
- Familiart: a group exhibition of 8 artists bound by family, is at Finite Gallery from February 11 to 27
- Finite Gallery is at 60 Caves Beach Road, Caves Beach
- Details: finitegallery.com
