• This project was seeded by City of Melbourne through ArtPlay’s New Ideas Lab 2018 / It has appeared at: Sydney Opera House, Hyphen Gallery, Dream Big – South Australia Museum, Melbourne Knowledge Week, Gertrude St Projection Festival, Kyneton Town Hall, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Art for Social Change Exhibition, Trentham Primary School  /  Video by Teagan Glenane

WILD CITY EXHIBITION & WORKSHOP SERIES

Wild City is an arts based workshop for children where we consider wild animals as citizens in urban spaces.
The project is concerned with providing an experience for learning, making and creative expression through a series of workshops for children that are based on real environmental issues. In the workshops, I provide a miniature sculptural city and introduced children to ideas of human and animal architecture and show hybrid examples of co-existence. The children then draw, plant and construct their ideas onto the mini city turning it into a lush green space that includes animal habitat. The city becomes a hybrid of human and animal habitat. The children’s work is curated into a collaborative exhibition piece where children’s ideas about creating animal habitats in urban spaces and cities are expressed. The video below captured the first series of workshops with descriptions of what the children made and why it was important to them.

I was able to engage 15 Melbourne based urban ecologists, researchers and conservationists in the creation and delivery of this project. This clarified ideas on what challenges wild animals encounter in ever expanding human landscapes, and how these issues are currently being tackled. These specialists helped me to further my research in urban co-existence with the wild animal and connect it to the specifics of Melbourne. Many of them actively participated in the workshops with children, delivering interesting talks on species that live in the area and what they require as habitat.

Please contact me if your school or community group wishes to hire/engage with this work.

Wild City won the peoples choice award  in the ‘Art for Social Change’ exhibition at Incinerator Gallery

Here is a link to Wild City’s appearance at Boroondara Arts  or watch the longer video (shown in the ArtPlay gallery)   Wild City Video – 7 mins