Image: Marina Deller
April 11- June 20, 2025
Opening: Friday April 11, 5:30-7:30pm
Gallery Foyer, 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta
Free entry, all welcome
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You can find The Myth of the Lonely Artist in The Mill’s Gallery Foyer, located at 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide).
The Mill’s galleries are open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm.
Accessibility
The Mill has two entrances, the main entrance on the corner of Angas and Gunson Street and an accessible entrance further down Angas Street.
Both doors are locked from the outside, there is a doorbell on the main door that will alert The Mill team. They will meet you at the accessible entrance to welcome you into the building.
The Mill has concrete flooring throughout with no internal steps and a disability toilet on site.
Read more in-depth information on our accessibility web page.
We are excited to present The Myth of the Lonely Artist, a new Foyer exhibition featuring 2025 Writer in Residence Marina Deller. The digital exhibition explores the stereotypes forced onto writers and artists, focusing on the bright spots of companionship which form part of an art practice or day-to-day life.
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I have long been fascinated by stereotypes. This fascination began after deciding I wanted to be a writer when I ‘grew up’. I was interested in the way stories were built, and especially in the idea that characters could have ‘tropes’ like plots could. As a queer teenager, I faced a different kind of stereotyping. It encouraged me to consider what kinds of stereotypes are rife in not only stories but the world they depict, and how – when unexamined, when taken as truth – these can veil or derail true and complex personhood.
Writers are often painted as poor, obsessive to the point of destruction, and lonely. Though the first two I can attest to, the last never sat quite right with me. I asked myself, ‘In examining the world through artistic forms are artists doomed to feel lonely?’
Undertaking the Writer in Residence program at The Mill has been a transformative experience and has helped me explore this question. Early 2024 I was at a kind of post-PhD crossroad professionally and creatively. I craved a space to reconnect with my practice beyond academia. At The Mill, I fell in love with the capacity for a collection of creative humans to inspire, challenge, and support one another. Even the smallest moments – hellos in the hallways and chats over coffee – lit my days. I also found myself inspired by the multi- and inter- disciplinary nature of many of the artists’ works. As well as writing, I wanted to paint and draw (even if badly) and found myself reaching for my camera often. Being at The Mill in this period of change, I felt keenly that the world had a lot to offer me. I also began to observe where and how I was being kept company in my practice and taking note of it, which led to this hybrid project.
So, is there such a thing as a lonely artist? I’m sure there is, somewhere, just as I am now certain I have never been one. My hope for this work is that it allows you to focus on the small, bright spots of companionship which form part of an art practice or simply day-to-day life.
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Marina Deller is writer, academic, and critic, working and creating on Kaurna Land. Marina has a PhD in Creative Writing (Life Writing) from Flinders University, where they are an award-winning teacher of Writing and Literature.
In their creative practice Marina examines art, culture, (queer) identity, family, love, and loss. They write essays, short stories, poetry, and hybrid works incorporating objects, art, and photography.
Their writing appears in such outlets as The Conversation, Westerly, Voiceworks, Archer, Babyteeth Journal, and InDaily and has been painted on the city streets as part of Raining Poetry in Adelaide. Their short story “Nostos” was shortlisted for the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction 2021, and their essay “Dresses, heavy with water” was highly commended in the AAWP/Westerly Magazine Life Writing Prize 2022.
Marina is also a recent recipient of the Island View Writers’ House Emerging Writer Residency and an active member of the Life Narrative Lab where they curate and run reading events which platform emerging life writers.
This exhibition has been created as a personal project through The Mill’s Writer in Residence program.