Climate Aware Creative Practices: Towards a Collective Pedagogy – The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools

This paper addresses the theme of activism in relation to environmental justice and its imbrication with pedagogical approaches to climate-aware arts practice. We introduce our newly established research project ‘Climate Aware Creative Practices’ (CACP) led by Terri Bird, Helen Hughes, and Tara McDowell, with research assistance from Lauren Burrow. CACP is engaged in understanding ways in which university arts courses can:

foster artistic, theoretical, and curatorial practices that are aware of and respond to the challenges of climate change;
centre Indigenous knowledge in climate-aware practice and pedagogy;
actively participate in climate justice, advocacy, and activism; and
understand art’s role in contributing to both issues and solutions pertaining to sustainability (i.e., the environmental impact of art and exhibition making).

This first phase of our research with CACP has been to examine the existing approaches that art schools are taking towards teaching climate-aware creative and critical practices through a series of interviews with teachers at art schools nationally and internationally. The second phase has been to form a nation-wide network of art schools committed to climate justice, through which to share research and resources, and to act collectively. Another possible longer-term outcome of the research project is to establish a charter for climate-aware creative practice, co-authored by members of the network. This paper shares CACP’s recent findings, with the aim of further promoting the idea of a national network to readers.

About the author

Helen Hughes

Helen Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Art History, Theory and Curatorial Practice at Monash University. She is a founding editor of Discipline, and on editorial boards for Memo Review, Index Journal, and Findings. She was a 2019/20 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History.

Tara McDowell

Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University. She publishes and lectures frequently, and has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her recent books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019), which was awarded the Millard Meiss Award and was a nominee for the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Curatorial projects include Take Hold of the Clouds with Fleur Watson for Open House Melbourne (2022); Shapeshifters: New Forms of Curatorial Research (2019); John Baldessari: Wall Painting (2017 and 2019); 124,908, for the 2nd Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia (2015); Nothing Beside Remains (2014); and The Land Grant: Flatbread Society with Amy Franceschini (2014).

Terri Bird

Terri Bird is an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Monash University. She works collaboratively with Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell as Open Spatial Workshop (OSW). In 2017 OSW exhibited Converging in Time at MUMA, which explored connections between materiality, histories of shaping territories and the various politics inscribed in place. In 2017 she co-authored Practising with Deleuze: design, dance, art, writing, philosophy with Suzie Attiwill, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe and Philipa Rothfield. She has also published essays in Deleuze Studies Journal, Angelaki, and Studies in Material Thinking that focus on the dynamics of forming processes and art’s material operations