Come with Wet Feet, Leave with Wet Hair: Summer Workshop

Come with Wet Feet, Leave with Wet Hair: Summer Workshop
Minjerribah-Moorgumpin Elders in Council, Megan Cope, Rachel O’Reilly   

Come with Wet Feet, Leave with Wet Hair is the third in a series of multi-day gatherings convened around contemporary art and cultural work, First Nations knowledges and multi-disciplinary critical climate thinking. Grounded on Minjerribah, Quandamooka Country, this workshop brings together Elders, regional arts workers, artists, researchers and students for three days of conversation, practice, relationality and reflection. 

The gathering will open with a Welcome to Country and workshop with the Minjerribah-Moorgumpin Elders in Council, positioning participants in relation to the situated histories of the island alongside pressing contemporary concerns for Quandamooka Country. Over the next two days, artists Megan Cope (Quandamooka people) and Rachel O’Reilly will lead workshops that expand the space of artistic practice in relation to the environment. Asking what art can do in a time of crisis, these sessions form deep engagements with recent major works by each artist.  

Discussing the concept and ethos of her living sculpture Kinyingarra Guwinyanba (2022–ongoing), Megan will reflect on how the work leverages artistic practice to care for Country and help rehabilitate its important coastal ecosystems. Participants will take part in a hands-on workshop, during which they will learn about the important role kinyingarra (oysters) play in the ecosystem and the histories, knowledges and futures of kinyingarra on Minjerribah. 

Rachel’s workshop will draw out the possibilities of a dialogical, research-led artistic practice, focusing on expanded concepts of infrastructure – both colonial-modern (pipelines, ports), and planetary (groundwater, forests, weather systems) – on stolen land. She will reflect on art's role in questioning institutions, law and policy, and the impact of these things on our understandings of place. This workshop includes a screening of her new video installation NORTHERN WATERS (2025), addressing the complex aftermaths of the successful 1960s ‘Save the Reef’ campaign. 

This free Summer Workshop will take place on from the 4th to the 6th of February, 2026 at the Moreton Bay Research Station, Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) on Quandamooka Country.  

• Participation is limited and by EOI here. Please note that EOI's close on Sunday 14th December at 11.59pm.
• EOI outcomes will be communication via email by 5pm on Friday 19th December.
• Participants will be required to attend for the duration of the three day program. 
• Participants should come ready to share about their own work and interests, and there will be a small number of required readings distributed ahead of time for discussion over the course of the workshop. 
• All accommodation and food costs are covered, but transport to the workshop will be the participants own responsibility.  
• If you are based in SEQ and require travel assistance, please indicate on the EOI form.  
• One travel bursary to the value of $600 will be available to support a regionally based arts worker to attend the workshop.  

For any queries regarding the Summer Workshop please email Jacqueline Chlanda at j.chlanda@uq.edu.au 

The Minjerribah-Moorgumpin Elders-in-Council Corporation was founded in 1993 as a cultural organisation committed to preserving, recording, communicating , and teaching the culture of the Goenpul [Goren-pul], Ngugi [Noog-ee] and Noonuccal [Noo-knuckle] First Nations People of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and Moorgumpin (Moreton Island). 

Megan Cope Quandamooka people. Born 1982, Meanjin (Brisbane. Lives and works in Meanjin (Brisbane) and Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island).Megan Cope is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Recent solo exhibitions include Water is life, Bayside Gallery, Brighton, Victoria (2024); Mirigan/Star in the Sky and the South East Wind, Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2024); and Unbroken Connections, Redland Art Gallery, Redlands (2022); Fractures & Frequencies, UNSW 8 Galleries, University of NSW, Sydney (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Soils, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2024); Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, Oceanside Museum of Art, California, United States of America (2024); We Are Electric, The University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum, Brisbane (2023); proppaNOW: There Goes the Neighbourhood!, Vera List Center, New York City, United States of America (2023); Busan Biennale: We, On The Rising Wave, Busan, South Korea (2022); and Reclaim the Earth, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2022). Her work is held in collections including Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; National Gallery Australia, Canberra; Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and Musées de la Civilisation, Canada. 

Rachel O’Reilly is a settler Australian artist/writer/researcher b. Gladstone,  QLD. She was film, video, new media curator at GoMA/Australian  Cinematheque, has an MA (Cum Laude) in Media and Culture from the  University of Amsterdam, was a writer/artist in residence at Jan van Eyck  Academie and inaugural Fellow in Ecology at Sandburg Institute. From 2014-21 Rachel taught ‘How to Do Things with Theory ’at the Dutch Art Institute, NL and edited Theory on Demand for the Institute for Network Cultures. Her artistic work has been presented at Haus der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin; E-Flux, New York; Tate Liverpool; Museum of Yugloslav History, Belgrade; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Jakarta Biennale; Qalandiya International, Jerusalem; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil. Curatorial/editorial collaborations include The Leisure Class (GoMA), Moving Images of Speculation (NL), ‘Planetary Records’, Contour Biennale (BE), EX-EMBASSY.com (DE) and Feminist Takes (Sternberg Press). She writes with Jelena Vesic on Non-Aligned Movement legacies, with Danny Butt on artistic autonomy in settler colonial conditions, and edits with Aboriginal contemporary artist Richard Bell. Her longterm project, The Gas Imaginary (2013-2021) used poetry, drawing, installation, essays and moving image media to explore the difference of unconventional gas (fracking) from colonial modern mining regimes, in dialogue with Gooreng Gooreng elders and frontline activists, culminating in www.infractionsdocumentary.net.  NORTHERN WATERS (2025) is her third major moving image commission.