Salty Dog: a workshop exploring material, method and metaphor with Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and Lleah Smith
Welcome to a workshop where salt becomes our shared material and guide: a trace of water, a bodily inheritance, a preservative, an irritant, a boundary and a way of staying in relation. 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.
An aerial image of solar evaporation ponds in the Atacama Desert provides a visual point of departure. From above, the ponds resemble painted swatches—fields of colour held within an immense landscape. It offers a way to move between the intimate and the planetary, the close-up and the faraway.
This is an opportunity to learn from two leading curatorial and pedagogical thinkers in our region, and is intended for artists, arts workers, researchers and students, or anyone interested in material and conceptual modes of environmental thinking. Participants will follow a personal ‘salty moment’ through sensory experience, conversation, writing and collective making. In small groups, they will share stories, identify points of connection and create salt mixtures, small material salty archives that hold traces of place, intimacy and story.
This free, in-person workshop will take place at UQ St Lucia. It finishes at 12:15pm, meeting the hide tide of Maiwar (the Brisbane River). Numbers are limited. Participation is via EOI (closing Sunday 25th of October). Please indicate access needs in the EOI. Further workshop details will be shared with confirmed participants.
- Friday 13 November, 10:00-12:15 | UQ St Lucia
- Participation by EOI (closing Sunday 25th of October)
Salty Dog is part of Reflective Motives: Two Days with UQ Art Museum and the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network
Dr Bronwyn Bailey‑Charteris is an Australian‑Swedish curator, writer and researcher, based on Dharug and Gundungurra Country, working at the confluence of contemporary art, ecology and technology. Through curatorial practice and research, she traces new vocabularies for life in planetary crisis, with a particular attunement to water. She is a Senior Research Associate at UNSW within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and author of The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (Routledge, 2024).
Lleah Smith was born on Cabrogal Country, Australia, and is based in Ngāmotu, Aotearoa. She is Head of Public Practice + Creative Enquiry at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and Puke Ariki Museum and Libraries. Smith works across pedagogy x socially engaged art x the curatorial, positioning fermentation as practice, metaphor, methodology and method for thinking and learning. She creates spaces where productive agitation can fizz, funk and flourish. She has made significant contributions to the Asia-Pacific over the past 12 years and is a current PhD candidate at Monash University.
Image credit: NASA Expedition 19 crew, Solar Evaporation Ponds, Atacama Desert, 2009. Courtesy NASA/Wikimedia Commons.
About 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.
