Now on view as a part of Shepparton Art Museum’s ongoing commission series, Raafat Ishak’s wall painting Sherbourne Bear at Tallygaroopna (2026) weaves local history, literary symbolism, and modernist political architecture into a meditation on time, ambition, and settler coloniaIism.
Referencing Shepparton’s namesake, Sherbourne Sheppard, and a symbolic bear drawn from children’s literature, the work layers personal myth with place-based narrative. Within the geometric wall painting, Sherbourne stands at a threshold between two ideological paths: a staircase representing individual ambition, and an elevated structure evoking the Russian architect and artist El Lissitzky’s unrealised 1924 socialist building Wolkenbügel. Settler colonialism is framed as a passage that cuts through time and space-a suspended, continuous moment in which history, ideology, and imagination intersect.
Art Wall: Raafat Ishak
Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, VIC
On view from 1 March onwards