Gang-gang: Imagining Gang-gangs art show opens at M16 Artspace

In this Year of the Gang-gang and with the year-long Gang-gang Survey underway we've been running umpteen pictures of, and stories about, our faunal emblem. Yet many readers lament to us that they have never, ever seen a Gang-gang. Now, suddenly, there are 108 of them all together, just waiting to be ogled.

But we have teased and tinkered with the truth a little, for the great congregation is not of live birds but of schoolchildren's artistic impressions of them. The spectacular Imagining Gang-gangs art show opened at the M16 Artspace on Wednesday afternoon. Canberra schoolchildren were invited to imagine the species and to paint, draw and sculpt it.

Because we are so famous and important we were given a sneak preview on Wednesday morning. Our picture here, a portrait in chalk by Lara Hedley (of Campbell High School) of that feathered Adonis the male Gang-gang, is one of many scarlet stars of the show that leapt off the wall at us and demanded "Look at me!"

The show boasts 108 Gang-gangs depicted in 80 artworks. There are portraits of individual birds (with an overwhelming, regrettable but understandable sexist preference for the flamboyant males over the discreetly exquisite females). Then there are depictions of the famous mutually-preening and bonding-for-life couples. Then there are imaginative arrangements like the three ceramic males shoulder to shoulder on an actual woodworm-chewed log.

There is even, as you enter, borrowed for the show, an actual, real, deceased, taxidermised male Gang-gang. (Perhaps, though, he is not dead but is only resting as he pines for the fjords.)

The art prize and its resulting show were organised not only to be part of the Year of the Gang-gang shenanigans but also, the Canberra Ornithologists Group's Kathryn Eyles explained on Wednesday, to try to engage schoolchildren with the wonder of birdlife. Today's "birdos" are overwhelmingly of a grey-plumaged age. It will be a shame if the appreciation of birds withers as our generation withers and falls off its perch (pun intended) and we have no one to bequeath our binoculars to.

And as it is, Eyles points out, the artworks come overwhelmingly from schools that are in Canberra's "Gang-gang hot spots" (for example, close to Mt Ainslie) where the birds are seen and so are able to exert their special charm. It would be wonderful if, in this Territory for which it is the faunal emblem, the species was spread evenly and generously across all of suburbia (like Vegemite spread evenly and generously across a slice of toast) but that doesn't seem to be the case. For example, forlorn Tuggeranong and most of Belconnen seem to have no Gang-gang Vegemite at all on their corners of the ACT slice. The discovery of the true distribution of them, these poorly-understood fowls, is one of the purposes of this year's special Survey of the Gang-gangs.

We wish we had room for more pictures from the fleeting exhibition (it closes at 5pm on Sunday). Yarno Rohling's exciting Gang-gang Destiny is a kind of passionate political poster declaring "A vulnerable species no more. Once ruled by men – but never again!! Gang-gang Revenge! We will be free birds!" In his picture the skies around Black Mountain Tower teem with as many Gang-gangs as there were Bogong moths around the Manuka Oval floodlights during the recent day/night cricket match.

Mikaela Newman's Musical Gang-gang has an MP3 player and is listening rapturously, through headphones, to its choice of music (which we like to think is Mozart).

Meanwhile, in a gallery far away, across the city at the ANU's School of Art, the school's enormous, annual Graduating Exhibition opened on Wednesday.

One of its most enthralling works is surely Julie Delves' Colombo 1976.

Exquisite tininess is usually one of the defining qualities of goldfish but here, if everything is to scale, is an alarming goldfish the size of a golden humpback whale or giant golden shark! Horror!

Julie Delves tells us that, yes, she has enjoyed playing with "confusing ideas of scale" and would like those who see the painting to be set a-wondering about what it may mean.

She explains that the doll-like human figure is her painting of an actual doll she that she bought about 12 years ago in a Darwin second hand shop. It had a handwritten note "Colombo – 1976" sewn into it, explaining when and where a collector of dolls (now deceased, and her collection dispersed) had bought it.

And while working at her art projects this year (she has just finished third year) Delves felt the need to have some living things around her while she was painting inanimate things. And so she had some plants, and a true goldfish, and so juxtaposed the inanimate doll and animated goldfish in this confusing, wonder-stoking way.

The Graduating Exhibition is a wonder in its own right. The School of Art's Dr Waratah Lahy advises us that "The entire school turns into a gallery, with works being hung in every workshop and also the main gallery and foyer gallery."

The goldfish-enriched Graduating Exhibition continues at the ANU School of Art until 10 December.