Creative work thrives on dialogue, challenge and peer exchange. Get out of your studio and meet people who want to see your wildest ideas get bolder, who celebrate failure as part of the process, and who push you further than you’d dare to go alone. That’s what CASE is for.
We sit in the space between institutions, after formal education ends, between exhibitions and outside the commercial gallery system, sustaining the conditions that allow practice to continue and evolve, and the relationships and momentum that keep artists making long after those structures fall away.
We believe you
Just say that you’re an artist. Claim it. You don’t need gallery representation, a degree or anyone else’s permission. If you’re making art and you’re serious about your practice, you belong here with us.
Centre visual art
Life is short. Put the art first. CASE exists for people who want art where it belongs, slap bang in the centre of our lives and our community. Not squeezed into the margins. It’s serious work. It’s also joyful, silly, fascinating, strange and mysterious, isn’t it?
Connection holds growth
Relationship is a creative force. When artists share work and exchange ideas with each other, practice expands in ways it couldn’t in isolation. Inspiration moves between people. So do courage and ambition. Sometimes it’s a chat over a cuppa that keeps the work sparking.
Cultivate wild potential
Creativity is vast, unpredictable, and alive in everyone. The most vital work often emerges before it’s fully resolved, through experimentation, risk, and a willingness to stay with uncertainty. CASE makes space for the unfinished, the audacious, the surprising.
Our story
In 2002, six ambitious Northern Rivers artists decided that living regionally shouldn’t mean missing out on the innovations and ideas driving contemporary art. So they created C.A.S.E., Contemporary Art Space and Education.
In the years since, CASE has taken many forms. A gallery. A print studio. An exhibition program. A community of artists meeting, making, and showing work together. Each incarnation shaped by the people who gave their time and energy to keep it alive, bringing fresh ideas, new directions and a vision for what CASE could be. Through it all, one thing stayed constant: a commitment to supporting contemporary art and artists in this region.
The Postcard Show, now a Northern Rivers institution, has been running almost as long as CASE itself, a thread of continuity through every reinvention. We stand on the shoulders of everyone who kept this going, and we’re grateful to every one of them.
