Art from the Heart: Colour, Courage & Community
If you've ever visited an Art from the Heart exhibition, you'll know it isn't your usual polite charity show. The artworks are bright, funny, angry, tender and political. Some of them are painted with injecting equipment. A lot of it is about survival.
Each artwork is created by Sydney's Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre service users, who every year, pick up a paintbrush and tell the city their story.
2026 marks the exhibition's 16th iteration, also landing in MSIC's 25th anniversary year.
Drawing From Experience
The bold, tattoo-style illustrations behind Australia's Support Don't Punish campaign aren’t created by a design agency, they’re hand drawn by Emily Ebdon, a Tasmanian peer worker and artist with two decades of frontline harm reduction experience.
In this spotlight, Emily talks about feeling creatively constrained in faith-based organisations, finding her voice in the drug user movement, and the process of turning real submissions from people who use drugs across Australia into vibrant artworks.
Journey through the Underworld for International Overdose Awareness Day
August 31 is International Overdose Awareness Day (IOAD), the world’s largest annual campaign to end accidental overdose. This year’s theme is ‘Together We Can’. Against this sentiment of hope and togetherness, the title for ACON’s IAOD event ‘Stories from the Underworld’ seems rather mysterious.