Grounding Rural Practice

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From 2020-24, a farm in the western district of Victoria became our home and workshop, and for a number of artists a space to take up time exploring their practice in relationship with the local environment. Our visiting artists shared their findings with the broader community through presentations, readings, open studios and workshops.

Our rural artist residencies and public art programs leant heavily into our work on social resilience, and many of them also tied in to Dining Room Tales. Basing our practice on the land in this period was our own response to challenging times, and embracing the hyper-locality of our practice through the cyclical span of the land could not have been more vital.

Contact us to find out more about our ground breaking grounding rural practice for artists.

Rural/International

After jam-packed years sharing our practice with communities across rural Victoria and South Australia, we are now doubling down on the next phase of our strategic vision: forging links between our local rural context and rural/remote contexts abroad.

We are sharing locally made Dining Room Tales work (from rural Aus) with rural/remote communities internationally, and developing new works with artists from rural/remote contexts abroad, who we will then bring home for extended engagement down under.

Through all this, we continue to deepen understandings of small community activation through art, the impact of filtering diverse knowledge inputs into slow social settings, and connecting hyper-local action across global distance.

This is our global-local; small communities, leaning into each other from afar.

Artists in Residence 2022-23

A farm in the western district of Victoria becomes the home and workshop for an artist invited to take up time and space to explore their practice in relationship with the local environment. The artist shares their practice with the greater community through presentation, reading, open studio or workshop.

Dining Room Tales in Community 2021-24

Across our pilot phase we have shared Dining Room Tales performance events in fourteen locations across the western district, engaging ten communities--Lismore, Camperdown, Derrinallum, Skipton, Tesbury, Darlington, Cobden, Jan Juc, Nirranda, Tarrington--in seventeen creative actions of social resilience.