Description

This facilitated drawing workshop introduces contemporary ecological research through art, design and scientific practices. Participants will be introduced to a sensitive, more-than-human approach to designing and inhabiting our cities in response to a changing climate. The workshop will include a talk by an ecologist, a guided walking tour through CERES Community Park and a drawing exercise – culminating in a collectively designed in-situ exhibition of the drawings which respond to the participants’ discoveries on how water, air, soils, bacteria, insects, birds and their own bodies, amongst others, are interrelated in an infinitely complex entangled ecology.

Contributors

Saskia Schut’s creative research works at the intersection of art and landscape architecture. Employing sensory, collective and site-based methods to reimagine ways in which design can address the complexities of a rapidly changing climate.

Dr Andy Miller is a practice-based design researcher and academic in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT. His practice explores responding to climate change through ecological feel-thinking, ways of making and alternative ways of living and being in a more-than-human world. Andy has collaborated on various design projects and publications both locally and internationally.

Dr Angela Foley is a non-Indigenous educator committed to interculturally informed eco-literacies for Country, age-appropriate education, and creative, place-based learning through a/r/tography (art/research/teaching). She folds together opportunities for decolonial inquiry with Indigenous perspectives and creative inquiry with an array of partners including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, Biennale of Sydney 2022, and across the early years to tertiary sector.

Presented by School of Architecture and Urban Design – RMIT University.

Open Nature is part of ,Melbourne Design Week 2022, an initiative of the Victorian Government, Creative Victoria in collaboration with the NGV.

Image: Swampgut imaginings by Andy Miller and Saskia Schut.