A collaboration between Psychology for a Safe Climate, Sydney Environment Institute, CLIMARTE, and the Knowledge Translation Strategic Platform of Maridulu Budyari Gumal SPHERE.
Image: ‘domain’ by Rod Gray, 2022. Ink and acrylic on paper for CLIMARTE TREE project
During an exhibition of CLIMARTE’S TREE project: https://climarte.org/project/tree/
This workshop serves as an opportunity to gather; psychologists, artists, activists and the trees of Melbourne, to tell of our symbiotic narratives and to make art together as a way of healing and connecting as we face the climate reality.
Inspired by CLIMARTE’s TREE Project, which is based on the City of Melbourne’s Urban Forest program, this workshop will explore our own lives with trees as we face a dangerously warming world. It will respond to artworks in CLIMARTE’s TREE exhibition, as well as offerings from the general public to Melbourne’s treasured trees.
In honouring the more-than-human beings that support our life, we hope our collective work will help to make sense of our fraught relationships with the natural world. While giving important space to grieve, we also hope to inspire hope and action.
To ensure that it is as accessible as possible and provides a legacy, the work we create together will be filmed, and projected onto trees, creating further effects across the arbor-human network. No prior art-making experience is required, and we will supply materials for both collage and drawing on the day. We will begin with a short talk about CLIMARTE’s TREE Project and the Urban Forest Program that inspired it, followed by conversations between participants about their experiences with trees, in both small groups and then shared with the larger group. The group will then reflect together on their own human-arbor stories while developing the work together.