Inspired Lives: Discovering Life in Imagination is an exhibition that shares the original voice of suicide survivors through a series of large-scale art installations.

What counts, our whole purpose, is to try to understand what we are about, to scrutinise ourselves … Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor. -Louise Bourgeois

Despite its proximity to the central business district and many architectural treasures, city-fringe North Melbourne has been the awkward step-sister to the fashionable neighbouring suburbs of the inner north. However, it seems that the word is out. It is now home to a growing number of hipster cafes, bespoke furniture makers and wine bars, adding still more texture to this gritty inner urban pocket. So it should not be entirely surprising that the suburb is also home to a commercial art gallery which appears to be straight from the lower east side of New York.

The Toorak Village Art Affair is known as the ‘little sister’ of the very successful Toorak Village Sculpture Exhibition which runs annually each May.

An explosion of activity rips through a crowd of men and women. Their bodies fall and recoil in the face of an approaching storm, their features contort with fright and agony, their limbs flail; rocks smash into their faces, whipped from the earth by the gathering tempest.