Lisa Slade is shaking up the national arts establishment by re-envisioning how art is presented

Everything, it seemed, was where it had always been. And there was little room for showing off the gallery's massive collection holding.

Slade, who was born in Cessnock, went to high school in Lochinvar and lived some of her teen years in Newcastle East, had been a curator at the Newcastle Art Gallery and an art history lecturer at the University of Newcastle.

She moved to the Art Gallery of South Australia soon after former NAG director Nick Mitzevich took up the head post there. Mitzevich, who is also originally from the Hunter Valley, is now director of the National Gallery of Australia.

The pair led a re-hang of the entire gallery, including the very traditional, long-standing permanent displays.

"You knew where everything was going to be," Slade says.

"These days you don't know. It's a place where great ideas are always on display."

Instead of colonial pieces being segmented from First Nations art, European genre pictures set aside from modern art and Australian Impressionists in disconnect from installation works, images and styles that didn't seem to have anything in common were brought together.

Regrouping artworks into thematic artful clusters served to "Ioosen the chronological corset, bringing works into conversation", Slade says.

"The signature that we have established, and it's probably been a decade in the making, has been a kind of time-travelling way of working curatorially. The hang requires you to do the work, you're making the connections."

Through this visual intertextuality, the gallery can speak to "some of the stories in history", she says. The ancient land speaks with colonial culture, and both converse with modern Australian works, while contemporary art responds. That is what contemporary artists are all about, Slade says.

"The moment they step into a space they're always making a connection back to history and drawing history up into the present," she says.

Leading contemporary artist Fiona Hall, who was based in Adelaide for some of the time Slade has been there, created a series of works in response to a collection of "trophy-like" silverware at AGSA.

The works were made in the 1880s by German artisan immigrants to South Australia and were leading edge in their day, taking a European tradition and turning it antipodean with Australian flora and fauna, and figures of Aborigines. It was "a way of making sense of place", Slade says.

"To me that's been the most exciting part of being here, making sense of being in the south, in Australia generally," she says.

"The big questions about what it means to be in the southern hemisphere - a GPS for people finding themselves."

The idea to re-perceive the experience of viewing art sprung from Newcastle connections. Slade, who has a double degree in art history and social anthropology, based her PhD on the Macquarie Collectors' Chest which was made in Newcastle around 1818 for Governor Macquarie.

The chest's drawers, and hidden drawers, contain a collection of Australian artefacts including stuffed birds, spiders, shells and algae specimens. Macquarie took it back to England, and it is now held in the Mitchell Collection of the State Library of New South Wales.

The idea came from the Renaissance era, when it was often an immersive chamber experience - entire rooms were filled with scientific and cultural items thought to hold wonder. By such configuration, the disparate became associated.

For the last exhibition she curated for the NAG, Slade commissioned a contemporary version of the Macquarie chest, referencing colonial artists. The show, Curious Colony: a twenty first century Wunderkammer, travelled to the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney.

She placed Fiona Hall's work next to the work of convict painter Joseph Lycett.

"I started a whole lot of conversations between the Newcastle collection in both its contemporary and historic forms," Slade says. "So, in a way, those ideas were translated to Adelaide."

This week Slade has been back in NSW, installing an AGSA touring show of First Nations art at Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery.

The works in the Kungka Kunpu (Strong Women) exhibition are drawn from the gallery's extensive holding of contemporary works from Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara artists of a desert region in the far north of South Australia, which extend across the imposed boundaries of State.

To these artists, art is not a luxury product, "it's a powerful tool for communication", Slade says. "It's not some kind of cream on top, it's essential. An ancient call and response."

During her time in Adelaide, Slade has worked to deepen the gallery's connection with APY artists, including Vincent Namatjira. She commissioned a major building projection work by Namatjira that was displayed at the same time as an exhibition that reflected on a century of the Archibald Prize for portraiture.

"That made a lot of sense," Slade says, as a portrait of Namatjira's great-grandfather, the influential painter Albert Namatjira, was awarded the Archibald in 1956 - the first time a painting of a First Nations person had won. The projection work by Vincent Namatjira gave a local touch to a show about a "very Sydney-centric" art prize, she says.

Slade recently travelled with Namatjira to the National Gallery of Australia to see its holding of watercolour works by his great-grandfather Albert Namatjira.

Slade is at the forefront of an AGSA commitment to reconnecting First Nations communities with "their own cultural material". Many works held at the Adelaide gallery have "weird White titles" or no titles at all, she says.

On their way to Canberra, Slade and Namatjira visited the studio of painter Ben Quilty, who had previously worked on APY Lands at the invitation of Namatjira. Now Quilty had invited Namatjira to work with him in his space, and Slade watched as they created a series of works about the new King of England. It was just days after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

Slade will be in the Hunter Valley region in March when the Kungka Kunpu exhibition comes to the Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

Though, she is a regular visitor to Newcastle, with her mother still living locally.

"In some ways, I'd love to come back," she says. "I think it's a great city to live in."

The city has undergone massive changes in the 12 years she's been away, Slade says. Notably, the long-planned expansion of the Newcastle Art Gallery is finally under way. She hopes the new space will be taken as a chance to showcase the city's internationally important Japanese ceramics holding, some of which was recently in Adelaide for a show of avant-garde Sodeisha ware.

"I feel there's a real opportunity for Newcastle to embrace that collection," Slade says.

"To see more shows curated from that collection would be great."

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