Practicing in Times of Earth: A Conversation about Art, Research, and Geology with Bianca Hester, Robert Andrew, Sam Spurr and Therese Keogh
Join artists Bianca Hester and Robert Andrew, architecture researcher Sam Spurr, and CACP member and Reflective Motives organiser Therese Keogh, for a conversation tracing lines between geologies of Country, art, architecture, and extraction.
The historical sandstone buildings of University of Queensland provide a backdrop for a discussion into material colonialities of knowledge institutions, deep temporalities of rock, and social compositions made in and from the earth. Discussing walking, sculpture, language and collaboration, panellists will engage a collective inquiry into the roles creative practice and practice-led research can play in speculating and creating geological encounters beyond those of extraction.
This talk is presented as part of Reflective Motives: Two Days with UQ Art Museum and the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network. To register your attendance and receive event updates, sign up via the main event page here. For those unable to attend in person, we are offering online livestreaming for all talks. To receive the livestream link, please select "Attend Online" ticket type.
Robert Andrew is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist and descendant of the Yawuru people, whose Country encompasses the lands and waters of Rubibi (Broome), Western Australia. Working across time-based sculpture and installation, he has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at PICA (2023) and MONA (2022). His work has also been included in the Biennale of Sydney (2022), Aichi Triennale (2025) and Yokohama Triennale (2020). His work is held in major Australian public collections. Andrew holds a Doctor of Visual Arts and completed postdoctoral research at Griffith University in 2024.
Bianca Hester’s practice explores entanglements of materiality, place and the forces of ecological change across timescales, producing expansive artworks that cultivate new modes of attentive, relational embodiment amid the pressures of climate crisis. Employing situational methodologies – she combines experimental fieldwork, engaging the geologic record, site-writing, sculptural production, collaboration and performed actions – to develop projects that unpack the material conditions of specific places. This results in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants. She has exhibited widely within Australia and internationally. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art & Design, UNSW Sydney.
Therese Keogh is an artist and writer living on Awabakal Country. Therese works collaboratively through writing and research projects and is invested in collective imaginaries as a process of creating more just relations with lands, matter, and people. Therese’s collaborative work includes facilitating ‘Magnetic Topographies’ with Clare Britton and Kenzee Patterson—looking to collective pedagogies of place—and ‘Written Together’—a shared workshop for non-normative writing in arts research. Therese holds a BFA from Monash University, an MFA from Sydney College of the Arts, an MA Geography from Queen Mary University of London, and a PhD at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Dr Sam Spurr is an architectural theorist and creative practitioner working across architecture, art, and critical forms of world-making. She is Associate Professor of Architecture at The University of Newcastle, Australia. She has taught across architecture, design, and fine arts for more than twenty years. Her research and creative practice examine architecture’s relationship to extraction, energy, ecological systems, and the socio-political conditions of contemporary Australia. She is co-founder of the Global Extraction Observatory (GEO) with Dr Eduardo Kairuz, a research collective that investigates energy production and resource extraction through creative practice, exhibitions, scholarship, and public engagement. In 2025, they were the Planetary Transitions Artists in Residence at the Research Institute for Sustainability – Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), where they researched the spatial and cultural dimensions of energy transition and lithium extraction. Recent GEO publications include Repair Stories (Perimeter Editions, 2024) and “Orthofeudalism: An Introduction” (Anthropological Forum, 2026). Working across theoretical writing, artistic production, and spatial representation, her work brings architectural discourse into dialogue with feminist thought, ecological knowledge, and the contested landscapes of extraction.
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.
Program Schedule:
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.
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.
