CACP
NETWORK
PROJECTS
Climate Aware Creative Practices: Towards a Collective Pedagogy.
This paper addresses the theme of activism in relation to environmental justice and its imbrication with pedagogical approaches to climate-aware arts practice. We introduce our newly established research project ‘Climate Aware Creative Practices’ (CACP) led by Terri Bird, Helen Hughes, and Tara McDowell, with research assistance from Lauren Burrow. CACP is engaged in understanding ways in which university arts courses can: foster artistic, theoretical, and curatorial practices that are aware of and respond to the challenges of climate change;
centre Indigenous knowledge in climate-aware practice and pedagogy;
actively participate in climate justice, advocacy, and activism; and understand art’s role in contributing to both issues and solutions pertaining to sustainability (i.e., the environmental impact of art and exhibition making).
Terri Bird, Helen Hughes and Tara McDowell (Department of Fine Art, Art Design and Architecture | Monash University) 2022 Conference.
Click on image for Link.
Climate Aware Creative Practices Keynote Lecture
In February 2023 Tristen Harwood presented Monash University’s inaugural Climate Aware Creative Practices (CACP) Network Keynote Lecture ‘Sustainability is Colonialism: land trauma and settler futurity in environmentally conscious art’.
Tristen Harwood, an Indigenous writer, cultural critic and independent researcher, and a descendant of Numbulwar where the Rose River opens onto the Gulf of Carpentaria. How do we come to terms with the settler-colonial foundations of conservation and environmentalism in the context of art and pedagogy? To this question, Tristen will offer Indigenous and decolonial perspectives on teaching environmentally conscious creative practices.
Click on image for Link.
In Semester 2, 2023, Associate Professor Terri Bird, Dr Helen Hughes, Associate Professor Tara McDowell and Research Officer
Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris undertook the first student survey on climate change and pedagogy in the school of Fine Art at Monash
University Art Design and Architecture. Led by their development of the Climate Aware Creative Practices (CACP) group and national
network, the purpose of the survey was to gain a fuller understanding of what students know about climate change, how it is impacting
their lives and practices, as well as how it is being taught in Monash University’s Fine Art department.
Click on image for Link.
The Charge that Binds
The Charge That Binds celebrates the dynamism, vitality and power of natural phenomena and the more-than-human world, reminding us of what is at stake at a time of ecological emergency. Infused with both optimism and grief, the exhibition draws together works that celebrate a world composed of multifaceted, multispecies relations and pulses – foregrounding and reimaging modes of relationality and connection beyond the disruptive, extractive logic of capital.
The Charge That Binds presents recent artworks by Australian and international artists, alongside several key new commissions, traversing a broad range of mediums including painting, sculpture, moving image, sound and choreography. This lively assembly of practices celebrates and cultivates interdependency and reciprocity across difference in both a poetic and pragmatic register.
Grappling with the entwined issues of ongoing climate change and entrenched social inequity, works presented conjure new (and old) stories about our interconnectedness with the living world and each other, underscored by a recognition that natural exploitation, cultural domination and territorial occupation are often part of ongoing colonial processes and thinking.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of experimental workshops, discussions, performances and pedagogical investigations addressing the role of artists and art institutions in fostering collaboration, collective action and new imaginaries in response to our planetary emergency. The Climate Aware Creative Practices Network will host the Relational Ecologies Laboratory throughout the course of the exhibition, culminating in an intensive two-day program of talks, discussions and workshops in late-February 2025.
The Charge That Binds adopts a collective curatorial model, with oversight from a curatorial advisory group including Associate Professor Michelle Antoinette, Art History and Theory program at Monash University; Professor Brian Martin, artist and Director of Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab; Professor Peta Rake, Director of University of Queensland Art Museum; and Professor Naomi Stead, Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University.
Curator: Shelley McSpedden
Click on image for Link.