Welcome to the Void: Community Voices in Post-Mining Landscapes

2026 UNIVERSITY GALLERY

Welcome to the Void:
Community Voices in Post-Mining Landscapes

13 – 27 February 2026

This immersive exhibition invites you into the heart of the Hunter Valley, NSW, where landscapes bear the deep scars of open-cut coal mining. The exhibition presents material collected through ethnographic and arts-based methods with people living in the Hunter Valley’s mining country. It explores how local communities experience and respond to environmental disturbance and how mining legacies and post-mining landscapes, particularly so-called final voids, transform into hopeful futures or haunting remnants of extraction. 

Featuring a rich tapestry of participant-created artworks, collaborative murals, creative interpretations of field data, walking interview photographs, and an ethnographic film, the exhibition offers intimate, grounded perspectives on life after mining. These pieces illuminate the emotional and cultural dimensions of post-industrial landscapes – elements often overlooked in policy and planning. 

Viewers are invited to engage with themes of place, memory, and transformation, not through conventional research formats, but through the raw, expressive power of community storytelling and creative expression. The exhibition becomes a space for reflection and reckoning, where questions of environmental justice and the possibility of alternative futures take centre stage. 

By amplifying community voices and embracing artistic collaboration, the exhibition fosters dialogue, healing, and renewed connection to land. It is both a tribute to resilience and a call to imagine a more just and regenerative path forward. 

This project is conducted by researchers at the University of Newcastle and is funded by the Australian Research Council.