Moving | EDUCATION AND LEARNING

All M&G NSW touring exhibitions are accompanied by an Exhibition Information Pack, which includes artwork lists, promotional details, installation guides, marketing templates, an Education Kit, Public Programming scaffold and Mediation Handbook, among other useful details to assist with a successful exhibition. These packs are modified and adapted to suit the needs of individual tours.

A Mediation Handbook will be developed for Moving utilising accessible language describing practice and exhibition themes. The handbook will incorporate information, links, further reading and suggestions to help support staff and volunteers to relate to and speak about the themes of the show with confidence. It will also include a Glossary of key terms such as: Cultural identity, Performance Art, Lived Experience, Societal Memory, Durational Work, Connection to Place, Feminist Art, Intersectionality and Colonisation.

The Education Kit will be developed by Goulburn Regional Gallery’s Education Officer as a professional development opportunity. It will offer curriculum linked educational opportunities for primary, secondary and tertiary students and teachers across the subject streams of Visual Arts, English, Visual Literacy, Geography, Creative Writing, Environmental Science, Drama and Society and Culture.

The Education Kit will provide opportunities for teaching staff to ensure that students ‘receive an education that includes culture, creativity, humanities and the arts’ (Revive Principle IV). It will invite critical and creative engagement with the exhibition and artists’ practices with a focus on water and its links with the human experience through an exploration of rituals, feelings, connections, identity and grief. The Education Kit will offer activity-based learning experiences that involve drawing, listening, collage, design, assemblage, storytelling, writing, performance, painting and printing.

For tertiary or senior high school student visiting the exhibition, there could be a scaffold for focusing on the evolution and history of video and performance-based art; prominent Australian video performance artists such as David Rosetzky and Drew Pettifer; links with early collectors such as the National Gallery of Victoria; links with international artistic movements and institutions; and Australian academic platforms for this artform such as Monash University and RMIT University.

The following links are some recent examples of Education Kits and Mediation Handbooks below:

Moving | ENGAGEMENT TOOLS

To promote audience engagement with the stories and themes of the exhibition as well as the key REVIVE pillar of ‘making sure our stories connect with people at home and abroad’ (Revive Pillar V), a range of engagement tools will accompany Moving. These tools will allow audiences to connect both within the Gallery spaces and beyond, across multiple mediums, addressing the REVIVE principle that ‘Australian stories are seen and heard, regardless of platform’ (Revive Principle VIII).

These resources aim to broaden the possibility for connection with multiple audience segments and include:

• A video resource – this would include artist interviews undertaken by Curator Yvette Dal Pozzo, to provide descriptive and creative insights into the themes of the show and the works on display. It will be available for venues to use in the gallery and online and will also include transcripts of the audio to increase access.
• Room Sheet – this would be a specifically designed free room sheet available for audiences to take away, including images of the show and longer form text or an essay.
• Accessible Audio Tour by an Audio Description Specialist, available via QR codes in-gallery and online.
• Accessible Content with large font labels.
• Venue appropriate bespoke cultural engagement linking with local First Nations communities and histories as well as voices from varied cultural and societal perspectives.

Moving | PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

Public programming at tour venues will provide broad opportunities for ‘all Australians, regardless of language, literacy, geography, age or education’ to ‘access and participate in arts and culture’ (Revive Principle II).

Moving offers venues and their audiences’ opportunities to connect with the work of high-calibre artists, and deeply engage with the ideas and practices presented. The exhibition includes a range of contemporary themes that will appeal to broad audiences. Although the overriding theme is water – as subject medium and metaphor – the exhibition also connects water to memory, emotion, performance, human perception, renewal, rituals and identity. Key themes can be further expanded to include a range of prompts for future public programming:

• Water – human psychological and physical relationship; capacity to heal, erode, propel; transience and persistence; physicality such as rain, droplets, floods, drips, rivers, ripples, oceans, lakes, flow
• Memory – sentimental attachments, collecting, connection to place, societal memory
• Emotion – feelings, grief, pride, longing
• Performance – body, presence, voice, gesture, communication, time, duration, space, audience
• Human perception – sensory, language, translation, sound, listening, rhythm
• Renewal – birth, healing, nature, cycles, pregnancy
• Rituals – religious, cultural, personal
• Identity – cultural strength, superheros, symbols, First Nations identity, Queer identity, cultural identity, feminism

These themes and subthemes are a great starting point for developing public programming ideas and relating them to the issues, interests and histories of local communities.

The wide range of artist’s practices and skills further enhances the possibilities for public programming. Moving incorporates photography, film making, animation, textiles and painting. Workshops utilising these mediums could be a public programming focus for venues – either led by the featured artists or local artists working with these mediums.  The artists themselves also have particular skills: David Greenhalgh is an experienced presenter as well as a curator; Jodie Whalen is an educator and animator; Lotte Consalvo and Ida Sophia specialise in performance; Hannah Bronte works with textiles, video and performance, political banner art and is also a DJ; Wade Marynowsky is inventive, works in robotics and is a university lecturer; Dennis Golding has experience running children’s cape making workshops, particularly for First Nations Children and is also a mural artist.

Moving | ENGAGING WITH AUDIENCES

M&G NSW works with venues to develop public programs tailored to their audiences and needs. Moving lends itself to rich programming opportunities and engagement with communities interested in multisensory tours and workshops, talks, art experiences for disability groups, artist-led making activities, animation and film making experiences, all powerful ways to bring audiences into the gallery and to build social cohesion and community ownership of cultural spaces such as regional and public galleries. Some examples of public programs to engage with differing target audiences might include:

Early Childhood

• Sponge jellyfish with tentacles made by blowing watercolour droplets with a straw
• 3D collage fish tank fridge magnets with an ocean themed story time
• Parent/carer baby tour of Moving followed by sensory play and gallery tummy time
• Baby footprints transformed into fish illustrations
• Outdoor sensory splashing/bubble blowing for babies inspired by Ida Sophia
• Rainy-day scene spray bottle painting for toddlers and their carers inspired by David Greenhalgh

Primary School Age

• 3D beach scenes – canvas beach base, acrylic paint and polymer clay people, animals and objects
• Scuba Dive in Paint workshop – underwater scenes
• Cape making with Dennis Golding
• First Nations artist-led or Elder-led environmental sustainability workshop – Caring for Country

Multisensory tours for early childhood/primary Disability Groups

• Sensory liquid floor tile in front of Whalen’s work
• Ring a bell in front of Consalvo’s work
• Squish kinetic sand in zip lock bags in front of Bronte’s work
• Inspired by Marynowsky’s work – create underwater creatures using plasticine and seashells

Video Art Experience for Secondary Schools – featuring artist Jodie Whelan

• Critical analysis of work and Q&A with Jodie Whelan
• Footage and Sound Scavenger Hunt in small groups (students to collect snippets of footage and sound in outdoor environment)
• Group footage and sound edit – focus on layering using free downloadable software such as CapCut or iMovie
• View and review of works – peer, staff and Whalen feedback to students – what is interesting and successful within each work?

Adults and Teenagers

• Charcoal drawing activity inspired by water e.g. expressive crashing waves, realistic glossy water droplets.
• Guest artist – watercolour monotype printing
• Decorate your own t-shirt inspired by Katthy Cavaliere
• Film and animation workshops
• Explore community identity and connection to place through found objects

Moving | TOUR VENUES AND REACH

Moving | TOURING OUTCOMES AND IMPACT

For each of our tours we produce comprehensive reporting for artists, funders and partners – these highlight the engagement and reach outcomes for touring – for example in the touring report for OCCURRENT AFFAIR

OCCURRENT AFFAIR | proppaNOW – Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Richard Bell, Megan Cope, Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey, and Laurie Nilsen.

OCCURRENT AFFAIR was a major exhibition featuring works by Brisbane-established Aboriginal artist collective proppaNOW. Established in 2003, proppaNOW is one of Australia’s leading cultural collectives, exploring the politics of Aboriginal art and culture, and provoking, subverting and re-thinking what it means to be a ‘contemporary Aboriginal artist’.

A Goulburn Regional Art Gallery and Museums & Galleries of NSW touring exhibition, curated by Yvette Dal Pozzo.