Reclaiming Tomorrow: artists' visions for a regenerative future

Date: Friday, 19th September 2025

Time: 1:00pm - 2:00pm

Location:

ARTSPACE, 43/51 Cowper Wharf Roadway, Woolloomooloo

Artists have the capacity to question dominant narratives, disrupt systems, define new stories, envisage better futures, and reconceptualise our relationship with the world. At a time of poly-crisis this is needed more than ever. In this panel we explore examples of art works and methodologies that offer a reframing of our relationship with the planet and one another. We ask what would happen if artists played a role in co-creating living cities—not relegated to beautification, but essential agents in rethinking how we live, relate, and regenerate, part of a natural, living system?

Chair

Kate Goodwin, Independent Curator, Adjunct Professor, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney

Speaker

Anne Loxley, Curator and Executive Director, ACE

Dr Jonathan Jones Wiradjuri / Kamilaroi artist, curator and researcher, Jumbunna Institute UTS 

Cat  Jones, Artist, writer and researcher

Professor Liza Lim  AM, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

Speaker Bios

Kate Goodwin is a curator, writer and educator working at the intersection of art, architecture and city making. She is an Adjunct Professor at USYD and member of the Tin Sheds Gallery advisory board. She was awarded a Byera Hadley Travel Fellowship to study the architecture of Aboriginal art centres in the Northern Territory. She was Heinz Curator and Head of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2003-2021) where she curated exhibitions including Sensing Spaces (2014), and Renzo Piano (2018) and Inside Heatherwick Studio which toured East Asia (2015-16). She was awarded a RIBA Honorary Fellowship in 2016.

Anne Loxley is an award-winning curator who specialises in collaborating with artists and communities to creatively address significant issues. In 2020 she joined ACE as Executive Director. Previously Anne was Senior Curator, C3West, for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, (2011-2019) where she developed innovative ways for artists to collaborate with communities, businesses and non-arts organisations, to address important concerns. Anne is Deputy Chair of the City of Sydney’s Public Art Advisory Panel, and a member of these organisations: Western Sydney Arts Alliance Working Group, Western Sydney Women’s Leadership Network – Art and Culture and the Sydney Cultural Network council. With Blair French, she co-edited Civic Actions: Artists’ Practices Beyond the Museum (2017).

Jonathan Jones is an artist and researcher of the Wiradyuri and Kamilaroi Nations of southeast Australia. He works closely with community to create a range of projects that talk to both the historical and contemporary. His projects are grounded in research and work with local Aboriginal Elders and community members to tell local stories from the southeast region. Jonathan has exhibited nationally and internationally, and in 2018 received the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in the field of visual arts. Jonathan is a researcher at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University of Technology Sydney.

Cat Jones is an award-winning artist, writer and researcher whose work explores internal and external landscapes and processes of transformation towards change in thinking. Her artworks and immersive experiences range from performance, text, and audio walks to illusion, live dining experiences and olfactory art. Her writing encompasses creative, critical, and scientific publication. She is the recipient of a Creative Australia Fellowship focused on human plant relationships; ANAT Synapse alumni and artist affiliate of Sansom Institute Body in Mind investigating neuroscience of illusions and chronic pain; a Create NSW Performing Arts and Music Fellowship exploring medicine and feminist futures; and the Australia Council’s 2021 Emerging and Experimental Art Award. Previously she was Artistic Director of PACT and Co-Director of Electrofringe Festival. Cat is a Creative Industries Resident, MAAS Powerhouse, Ultimo.

Professor Liza Lim  AM is an Australian composer, educator and researcher who leads an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship focussed on Music, Ecology and Climate Justice. Recent compositions such as ‘Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time’ for ensemble, gestural performer and video and the improvisation template ‘Calling the Ancestral River’ explore time, flow and practices of attention around a living river being and the ways in which we ourselves are rivered. Commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Lim is Professor of Composition and the Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.