Join us for the Friends of Merri Creek Annual General Meeting, in-person or online via Teams (link provided to registered attendees closer to the date).

We will hear from guest speaker Kate Hill, Head of Ceramics at the School of Art and Design, ANU on her PhD project, Digging: Handling the layers of material politics through the processing of local clay soils, which included research focussed on the merri merri/Merri Creek.

The talk will be followed by brief AGM business. There will be opportunities to mingle over nibbles and drinks and reflect on a year of work caring for the Merri Creek catchment.

More about the AGM guest speaker

Kate Hill is an artist based in Kamberi/Canberra on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Land. Her practice-based research explores an expanded ceramics practice, incorporating the mediums of sculpture, video, sound and social practice to investigate the entanglements of clay and other geological materials with the politics of place. Kate is the current Head of Ceramics at the School of Art and Design, ANU and a board member of Plumwood Mountain. Kate was a committee member of Friends of Merri Creek from 2020-2024.

Kate will discuss her recent PhD project Digging: handling the layers of material politics through the excavation and processing of local clay-soils (conferred in 2024 with Monash University), which investigated the multiple layers of encounters that intersect and circulate through material-based creative practices. Specifically, it drew on the central component of her ceramics-based practice—clay soils—to consider the intersections of the politics of place and their relations to extractivism and productionism. A large portion of her research focused on the ecology of the merri merri/Merri Creek on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Land, of which clay soils are significant. Her PhD investigated these soils in relation to a host of determinate factors – unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Land, water, grasslands species of the volcanic plains, as well as toxicants and litter. The entanglement of these factors informed multiple creative outcomes which Kate will also discuss, including a suite of artistic works for a gallery exhibition in Brunswick, and several socially-engaged events on a section of the merri merri/Merri Creek in Westgarth.