Curation, Design & Writing

River Country community day, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, ACT 2023, and NSW regional tour, 2024 - 25.

The River Country community day brought over fifty First Nations and non-Indigenous cultural leaders from across the Murray-Darling Basin to share their experiences with and responses to environmental change. 2000 visitors of all ages explored conversations, dance and spoken word performances, music and hands-on workshops, learning about threatened rivers and wetlands and sharing their waterway stories. As a Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment at the National Museum, I led on the community day concept development and curation and worked with Public Programs colleagues on production and delivery.

In 2024-25, the River Country tour took this engagement experience to regional venues in the NSW Riverina, Far West and North West. As co-lead creative producer and facilitator, I worked with partners to develop and deliver conversations, workshops, walks on Country and film screenings reaching a further 2000 people, including over 500 primary school students.

Images below: Cameron Muir, Vic McEwan, Sarah McEwan

Beneath the Surface: Looking for platypus and rakali,
Kirsten Wehner, The Museum, Dec 2022.

A reflective essay for the National Museum of Australia’s The Museum magazine exploring material representations, cultural resonances and affective meanings of platypus.

PhotoAccess Artistic Program, Canberra, ACT, 2018 - 2022

As Director, PhotoAccess, I led the artistic development and delivery of the centre’s exhibition, workshops, public engagement and digital program. This included the curation and management, each year, of approximately 25 exhibitions, 50 workshops and 20 public and outreach programs. Over my four year tenure, PhotoAccess grew significantly, leading in 2023, to the organisation securing, for the first time, Australia Council four-year funding support.

Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the face of environmental crisis, Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner & Jenny Newell (eds), New South Books, 2020

Together with Cameron Muir and Jenny Newell, I co-edited and contributed to Living with the Anthropocene, one of the first publications exploring Australians’ diverse lived experiences and the cultural and emotional meanings of the Anthropocene.

The book included over 40 contributors, including some of Australia’s most well known writers and thinkers, as well as ecologists, walkers, farmers, historians, ornithologists, artists and community activists. Together, their entries build a picture of a collective endeavour towards a culture of care, respect, and attention as the physical world changes around us.

National Museum of Australia curatorial program, 2004 - 16

As a senior and, then, head curator at the National Museum of Australia, I led a number of significant projects ranging across collections, exhibitions and public engagement. These included:

• People and the Environment program, 2011-2016: One of the museum’s three main curatorial areas, encompassing all relevant collections, exhibitions and public engagement work.

• Spirited: Australia’s Horse Story, 2014: A major temporary exhibition, co-curated by myself and Martha Sear.

• Landmarks: People and Places across Australia, 2011: A major permanent gallery tracing a broad history of Australia through place stories. My role included directing a team of ten curators to develop all concept and content creation, design, collections development, text and interactives.

• Journeys: Australia’s Connections with the World, 2009: A major gallery tracing Australia’s place in global flows of people, goods and ideas. Roles as for Landmarks.

• Circa, 2009. A theatrical, multi-media experience telling the story of Australia through the Museum’s collections. My roles included concept development, script editing, collections development and curatorial realisation.

• Multiple smaller curatorial and program projects.

Prahbat Playbox, Prahbat Foundation, Ahmedabad, India, 2017

As part of a UK-India design exchange, I joined a cross-cultural team developing a set of play equipment for Prahbat Foundation students living with cerebral palsy. This project included research with Foundation staff and students, collaborative concept development and design iteration, and fabrication and installation.

Moving Stories, St Pancras and Somers Town Living Centre, London, UK

Moving Stories was an exhibition exchange installation engaging St Pancras and Somers Town residents in public conversations about improving health and well-being in the neighbourhood, historically a deprived area now transitioning through the building of large medical research facilities. As part of a team of four, I undertook social and action research and designed an engaging, low cost interactive space that both provided information on wellbeing opportunities and gathered information about residents’ ways of life.

Curating the Future: Museums, communities and climate change, Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin and Kirsten Wehner (eds), Routledge, 2017

In collaboration with Jenny Newell and Libby Robin, I co-edited and contributed to Curating the Future, a substantial collection considering how museums and their communities are engaging with contemporary anthropogenic climate change. The book ranged widely across different aspects of museum practice, including examples and analyses from the Pacific, North America and Europe.