Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Reflective Motives is a two-day gathering hosted by UQ Art Museum in collaboration with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network (CACP). The program is made up of four artist-led workshops facilitated by invited artists and researchers: Dominique Chen, Caitlin Franzmann, Libby Harward, Bianca Hester, Eugenia Lim, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Lleah Smith and collaborators to be announced. The keynote conversation will take place between Dr. Aunty Mary Graham and Tristen Harwood. Alongside shared meals, walks and screenings, Marilena Hewitt will collaborate with attendees and facilitators to create a responsive Reflective Motives reader, collating conversations, workshop notes, reflections and printing experiments, in a live publication to be distributed at the event’s close.

Reflective Motives brings together artists, researchers, educators and curators for two days of practice-led climate thinking. Drawing on Dr. Aunty Mary Graham’s articulation of ‘the reflective motive’ as mode of understanding and practicing relationality, this gathering offers strategies for responding to a socially and environmentally changed climate in the context of contemporary art. Reflective Motives is an invitation to engage with artists working with place, Country, matter and language. Alongside hosted workshops and talks, a breakout space will provide room for unprogrammed conversations, sharing, meals, and exchanges, as well as a platform for attendees to self-organise their own creative and collective contributions to the event.

Community Picnic Blanket Exchange

As part of Reflective Motives attendees are invited to participate in a community picnic blanket exchange. Get stitching/weaving/patching/printing! In your studio, with friends, collaborators, community groups, or in classrooms, you are invited to create a picnic blanket to bring, use and swap.

Further details to be released in September, including a full program and social story. Please register to stay up to date, including further details for session registration as some parts of this program will have limited capacity.

Reflective Motives is organised by Therese Keogh and Jacqueline Chlanda with Helen Hughes, Tara McDowell and Terri Bird from the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network

Reflective Motives is hosted by UQ Art Museum in partnership with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and by Monash Art Design and Architecture.

Upcoming sessions

Reflective Motives: Online Reading Group

25 September 2026 10:00am–6 November 2026 12:00pm

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Join us to discuss key texts by Elder, educator and philosopher Dr Aunty Mary Graham, who will be presenting the keynote conversation with Tristen Harwood at Reflective Motives in November.

Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

12 November 2026 9:00am–13 November 2026 7:00pm

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Dust of these domains: walking workshop with Bianca Hester

12 November 2026 2:30pm–4:30pm

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Dust of these domains (2023-ongoing) is a participatory walking and making workshop led by artist Bianca Hester. Developed from Hester’s reading-walking work, the workshop will explore the environmental and social forces embedded within the grounds of The University of Queensland St Lucia, on Yuggera and Turrbal Country.

Searching for the Knowledge Tree: a plant-oriented walk with Dominique Chen, Caitlin Franzmann and Libby Harward

12 November 2026 2:30pm–4:30pm

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

During this workshop long term artistic collaborators Dominique Chen, Caitlin Franzmann and Libby Harward will lead a gentle, plant-oriented walk on Country at UQ St Lucia, responding to the histories of plants, clearing and planting at this site and opening space for conversation, attention and care. Participants will be invited into reflective observation and material, occasionally culinary, encounters with the plant life on campus.

Relational Ordering: Reflective Motives Keynote Conversation with Aunty Mary Graham and Tristen Harwood

12 November 2026 5:00pm–7:00pm

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Over decades Dr Aunty Mary Graham has theorised and put forward a relational-ethical order. The relational logic developed in her political philosophy offers both a ground for imaginative possibility and everyday practices that recognise distinctiveness and autonomy as well as nourishing collective life-systems. Reflective Motives presents Relational Ordering, an in-conversation keynote between Graham and Tristen Harwood, which considers what Graham’s political philosophy asks of us, the possibilities it opens, and forms of collective life it might yet enable.

Murmurations: a dawn bird walk and reading group with Eugenia Lim and Coen Hird

13 November 2026 5:30am–9:00am

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Beginning with the sunrise, Murmurations asks us to step outside our rhythms and into the temporalities of birds. Meeting the dawn chorus, we begin with an early morning “birdwatching” walk (with the offering to draw, listen, and commune with the birds on Yuggera and Turrbal Country).

Salty Dog: a workshop exploring material, method and metaphor with Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and Lleah Smith

13 November 2026 10:00am–12:15pm

in Reflective Motives: Two Days with the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network and UQ Art Museum

Led by long-term collaborators Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and Lleah Smith, Salty Dog follows salt through bodies, landscapes, memories and acts of disruption. Inspired by Bronwyn’s encounter with the mangroves at UQ St Lucia in 2023, the workshop explores salt as material, method and metaphor.