A celebration of diversity, creativity and community.
Join us on Sunday 2 August 1pm- 5.30pm at Tecoma Uniting Church for a day of music, art, storytelling, conversation and connection.
Featuring artists and performers from First Nations, LGBTQIA+, disability, and culturally diverse communities, Voices from the Edge creates space for voices from the margins to be heard, honoured and celebrated.
🎨 Art Exhibition
🎵 Live Music & Performance
🗣️ Storytelling & Panel Conversation
☕ Meet the Artists
🖌️ Community Art Activities
🍲 Food & Connection
Together we’ll explore our shared humanity, celebrate our differences, and build bridges of understanding through creativity, compassion and community.
All ages and abilities welcome.
LGBTQIA+ safe space.
Assistance animals welcome.
Participating Artists
Mariam Issa
Belonging: A Journey of Courage, Loss and Love
The talk will be a personal reflection on my migration journey and the lessons it has taught me about resilience, community, and the power of belonging.
Mariam Issa is a storyteller, community builder, social entrepreneur and author. Having arrived in Australia as a refugee, Mariam has spent decades creating spaces of connection, belonging and cultural understanding. Through storytelling and community engagement, she inspires people to recognise their shared humanity and the transformative power of welcome. https://www.mariamissa.com.au/
Wade Keighley
Wade is an accomplished abstract artist whose skill belies his young age (born 2012). He was born with Down syndrome and since the age of 11, has been developing a unique style that infuses his vibrant joyous nature into exciting colourful works under the guidance of mentor Macarena Ocea.
Celeste Willoughby
Celeste Willoughby is a pianist and composer based in Melbourne. She has played piano all her life, driven by a passion for melody and the transportive nature of music. On her debut full-length album ‘Moving Mountains,’ released under her former name Edward, the composer weaves a narrative-driven musical journey that fuses her love of classical piano with more contemporary influences, offering a candid view into the struggles and triumphs in self-discovery through instrumental piano.
Pirritu
PIRRITU’s music is a gentle, honest, and melodic personal journey that entices you into the depths of sadness, love, and shimmering hope.
With two album releases under his belt, the songman’s work honours a cultural journey to connect back to land, language, and family with a continual thirst for deeper understanding of his people and country.
Pirritu’s music features folk instrumentation weaving amongst his unique vocals like the gentle wind and waters that the Ngiyampaa man sings of.
Emma Chandler
Emma Chandler (she/her) is a proud trans storyteller and theatre-maker based in Naarm. For over a decade, Emma has worked with kids and their grown-ups, connecting with them through kindness and wonder. Audiences declare Em’s storytelling is “just magic”, and that she “looks like an elf”, while The Age says she’s “pure enchantment”. Join her as she encourages us to find our inner child with stories, songs, a little magic, and plenty of silliness.
Ramak Bamzar
Ramak Bamzar (b. 1980, Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian-Australian visual artist and photographer based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Her practice explores memory, identity, and the ways personal and political histories continue to inhabit the body. Working primarily with staged portraiture and installation, she combines contemporary photography with textiles, domestic objects, and reflective surfaces to create images that move between intimacy and distance.
After moving to Australia, Bamzar’s work increasingly focused on the experience of living between places – building an everyday life while remaining emotionally connected to events unfolding elsewhere. Her portraits often exist alongside archival or symbolic imagery, allowing individual presence and collective memory to occupy the same space. Rather than documenting events directly, she is interested in how they are carried, remembered, and felt over time.
