CREATE OnCon #9 - Culture and Sustainability

On Tuesday 14 September, the CREATE Centre will host the ninth in our series of OnCons, curated by CREATE Member and HDR Huddler, Assoc. Prof. Mary Ann Hunter from the University of Tasmania. Mary Ann has engaged a incredible lineup of cultural and sustainability experts from a wide range of backgrounds to provide us with what will undoubtedly be an incredible OnCon.

The OnCon will feature Ruth Langford, who will be presenting "How ancient Indigenous cultures understand how arts practices support mental and physical well-Being in our modern world" and will focus on connecting to the Spirit of Place and Ancestral linage for healing. We will also hear from Deborah Wace and learn about her recent work "The Sartorial Naturalist". Deborah will showcase her new precious flora designs on silk, linen, and wallpaper, inspired by the wild Flora of Tasmania and the Herbarium collections which she researched in France, Italy and the UK during her Churchill Fellowship in 2018. Finally, Sacha Kagan will deliver a presentation entitled "Complexity, Imaginaries and approaching procedural sustainability through art", which integrates artistic and arts-based learning and knowing, as a practice of qualitative complexity, within a multi-dimensional understanding of sustainability as a procedural search process seeking convivial responses to the polycrisis of unsustainable development. This talk will highlight the need to critically investigate social imaginaries with creative imagination.

PRESENTERS

RUTH LANGFORD

With a diverse background in the Arts/Environmental/ Social/ Justice/ Youth Work and Indigenous Medicines Therapy, Ruth Langford divides her time into projects that reflect her passion for uniting ancient traditions with contemporary innovation. Drawing upon the cultural knowledge of her Yorta Yorta linage and the Aboriginal community of Tasmania where she was born and continues to live with her family, Ruth has gained a reputation as a capable facilitator and coordinator of effective capacity building programs, which have as their guiding principles, Connection to Country, Culture and to the Sacred.

DEBORAH WACE

Deborah Wace is a fabric designer, ecological activist, plant advocate and professional printmaker from Tasmania. Her artwork is highly detailed and intimate, a window into the botany of Tasmanian Native Orchids, Rainforest and Buttongrass and Marine plant communities. She is a graduate from Canberra School of Arts (1988) with a Bachelor Degree in Visual Arts, Printmaking. Drawing on her thirty years of plant collecting, her significant personal herbarium has been fully digitised. Combined with dry point and monoprint original artwork, these images are then layered using computer software to create her rich complex botanical designs. She prints digitally onto silk and other fabric developing designs for cloth, wallpaper and limited edition fine art and also teaches printmaking from her 9th floor studio at 65 Murray St Hobart, Tasmania.

SACHA KAGAN

Dr. habil. Sacha Kagan is a habilitated member of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, where he worked as Research Associate from 2005 to 2018. He was the founding coordinator of the international network "Cultura21: Cultural Fieldworks for Sustainability" from 2006 to 2016, board member of the Research Network 'Sociology of the Arts' at the European Sociological Association (ESA) from 2011 to 2019 (Coordinator 2015-2017), and received the "Basarab Nicolescu Transdisciplinary Science and Engineering Award" 2018 from the Academy for Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies (ATLAS). Dr. Kagan, whose research foci are on the arts, culture, urban development and queer sexual cultures in relation to the cultural dimension of sustainability, intervened at over 130 events in 33 countries, authored over 70 publications, directed 3 documentary films, and contributed in various roles to a dozen art projects.

MARY ANN HUNTER

Mary Ann is Assistant Dean, Transformation (Learning and Teaching), and Associate Head, Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania (lutrawita). Alongside national and international consultancy work in cultural policy development, mentoring, evaluation and curriculum design, Mary Ann has produced feature programs for ABC Radio National and was coordinator for meenah mienne, an arts-based mentoring and education initiative founded by Elders and artists supporting Aboriginal young people in the justice system in Tasmania. Her interests focus on the role of the arts and creative practice in education and applied settings, initiating projects such as Curious Schools, a teacher-led approach to making creativity visible in schools, and the Springer publication, Arts, Education and Sustainability: Emerging Practice for a Changing World. Mary Ann is currently co-convenor of global online learning exchanges with IMPACT, a Mellon Foundation-supported initiative bringing together arts practitioners, educators, and policymakers in shared conversation about the nexus of arts, culture and conflict transformation. Mary Ann holds numerous teaching and research awards, including an Australian Philip Parsons Prize for Performance as Research, and is thrilled to be on the Advisory Board of the Create Centre.