Participatory Art Encounters
Making through relation
These projects begin with simple invitations: paint, draw, stitch, pass, share. Each is carefully structured, yet none has a predetermined outcome. As participants work with materials and one another, authorship shifts, objects gather meaning and unfamiliar ways of seeing become possible.
Together, the projects explore what happens when artmaking is approached as a shared encounter: between people, materials, cultural histories, disciplines and places.
Miniature Moments
Passing stories from hand to hand
Participatory miniature painting | Watercolours on canvas | 2025
Inquiry: What happens when a personal image enters another person’s hands?
Each participant began with a blank canvas no larger than the palm of their hand. Using fine brushes and watercolour, they painted a fragment of lived experience. The small scale required close looking, patient observation and deliberate marks.
After thirty minutes, the paintings were passed to another participant without instructions about what should happen next. Each miniature travelled through several hands, gathering new colours, interpretations and memories before returning to its first maker.
The project draws on the collaborative organisation of Persian miniature manuscript illumination, in which different artisans contributed to a single work. Rather than reproducing its visual style, Miniature Moments reactivated this relational way of working within a contemporary participatory encounter. The tradition is connected to my own cultural and artistic history and to my interest in how it might continue to live within an Australian context.
Passing the paintings produced hesitation, curiosity, protectiveness and trust. Some participants reclaimed the miniature that began with their story. Others exchanged works, choosing to carry home an image shaped by someone else’s experience. Each painting became a small material record of shared authorship, vulnerability and collective memory.
Palm-sized watercolour paintings travelled between participants, gathering new marks, interpretations and memories with each exchange.
Palm-sized watercolour paintings travelled between participants, gathering new marks, interpretations and memories with each exchange.
Beginning with identical manufactured objects, participants transformed reusable tote bags into individual carriers of memory, identity and lived experience.
Get Carried Away
Carrying memory, imagination and care
Participatory painting | Reusable tote bags | 2024
Inquiry: How might making transform an ordinary object into a carrier of identity, memory and care?
Participants entered a carefully organised space. Blank tote bags waited neatly folded. Brushes, pigments and fabric paints were arranged across tables. Time was measured and instructions were given.
Then the brushes touched the fabric.
Paint wandered. Colours met unexpectedly. Hands paused, accelerated and changed direction. Within a structured environment, each participant found a different rhythm. Identical manufactured bags gradually absorbed individual gestures, memories and decisions.
The tote bag was chosen for its familiarity. It belongs to everyday life and to conversations about reuse and sustainable consumption, yet it is also a vessel: something made to gather, hold and carry. The project later brought to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which the carrier becomes a container for collected stories rather than a heroic object.
Painting moved the bags beyond their practical function. Some carried bold abstractions; others held symbols of family, culture or place. The project also brought textile-based and domestic making into view as practices capable of holding artistic, cultural and intellectual weight.
What began as a uniform object left the workshop marked by difference. Each bag carried an encounter among body, brush, pigment, fabric and imagination—and a story that could continue travelling beyond the workshop.
Glow Lab in the Gallery
Drawing with light in a more-than-human world
Participatory drawing installation | Light, plants & repurposed materials | 2025
Inquiry: What becomes visible when drawing begins with light rather than line?
In a darkened gallery, participants used mobile phones as drawing tools. The flashlight illuminated fragments of plants, fungi, roots and microscopic forms, casting shifting silhouettes across suspended panels made from repurposed timber.
One hand held the light while the other followed the moving shadow. Drawing became a coordination of body, technology, material and environment. As the light moved, scale changed. A leaf became unfamiliar; a root expanded into a landscape. Forms that might ordinarily be overlooked became briefly luminous.
The mobile phone also changed function. Rather than carrying communication away from the immediate environment, it became an instrument of observation. Participants had to slow down, coordinate their movements and respond to shadows that would not remain still.
Scientists, engineers, humanists and creative practitioners worked collectively within the gallery. No single participant could control the final image. Marks overlapped, forms became entangled and authorship developed through attention to what others had already drawn.
Glow Lab in the Gallery did not ask participants simply to illustrate plants. It used light to make drawing itself unfamiliar. Through that unfamiliarity, observation became active, relational and shared—an encounter with the more-than-human world shaped by movement, darkness and collective attention.
Vet Awareness Week
Drawing, dexterity and caring for the carers
University of Melbourne, Werribee campus | Veterinary students | 2025
Inquiry: What happens when creative practice encounters professional knowledge already carried through the hands?
Before designing these workshops, I spent time observing veterinary education. I watched students work with surgical instruments, listened to them discuss the practical skills they were developing and began to recognise how much veterinary knowledge depends on touch, precision, observation and care.
The workshops were designed in response to that embodied knowledge. Drawing, painting and collage invited close observation and visual communication. Stitching and jewellery-making involved controlled hand movements related to the dexterity required in clinical practice. In one activity, students used surgical-grade tweezers to handle individual beads, exchanging the pressure of a clinical task for a playful but still exacting material process.
The workshops did not attempt to replace scientific training or treat the pressures of veterinary study. They created a different kind of space alongside professional learning: no patient, assessment, diagnosis or expectation of perfection.
Students considered how drawing might help communicate complex procedures and diagnoses, while tactile activities brought renewed attention to what their hands already knew. Repetition, pressure, movement and concentration connected artistic and veterinary practices without making them equivalent.
The encounter revealed care as something carried through actions as much as words: through skilled hands, sustained attention and responsiveness to another living being.
Image caption:
Veterinary students worked through drawing, stitching and jewellery-making, bringing artistic attention into dialogue with dexterity, communication and care.
Paired with someone they did not know, participants negotiated every line, colour and compositional decision on one shared canvas.
Mandala Makers
Transforming strangers into creative partners
Collaborative painting | Interdisciplinary participants | 2024
Inquiry: How might making together transform uncertainty into collaboration?
Participants entered the workshop without knowing who they would work beside. Each was paired anonymously with someone from another discipline. Together, they received one canvas, ninety minutes, a limited palette of black, white and gold, and a small selection of mandala motifs.
Every decision had to be shared.
Participants discussed scale, line, pattern, symmetry and composition. Some planned carefully before touching the canvas. Others began with a mark and waited for their partner to respond. Hesitation, disagreement and uncertainty were not interruptions to the process; they became the conditions through which collaboration developed.
The mandala provided more than a visual motif. Its repetition, balance and centred structure created a method for working together. As patterns accumulated, the room became quieter. Conversation moved between words and marks, and decision-making gradually became part of the rhythm of painting.
Although every pair worked within the same constraints, no two mandalas resembled one another. Cultural references, personal histories and different approaches to colour and form entered each composition. The finished works recorded negotiation as much as individual expression.
The mandalas were later exhibited within the School of Biomedical Sciences. This shifted the workshop from a temporary encounter to a shared public contribution, asking each pair to carry collective responsibility for what they had made together.
Practice and Inquiry
Across these encounters, materials do more than support an activity. A miniature canvas changes hands. A tote bag gathers traces. Light unsettles perception. Surgical tools enter a different field of attention. A shared canvas requires strangers to negotiate.
The projects remain open to uncertainty, discomfort, refusal and outcomes that cannot be anticipated. Their significance lies in these unfolding relations: in what participants notice, carry, change and make possible together.
Images, video and participant reflections are presented with permission. Please do not reproduce or circulate this material without prior consent.