Next date: Saturday, 11 October 2025 | 10:00 AM
to Saturday, 14 February 2026 | 04:00 PM
Featuring artists: Jingwei Bu, Emma Buswell, Kate Just, Shannon Lyons and Dhana Merritt
Curated by Laura Couttie
Rest time is a group exhibition that offers space for slowing down. Our capitalist, patriarchal, colonial and ableist systems equate human worth with productivity. Against a backdrop of burnout, relentless competition and endless growth, the artists in this exhibition invite us to embrace slow approaches to making and experiencing art as both an act of defiance, and of self-preservation.
What happens when we reject grind culture and ‘fill our cup’ instead? How can slow art – grounded in mindfulness, collaboration and exchange – help us imagine new ways of living, working and creating? Rest time offers an invitation to all visitors to rest, reflect and reconnect.
Public Programs
Saturday 11 October - Emma Buswell - Knitted Embroidery Workshop
Emma Buswell: Knitted Embroidery Workshop
Saturday 11 October 2025 | 1pm – 3pm
A hands-on creative workshop where participants will be guided in the development of their own embroidery design.
In this workshop, Emma will guide you through how to translate your own ideas into a stitch pattern to embroider onto your own piece of cloth.
Participants will be supplied with materials to design and embroider their own piece with a technique called duplicate stitch. You can also bring along your own knitted garments to embellish if you wish.
Free to attend, bookings essential. Register here.
Saturday 11 October - Rest time Opening Event
Join us at the opening event for Rest time on Sat 11 October 4pm - 6:30pm, click here for more details. Free to attend, all welcome.
Saturday 11 October - Dhana Merritt - SOAK activation
SOAK - Dhana Merritt
Saturday 11 October 2025 | 4pm – 6:30pm | Delivered as part of Bundoora Homestead Opening Event
SOAK is a communal magnesium foot soak: part artwork, part health retreat, and fully participatory. To experience the work, visitors are invited to pause, sit with the artist, and immerse their feet in a rejuvenating infusion of magnesium and lemon balm (harvested from the artist’s medicinal herb garden).
Bookings are not required. Click here for further details.
Saturday 11 October - Jingwei Bu - Performance
Pouring Tea Until It Is All Evaporated- Jingwei Bu
Saturday 11 October 2025 | 5pm – 5:30pm | Delivered as part of Bundoora Homestead Opening Event
As part of Rest Time, artist Jingwei Bu will give a durational performance in which tea is poured as a single repetitive action until the tea has evaporated. For Bu, the methodical process of a repetitious action echoes the meditative state of Chan Buddhism – centralising one’s attention to process and in turn finding inner peace. The residue of the performance (stacks of tea-stained paper and teacups) will remain in the exhibition.
Free to attend, all welcome. Click here for further details.
Wednesday 15 October - Shannon Lyons - Watercolour Workshop
Tannins and Caffeine: Watercolour Workshop with Shannon Lyons.
Wednesday 15 October 2025 | 11:30am – 2pm
Get creative in this hands-on, experimental watercolour workshop hosted by with Shannon Lyons. Explore the use of paints and inks made from a variety of teas and coffees. Create an abstract work on paper inspired by tannins and caffeine along with the stunning grounds and gardens of Bundoora Homestead.
Free to attend, bookings essential. Register here.
Saturday 25 October - Exhibition tour
Bundoora Homestead Exhibition Tour
Saturday 25 October 2025 | 2pm – 3pm
Join us for an engaging afternoon of conversation from the artists and curators behind our upcoming season of exhibitions.
Learn more about their work, in an engaging set of exhibitions that speak to punk femininity, rest, memory and queer lineages. Hear from curator of Rest time, Laura Couttie, as well as artists Corinna Berndt, Abbra Kotlarczyk & Briony Galligan, and Bundoora Homestead curator, Sarah Werkmeister on Pia de Bruyn’s Female Trouble.
Free to attend! All welcome, bookings recommended. Register here.
Saturday 8 November - Kate Just - Knitting Circle
Kate Just - Knitting Circle
Saturday 8 November 2025 | 11am – 1pm
Kate Just presents; Self Care Actions, a series of hand knitted brightly coloured panels bearing texts related to self-care, including Ask For Help, Feel Your Feelings, Make Art, Get Into Nature, Say No and Love Yourself. The works arise out of Just’s well known social justice and feminist art practice and reflect the artist’s knitted meditations on the actions required to sustain oneself to do challenging work in a confronting world.
Visitors are invited to participate in the work by joining Kate in a live knitting/craft circle. Bring your own knitted or textile work and join an informal discussion with Kate about craft, feminism, self-care, community and activism.
Free to attend! All welcome, bookings essential. Register here.
Saturday 29 November - Tai Snaith - Families art workshop
Tai Snaith: Slow Down World- Reading and families workshop
Saturday 29 November 2025 | 10:30am – 12pm
Artist and author Tai Snaith will read her children’s picture book, Slow Down World, which takes us on a journey towards living in the present moment. The reading will be followed by a practical workshop led by Tai, where kids will use clay to create pictures of their worlds.
The workshop is for children and families, suitable for ages 3–12 years.
Free to attend, all welcome. Bookings essential, register here.
Saturday 14 February - Dhana Merritt - SOAK activation
SOAK - Dhana Merritt
Saturday 14 February 2026 | 10am – 4pm
SOAK is a communal magnesium foot soak: part artwork, part health retreat, and fully participatory. To experience the work, visitors are invited to pause, sit with the artist, and immerse their feet in a rejuvenating infusion of magnesium and lemon balm (harvested from the artist’s medicinal herb garden).
Bookings are not required. Click here for further details.
Saturday 14 February - Jingwei Bu - Interactive Performance
Pouring Tea Until It Is All Evaporated- Jingwei Bu
Saturday 14 February 2026 | 11am - 1pm
Jingwei Bu invites visitors to sit down and pour tea, with guidance, in a practice of mindfulness and meditation.
For the artist, the repetitious action of pouring tea echoes the meditative state of Chan Buddhist philosophy – centralising one’s attention to process and in turn finding inner peace.
Free to attend, all welcome. Click here for further details.
These public programs are proudly supported by the City of Darebin's Community Grants Program.
About the artists
Laura Couttie (curator)
Laura Couttie (she/her) is a writer, curator, consultant and arts manager, based in Naarm/Melbourne. Over the past fifteen years Laura has honed her skills in creative, administrative and management roles in a variety of galleries and arts organisations. Laura is co-founder and director of Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, the first edition which was held in October 2024. Laura is passionate about working closely with and supporting artists to develop and present new projects.
Jingwei Bu
Jingwei Bu is a Chinese Australian artist who lives and works on Kaurna land in Tarntanya/Adelaide. With a practice spanning intuitive drawing, moving image, performance and installation, she explores the concept of time as a collaborator – as the subject of her work, and as a medium in itself. Influenced by Buddhist Chan philosophy and Taoist thought, her work is responsive, experimental, and participatory, with a process of making driven by profound engagement with chosen materials and risk-taking.
Emma Buswell
Emma Buswell is an artist, curator and writer based in Borloo/Perth. She is fascinated with systems of government, economies and culture, particularly in relation to constructs of place, identity and community. Her current work takes its inspiration from the matrilineal hand craft and knitting techniques passed down from her grandmother and mother, as well as a contemplative investigation into the nature of kitsch, ephemera, labour, national identities and class politics.
Kate Just
Kate Just is a queer, feminist artist of Polish, Irish, German and Scottish descent currently based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is best known for her inventive and political use of knitting. In addition to her solo practice, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to create large scale, public or textile based art projects that tackle significant social issues including gender-based violence, reproductive freedom, LGBTQIA rights and political protest.
Shannon Lyons
Shannon Lyons is an artist and educator currently living and working in Boorloo/Perth, whose practice focuses on unpacking the complex relationships that exist between artistic content and context. She continually adapts, draws from, and responds to specifically located built environments, producing works that directly or tangentially reference the site where they are made or exhibited. Recent works incorporate tea and coffee as painting media, exploring institutional temporalities and care practices while referring to temporal dimensions of recovery and everyday rituals through mark-making that mirrors the meditative processes of brewing and healing.
Dhana Merritt
Dhana Merritt is an artist, naturopath, and arts worker based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her practice explores the healing power of nature through simple acts of nourishment and communal health. Integrating herbal medicine, sensory ritual, art activations and shared participatory experiences, Merritt creates immersive artworks that invite rest, reflection, and connection. Medicinal teahouses, aromatherapy blends and therapeutic foot soaks evoke ancient traditions of communal care.