RAY MONDE
THE PLACES THAT SHAPE US
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 28 February – 21 June 2026
Words by Joey Hespe – Pictures by Zoe Lonergan – Artworks by Ray Monde
​
There is a particular kind of distance in growing up queer in a country town—measured not only in geography but in difference, the sense of being marked as “Other” long before you have language for it.
​
For Braidwood-based Ray Monde, this awareness was atmospheric: it lived in the words of brothers who teased, “Why don’t you go inside and cut out shapes?” while they roared away on motorbikes or shouldered guns. He did just that—cutting, pasting, sewing clothes, covering his bedroom walls with collaged paper.
​
In the absence of belonging, creativity became a lifeline. Art was not pastime but a way through—the thing that seeded a lifelong practice.
​
Collage became his medium: glossy pages from magazines like Wallpaper form his palette. He paints over these surfaces, letting fragments of text and image ghost through, creating secret layers. Pastels in peaches, pinks, lemons, and greens recur, simplified and partially imagined, drawn from memory. Hidden references surface throughout—nods to friends, shared histories, and fragments of landscape both real and reimagined.​​
The Places That Shape Us gathers histories of queer becoming in regional Australia, weaving Monde’s memories with those of his peers and collaborators. Monumental in scale: boards 2.5 metres high and 3.6 metres wide. These freestanding dioramas invite visitors to walk through them as though moving through memory itself. Within these vast environments, small figures appear: portraits of artists and friends—Nell, Todd Fuller, Dan Kyle, Prue Hazelgrove, Nick Mitzevich, Luke Arnold, and Monde himself—situated in the landscapes that shaped them.
​
Soundscapes carry their voices: stories of resistance, like Fuller’s persistence to dance, and quiet triumphs, small acts of endurance and becoming. “I didn’t know I was queer at the time,” Monde reflects.
​
Rather than framing regional life as purely restrictive, Monde insists on its paradox: that for all its exclusions, the country also offered expanses of bushland, rivers, gardens, animals, skies that stretched forever. Childhood here meant walking along creeks, tending to farmland, listening to the tolling of church bells.
​
These experiences, he suggests, are formative: “Those good and bad experiences shape us.” His landscapes capture this doubleness—spaces of pain and resilience, but also of freedom, play, and imagination. They carry a “coming home” sensibility: through making and memory, landscape becomes a site of reconciliation.
​
In this way, The Places That Shape Us encompasses a space where environment and identity entwine.
​​
The Australian bush—so long mythologised as rugged, masculine, heterosexual—is reimagined. Monde’s playful dioramas resist inherited myths, proposing landscapes alive with tenderness, ambiguity, and difference.
​
His practice recalls Kusama’s infinity rooms, Kentridge’s theatre sets, and Wolseley’s ecological cartographies, yet distinguishes itself through intimacy: these are not landscapes to be gazed at from afar, but to be entered, walked through, inhabited. To step inside them is to traverse memory, childhood’s improvisations, and the fragile architectures of belonging.
​
Place, as Monde shows, does not merely surround us—it lives within us, shaping who we are and who we might yet become.
​
At a time when LGBTQIA+ lives remain under threat globally—where laws in Florida and Uganda legislate erasure—Monde’s insistence on visibility feels both personal and political. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill forbids teachers from discussing sexuality and gender, while Uganda’s 2023 legislation enforces life imprisonment for homosexuality.
​
Against this backdrop, The Places That Shape Us becomes not only an exhibition but an act of care—a call to awareness within local communities. As Monde hopes, these works may act as catalysts, encouraging audiences to recognise the equality of people who live regionally, to break stereotypes, to remove barriers.
​
His reimagined landscapes offer visibility where silence once prevailed, reminding us that queer lives and histories have always been interwoven with the same soil, rivers, and skies.
​
The Places That Shape Us, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 28 February - 21 June 2026