CONVENORS
Tara McDowell, Monash University, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, University of New South Wales

Tara McDowell is Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include contemporary curating, exhibition histories, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, and the various support structures of art, including home, school, exhibition, labour, and friendship. She is a founding member of Climate Aware Creative Practices, an Australia-wide alliance of creative arts educators, researchers, and practitioners working together to deepen engagement with the challenges posed by climate change. McDowell currently leads the Australia Research Council project Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis.

Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris Senior Research Associate, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) University of New South Wales Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is an Australian and Swedish curator, writer and lecturer based on Darug and Gundungurra Country, Blue Mountains. Her expertise is on the poetics and politics of eco-aesthetics and curatorial theory with a focus on water, environmental art and hydrofeminism. Her work navigates fluid territories through her academic work, curatorial theory and independent curatorial practice, which spans the Nordic and Oceanic contexts. Her work seeks to address the climate crisis through creative practice, theory making and pedagogy and charts new ways of seeing water’s currents across aesthetic, cultural, and computational landscapes. Currently she is the Senior Research Associate at UNSW as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated DecisionMaking and Society (ADM+S) and sits on the Steering Committee for Climate Aware Creative Practices (CACP) network.

PRESENTERS Terri Bird, Monash University Jo Pollitt, Edith Cowan University Katie Lee, Deakin University Charles Robb, Queensland University of Technology Lucas Ihlein, University of Wollongong

Terri Bird is an artist and writer who lives and works on the lands of the Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation in Naarm/Melbourne. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Monash University and a member of the collaborative art group Open Spatial Workshop (OSW), along with Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell. Over the past 23 years OSW has produced a broad range of work spanning sculpture, installation, public art, curated events, publications and video production. For a number of years, the work of OSW has been focused on mobilizing the temporal geo-logics evident in geology as a means of engaging with future possibilities. Most recently the work ‘Metabolic Scales’ was included in These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature, curated by Anna Briers, at University of Queensland Art Museum.

Jo Pollitt lives and works on Whadjuk Noongar Country as an artist scholar and Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University (ECU) with the Centre for People, Place, & Planet and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her research is grounded in a twenty-year practice of working with improvisation as methodology across multiple performed, choreographic, curatorial and publishing platforms. She was an inaugural Forrest Creative and Performance Fellow, is convenor of Dance Research Australasia, co-lead of #FEAS: Feminist Educators Against Sexism, and author of The dancer in your hands < >. She is the lead on the multi-year transdisciplinary project ‘Staging Weather’.

Katie Lee is an artist and lecturer in Visual Arts at Deakin University, based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Her practice works with sculpture, performance and video as methodology to examine relations between objects, bodies, and materials. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2005, with recent work including ‘Unfathomable Alphabets’ (Project 8), ‘Nothing New’ (Performance Art Festival Graz, Austria), and ‘Moving Objects’ (Melbourne Art Fair Project Space). She is a member of the LAST collective and regularly collaborates with artists interested in interdisciplinary practice. She is co-leader of the Public Exchange Bureau research cluster. Her current research explores improvised encounters and the perceptual conditions through which we experience the world.

Charles Robb is an artist and Associate Professor of Visual Art at QUT in Brisbane/Meanjin. He leads the first-year Open Studio program, teaching experimental, collaborative and cross-media art methods. His work explores the relationship between memorialisation and incidental form through sculpture, digital and photographic media, and has been exhibited widely, including at MONA (Hobart), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), and Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia (Melbourne). Robb is also active in the field of public art and has recently completed two major sculpture commissions for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. He currently serves as Deputy Chair of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools.

A/Pro Lucas Ihlein is an artist-researcher focusing on regenerative agriculture and the social and cultural dimensions of environmental management. He also collaborates with Dr Louise Curham as Teaching and Learning Cinema, re-enacting and documenting 1970s expanded cinema as an experimental method of intangible cultural heritage preservation. He teaches Contemporary Art at University of Wollongong, Australia.