Events and learning

Our 2026 program groundwork honours five decades of art, artists, education and community at 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. 

Accompany Marilena Hewitt in a collective publishing experiment, creating a live response to Reflective Motives. Here, publishing is a relational act, an act of care, listening, tending and testing. It’s a process of learning together, from and with the Lands on which we gather, communing with critters, and calling for justice with our whole bodies. Through chatting, stamping, drawing, and reflecting, a publication will emerge across the two days of Reflective Motives, to be distributed over dinner on the final evening.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.