The Minto Cats

The Minto Cats by Katie Reid - A portrait of the Suitcase Royale as cats.

I have been writing notes on the great book The Relationship Is The Project the chapter by Rosie Dennis on creating communities made me feel like the start of the year was so long ago!!!

In February of this year, I was sitting in Dukes Coffee on Flinders lane squeezed in between the classic Melbourne crowd waiting to have a chat with Rosie Dennis. Rosie is the CEO and Artistic Director of Bleached* Festival and was in Melbourne for APAM.

I first met Rosie back in The Suitcase Royale days, we worked on a project with her in Minto, NSW, around 2010 I think. It was a wild week. We were given a cafe in a near-abandoned shopping centre and were tasked with engaging the local community in some way.

We had a bunch of plans that all went out the window as soon as we began to have conversations with people who lived there, they just wanted their cafe back! So we fired up the coffee machine and got into it! I still have two paintings from a local artist called Katie Reid that I cherish. That was a project that really shaped my understanding of creating work in a community that is not your own.

I hope that Rosie and I can hang out and chat in a cafe sometime in the future!

Young and Eager by Katie Reid

Melton Growth Project Creative Development

Emily Tomlins and I started our creative journey on the ‘Growth Project’ for Melton Council. This is a very large community collaboration project that will culminate in an interactive installation in October 2021.

It was great to start throwing ideas around and talking about the big themes of the project including urban sprawl, community connection and agency.

After a morning of throwing any and every Idea out into the zoom-room, we settled on some questions that we can pose to the participants that will begin the conversation for the project: What do you like about your area now, and what do you imagine it will look like in the future.

We want to keep it as open as possible to allow for the most unprescribed answers and therefore creating the most unexpected results.

We discussed the installation taking on many different forms but ultimately we want the participants to have a say in how it develops.