Show Off Exhibition – City of Cockburn
More than 80 local artists are featured alongside some of Western Australia’s most respected practitioners in this year’s Show Off Exhibition, presented by the City of Cockburn.
This free community exhibition showcases a wide range of artistic mediums including ceramics, painting, sculpture, and mixed media. The exhibition is open daily from 10am–3pm until 29 March at the historic Memorial Hall.
City of Cockburn Mayor Logan Howlett described the annual exhibition as an important opportunity to celebrate the creativity of the local community.
“Cockburn is a community full of creatives, and the Show Off exhibition brings a remarkable range of artistic voices together under one roof.”
Collaborative Work – Where Feathers Gather
Where Feathers Gather brings together a sculptural timber form by Nis Wichtermann with hand-crafted ceramic feather sculptures by Danica Wichtermann, inspired by the Forest Red-tailed Black Cockatoo.
The work marks the first iteration of a developing body of collaborative sculptures exploring the symbolism of feathers as carriers of memory, movement, and connection. In many cultures, feathers signify presence, passage, and the traces left by birds moving through landscapes. Here they speak to the gathering places of cockatoos — the trees, feeding grounds, and habitats where flocks return season after season.
The sculptural olive wood form anchors the work in the strength and rhythm of timber, while Danica’s stoneware feathers feature sgraffito carving through layered underglazes alongside impressed native seed pod textures, referencing the food sources and bushland ecosystems that sustain these birds. The dialogue between wood and clay reflects a balance between structure and flight, permanence and fragility.
Where Feathers Gather also forms the conceptual starting point for a broader collaborative project being developed for regional exhibition and community engagement. Future works will expand on the idea of gathering — of birds, people, and stories — exploring how shared spaces hold ecological knowledge, environmental change, and collective memory.
Developed through many years of shared studio practice, the collaboration reflects Nis and Danica’s ongoing dialogue between materials, landscape, and making.
Title: Where Feathers Gather
Price: $1,500
Medium: Olive wood, stoneware clay, sgraffito carving through underglazes, glazed
Display: Suitable for indoor or outdoor placement
Nis and Danica continue to collaborate through PulseArt Studio and Rediscover Ceramics and will also host a joint Open Studio on Saturday 28 March at PulseArt Studio, Kent Street, Spearwood.
Featured Works – Danica Wichtermann
Whispers of the Wild – Where the Red Tails Roam
This carved porcelain vessel honours the endangered Forest Red-tailed Black Cockatoo and the native food sources that sustain them: gum nuts, banksia and flowering eucalyptus. Using Southern Ice porcelain, native seed pod impressions, underglaze and sgraffito carving, the work becomes a quiet homage to the birds’ resilience and the canopy they depend upon.
Both celebration and call to action, the piece reflects what is at stake in our disappearing bushland.
Whispers of the Wild – Where the Red Tails Roam
Price: $1,080
Dimensions: 25 cm (h) × 20 cm (w)
The rounded gum nut–inspired form features male and female cockatoos alongside ficifolia and Banksia menziesii. Loose white porcelain seed pods are housed within the vessel, imprinted and gathered inside like the seeds themselves.
Feeding the Canopy – Cockatoo Feather Platter and Bowl (set)
This functional porcelain set explores recurring feather motifs within Danica’s practice. Through carved and impressed surface textures, the works reference the movement of black cockatoo feathers and the interconnected relationship between birds and the forest canopy.
Price: $250
Dimensions: 25 cm (h) × 20 cm (w)
