Through government funding and a strong community spirit, art collective Cementa has finally realised its dream of purchasing their now permanent home at 71 Angus Avenue in Kandos.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Selling for $180,000, a price agreed upon roughly four years ago between its owner and Cementa, Alex said now that the ink is dry on the paperwork, he's happy to have finally completed the sale.
"It's an incredible achievement," Creative Director Alex Wisser said.
The money raised to buy the striking yellow building came from both community donations, fundraisers and government funding. The motivation to finalise the sale was kicked into gear when its owner, local man Ken Hopkins said he was eager to complete the sale last year.
"Over 2021 and into early 2022 we just started hitting the stumps and raising funds. We began that with a public fundraiser [through] which we were able to raise $55,000. And that was from private donations, which - not only our arts community from Sydney, but actually a very strong feeling from Kandos locals and, and also regional donation," Alex said.
"It was a great sign of support for us from across the regions. Our largest donation came in from Dubbo and we've had big donations from people in Bathurst as well, so it's very, very heartening.
"We were also very fortunate to have the services of Christopher Connellan, a local solicitor who donated his his time and energy to help us to complete the sale."
Now that the building is officially in new hands, Alex said they can get to work renovating the building and bringing it up to scratch and revealed plans to expand the space to serve a larger swathe of the community.
"At the moment, we need to look at repairing and renovating it. So and that was a big motivator in wanting to purchase it, because we can't kind of do anything with it until we own it," he said.
"There's a small cafe in there, and the art space. We'd like to be able to put a space in where people can have meetings or workshops or develop art or have local cultural activities take place.
"We'd like to be able to start to get some gear together to to have a sort of youth program that will involve local youth with technology and culture. So [we're] looking at VR or other digital forms of cultural expression.
"And really when I say local, actually, I mean it's something that would be an amazing benefit to actually all regional youth. So that would be something we hope would expand to provide benefit for the region more generally."
Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:
