Tonight Bellambi dad Tim Donnelly will be celebrating the triumph of art over adversity, as he ends a year battling bladder and throat cancer with his first exhibition.
Wobble – a collection of fantastical fish, jellies and other sea creatures – will officially open at Wollongong’s Project Contemporary Artspace with drinks and nibbles from 6pm. Then on Saturday, Tim will be at the Wentworth Christmas Festival in Port Kembla, selling T-shirts featuring his “skateboard meets surfer dude or dudette” designs.
“My work's always been very graphic, cartoony, manga-esque,” Tim says. “Comic book meets graffiti, and playful… I like drawing from my head. That's what I was like when I was in my 20s. I wanted to explore how I could look into my mind's eye and put pencil to paper and conjure something up.”
Born in the UK, Tim graduated from Coventry University to life in London at the height of dance club culture in the 1990s, when he painted graffiti, designed flyers for raves run by DJ friends and created UV-reactive canvas murals for the legendary Ministry of Sound.
Thirty years later, after a backpacking adventure brought him to Australia and a successful career in corporate graphic and web design, Tim is rediscovering his own talents, with all 14 works in Wobble created since March 2024, when his cancer treatment ramped up.
“For the first time in a long, long time, I'm feeling really optimistic,” Tim says. “I lost track of who I was, and I think cancer's given me the opportunity to reset and come back to the guy from the 90s that was the artist, trying to change the world for the better.”
For encouraging him to take the leap, Tim thanks his partner, Dr Sarah Nicholson, who as the director of the South Coast Writers Centre knows all about the power of creativity.
“It started off just as a way to while away the hours whilst I was going through chemo and radiotherapy,” Tim says.
“It was really cathartic. It helped me focus or take my focus away from the obvious mental challenges that cancer brings to mind – like, 'Am I going to survive this? This is horrible, I don't want to do this anymore, the pain, the pain, the pain' – into something a bit more constructive.
“The cancer has allowed me to focus more on art as therapy, my own therapy, and it has been amazingly therapeutic for me. It puts a smile on my face every day.”
Making a statement
The inspiration for Wobble began on a walk at Bellambi beach.
“Basically I wanted to make a statement about plastic pollution and how much it upsets me. Our oceans are getting trashed.”
Tim experimented with drawing little jellyfish and inserting them into plastic bottles and eventually this evolved into large paintings.
His favourite is Abysmal.
“It’s a really scary looking monster fish, like a fluoro psychedelic fish, that's basically coming out of the dark depths of the ocean with this massive maw, with super razor-sharp teeth. It's quite a large painting, it’s all acrylic, and it was really hard to do."
The monster was meant to have a jellyfish in its mouth, but Sarah and his sons were afraid he’d ruin it.
“So then I painted the jellyfish on archival quality paper and I stuck it on with super magnets. There's a magnet on the back of the painting and you can move the jellyfish around the painting from the back.”
A year of cancer
It’s been almost a year since Tim, now 54, received his shock diagnosis of bladder cancer, followed by surgery just before Christmas 2023.
“The prognosis was not looking good,” Tim says. “Then beginning of Feb, the results came back and they said, 'Oh, the bladder cancer is not actually what we thought it was. It's something called myofibroblastic sarcoma that ain't gonna kill you. However, we found that you've got throat cancer and that probably will, if we don't do anything about it.'
“And that's what I've been trying to get through.”
Eight weeks of “pretty brutal” chemo and radiation began in February.
“There was some times where I really wanted to throw the towel in. They nuked a big section of my head… I lost all my hair … all my skin fell off. I had third degree burns around my throat.”
Despite healing relatively quickly, Tim found the side effects remain. “Like no tastebuds, no saliva glands, tinnitus … they haven't got any better, but I'm totally happy with it. They're just part of what I am now.”
Tim describes having cancer as a “brain reset”.
“I was really in a rut before I got sick, really struggling to know who I was, where I was going in my life. And I'm not ashamed to talk about this. I was drinking too much…
“I've been really, really fortunate to get cancer in a weird way because it's allowed me to come out the other side, not the person I was before I went in.”
Fun with French
The final two pieces made for his exhibition are a diptych of sorts titled Les Trois Trembler and Les Deux Trembler.
“‘Trembler’ is basically 'wobble' in French,” Tim explains. “I gave them French names, but they're actually called the Three Wobbles and the Two Wobbles, nothing heavy in the names really. I just like to have a bit of fun.
“The jellyfish kind of have brains inside them, like Aztec graffiti graphic brains. They look really, really professional, like somebody's done these on a computer. I'm really proud of them because they're the embodiment of what I've been doing over the last three or four months.”
Tim has been in remission for since late September. “I'm not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm confident that I'm okay.
“I'm really grateful for coming out the other side of cancer, not dead, and being given another opportunity. Embracing art again is my way of taking advantage of that.”
Wobble is at Project Contemporary Artspace until December 16.
