Current & Recent Projects

M16 Artspace/Concept Six Environmental Artist-in-Residence (2024-5)

During this nine-month residency, I am continuing to explore Canberra’s waterways, creating new work investigating the practices of care through which people are nurturing the historical, present and potential more-than-human ecological and cultural values in disordered places such as Weston Creek.

This residency is generously supported by M16 Artspace and ConceptSix through their Environmental Artist in Residence Program, which supports the arts in the ACT.

Role: Artist

Photo: Gemma Fischer Photography

Borders (2022-24)

Borders was a multi-year creative inquiry aimed at re-visioning the Murray River as a meeting place; not a delineated border between NSW and Victoria but a fluid social/ecological community. Over the past two years, I’ve joined leading Body Weather practitioners and a diverse range of visual and performance artists for a series of labs exploring techniques for bodily accessing layered contexts of places. Produced by Rhae Kendrigan, Borders culminated in Mildura in April 24 with a mini-festival including performance, workshops, artist talks and an exhibition.

Roles: Participating artist, exhibitor and performer

Photos: Rhae Kendrigan, Kirsten Wehner

Meander: In search of life beneath the surface (2022-25)

Meander is a solo publication project exploring how creative investigations can help us connect with species who live in underwater worlds. The book draws together my reflective writing and artworks imaging what it might be like ‘below the surface’ in eight creeks, rivers and estuaries around Australia.

Supported by the National Museum of Australia.

Roles: Author and artist

Photo: Kirsten Wehner

Finding Weston, Considering Country (2023-4)

Finding Weston, Considering Country brings together Ngunawal Elders and a multi-disciplinary collective to walk along, listen to, learn about and reflect on Weston Creek as Country. Co-developed with my Catchment Studio co-director, Nicola Lambert, this program includes four ‘walkshops’ and a series of online discussions on colonialism and positionality. Finding Weston will conclude in 2024 with participants co-designing and installing an in situ trail dramatising the creek’s presence and sharing their encounters with it.

Finding Weston, Considering Country has been made possible through a generous ACT Government Environmental Grant 2022-3.

Roles: Co-concept, direction and facilitation

Photos: Gemma Fischer Photography

Body Forms (2024)

Responding to recent engagements with Body Weather as a method of ‘inhabiting’ an always fluid environment, I’m focusing this year on experimenting with drawing and mark making that captures bodies in movement. This will feed into a series of sculptures reflecting on bodies, organs and animal identities.

Photo: Kirsten Wehner

Edge Land (2024-25)

Edge Land is a year long collaboration with artist Mia Thurgate investigating the West Jerrabomberra Grasslands, with a focus on the lively zone where woodland meets grassland. During monthly visits to this landscape, we are creating 100 ‘objects’ that record how place intersects with memory, exploring the idea of more-than-human memory and how remembering happens bodily as well as the mind’s eye.

Role: Artist

Photos: Kirsten Wehner

University of Canberra/Belconnen Arts Centre Mid-Career/Established Artist-in-Residence for Cross-Sector Engagement (2022)

During this four-months part-time residency, I developed a series of walk diaries documenting my investigations of Weston Creek as a place of beauty, critiquing the discourse of deficit habitually applied to such urban waterways. This practice developed into Printing Weston, a one-day community workshop inviting local residents to learn more about the creek and create nature prints recording their encounters with the environment. Following the workshop, I worked further with participants’ outcomes to create a single work, On Beauty, exhibited as part of the Upending: Mending exhibition at Belconnen Arts Centre, 20 May - 3 July, 22.

Photo; Gemma Fischer