Yallingup Art Trail

People sometimes ask me where the art trail is, like it's something printed on a brochure with a numbered map. It isn't, quite. It's a series of roads with sheds and gallery doors on them, and the people who work in those sheds are the trail.

Photo: David Stanley, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

I've been on this trail since 1982, in the sense that I am one of the sheds on it. I built my gallery on Blythe Rd in 1988, walls of jarrah and southwest limestone, with my own hands. I didn't plan to be on a trail. But over the decades a community of makers has gathered down here: glassblowers, painters, potters, photographers, sculptors. Now there's enough of us that you can fill a proper day moving between studios. This is how I'd do it as a visitor with one day and a curiosity.

Google Maps sometimes misdirects via Wildwood Rd. Stay on Bussell Hwy, turn at the Carbunup store, then Blythe Rd. The trail I'm describing is roughly Carbunup to Yallingup to Dunsborough and back, all within twenty minutes of each other. You don't need a tour bus. You need a car, a half a tank of fuel, and a willingness to talk to the people behind the counter.

Begin in the morning at Gunyulgup Galleries on Gunyulgup Valley Drive. It's been there since the late seventies and is one of the longest-running galleries in the region. The range is wide: paintings, sculpture, ceramics, jewellery. It's a good place to calibrate your eye for the day. Half an hour, easy.

The road in is its own thing. Karri trees, a creek, the sense of being somewhere out of the way. Park at the top and walk down.

Five minutes up the road from Gunyulgup is Yallingup Galleries on Caves Road. Different focus. They lean into Western Australian painters and some contemporary work. The garden out the back is worth twenty minutes on a clear day. Coffee at the cafe next door if you need it.

This stretch of Caves Road is also where you'll find a number of small studios that are open by appointment. The Margaret River region runs an Open Studios event each spring, two weeks where dozens of artists open their workshop doors to the public, and a good portion of those studios are on this road. A visit lining up with it should do that instead of what I'm describing here. It's the best way to see how the work actually gets made.

Photo: Lasthib, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Twelve minutes from Yallingup Galleries, back toward the coast, is Blythe Rd. The sign with my name on it is on the right.

I built the gallery in 1988. Jarrah walls, southwest limestone, the same materials I work with in the shop next door. The viewing window opens onto the workshop — most days you can watch me turning a leg or finishing a top. Pamela runs the front. We share the space with other makers — Alan Fox blows glass in his own shed up the road and we carry his work, Julia Carter paints and shows here, Dylan Fox shoots the coast and his photographs are on the walls. Open Tuesday to Saturday, ten to four. No booking, just turn up. The story I tell is in the timber, and the timber doesn't take long.

I'm not modest about the gallery and I'm not boastful about it. I'll just say: having come this far on the trail wanting to know what's possible with a piece of southwest jarrah, my room is the room.

A few minutes from me, on Carbunup, is the studio of glassblower Alan Fox. Alan's been blowing glass down here for decades and his work is in collections from Perth to overseas. You can watch him work when the kiln's running. The colours he gets out of glass, blues and greens that look like Smiths Beach on a clear day, are the kind of thing you remember the next morning. We carry some of his work at the gallery; the rest is at his place.

Call ahead where possible. He's not always open to walk-ins.

By now it's somewhere between twelve and one. You've got a few options.

Yallingup Woodfired Bread at Yallingup Siding: pizza, coffee, a couple of tables outside. Five minutes from anywhere on the trail.

Caves House Hotel dining room: the historic option. Heritage building, beer garden, good Sunday roast.

Wills Domain or Clairault Streicker: for a proper sit-down winery lunch, both are within ten minutes and both are worth it.

Don't skip lunch. The afternoon half of the trail is where the road work happens.

Drive into Dunsborough, about ten minutes from Yallingup, and you'll find a clutch of galleries in and around the main street. The Studio Gallery on Naturaliste Terrace is the standout, with a rotating program of WA painters and ceramicists. There's also the Dunsborough Art Society space which exhibits local members; the quality is uneven but you can find treasures, and the entry is usually free.

This part of the day is best done on foot. Park once, walk between the four or five spots, take an hour and a coffee.

End the day at Cape Naturaliste. It's not a gallery, but it is the source of half the work you've just seen. The light off the cape, the heath in flower, the way the granite goes pink at five o'clock. Most of the painters down here have done a piece on it. To understand the trail, stand on it and look at what they're looking at.

Photo: Stuart Sevastos, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The walk to the whale-watching platform from the lighthouse car park is a kilometre and change, paved, and a visit between September and December will likely see humpbacks heading south.

Half of what makes a piece of work good is the country it was made in. Stand at Cape Naturaliste at five o'clock and you'll see most of the answer.

I'll tell you what I think happened. People who care about making things have always been drawn down here. The pace is right. The light is right. You can afford a shed and you can hear yourself think. Over the years that turned into a community, not a planned one, just a gathering. how this artist community came together

In 2009 I expanded my gallery to bring some of the other makers under one roof. It wasn't a business decision. It was that I'd been watching what Alan and Julia and the others were doing for years and the gallery was always going to be better with more than just me in it. That's the trail in microcosm: makers showing each other's work, sharing the room, taking the customer on a tour of what's around them rather than just what's in front of them.

To do this with the car as the main thing and the galleries as the stops between drives, a self-drive gallery crawl for the route that strings them together by road.

The trail doesn't end at any particular gallery. It ends when you've seen enough that the next morning, when you're back in Perth or Sydney or wherever you came from, the light looks different to you for a few days. That's the whole point of the exercise.

Read next: Open Studios in September.