Searching for the Knowledge Tree: a plant-oriented walk with Dominique Chen, Caitlin Franzmann and Libby Harward
Through walking around and trying to find our things, we gather, unlayer and feel our bodies of and as knowledge.
Wayfinding through dormancy, regeneration, return and cyclical time, we come together as an artistic and political act: a way of centering relationships to Country, unsettling colonial ways of organising land and knowledge, and to take our part in connected and perpetual futures.
We relationalise to de-institutionalise, with plants, seeds, memory, and each other.
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.
This free, in-person workshop will take place at UQ St Lucia. Numbers are limited. Participation is via EOI (closing Sunday 25th of October). Participants should be prepared to walk outdoors for all of the session. Please indicate access needs in the EOI. Further workshop details will be shared with confirmed participants.
- Thursday 12 November, 2:30pm-4:30pm | UQ St Lucia
- Participation by EOI (closing Sunday 25th of October)
Searching for the Knowledge Tree is part of Reflective Motives: Two Days with UQ Art Museum and the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network
Dominique Chen is a Gamilaraay woman, interdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator, and Senior Lecturer in Art History at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. Her research spans cultural relational creative practices, socially engaged practice, and Indigenous art and research methodologies, with a particular focus on the intersections between art, agriculture, and care for people and Country. Her work has been exhibited and presented nationally, including at The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Nexus Arts, Somerset Regional Art Gallery, The Museum of Brisbane, and at experimental arts festivals Cementa and The Unconformity. Dominique is co-founder, with Quandamooka artist Libby Harward, of The Blak Laundry—a functional pop-up laundromat, living artwork and critical conversation space by and for Indigenous artists.
Caitlin Franzmann is an artist and researcher who creates installations, performances, that explores human relationships to ecological processes and change. In response to the fast pace and sensory overstimulation of contemporary urban life, she invites people to slow down, listen, and contemplate interactions with their surroundings and with other living entities, including plants, insects, fungi, and microorganisms. She creates intimate situations for gathering, sensing, ritual, and storytelling to raise awareness of environmental issues specific to a place. She was a member of feminist art collective LEVEL (2013-2017) and a member of Ensayos (2018-2024), a collective research practice centered on extinction, human geography, coastal health and peatland conservation.
Libby Harward is a Quandamooka (Ngugi) woman from Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) and a contemporary conceptual artist working across installation, performance, video, sound and public art. Her practice interrogates colonial systems of classification, extraction and governance while foregrounding First Nations relationships to Country, knowledge systems and cultural continuity.Harward’s work has been presented nationally and internationally including at the Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), ACE Open (Adelaide), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Gropius Bau (Berlin), and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne / Norway). She is the Founder and Creative Director of Munimba-ja Arts Centre, a First Nations-led not-for-profit organisation supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists across South East Queensland through exhibitions, residencies, mentorship and professional development programs.
Image courtesy Dominique Chen, Caitlin Franzmann and Libby Harward.
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.
