Bees, breath and poetry: Nature inspires creative dialogues

A free community event has explored the intersection of creativity, climate action and the future in the Illawarra.

Wollongong Town Hall hosted families, creatives and ecologists for Creative Dialogues, a gathering organised by Wollongong City Council, on June 20.

The Illawarra Flame spoke to artists, educators and makers involved in the event on the day.

Virginia Keft – Artist, The Picket Fence Project 

"I’m a Muruwari artist from far northwest NSW, but I’ve lived on Dharawal country my whole adult life. The Picket Fence Project is a First Nations community arts project that looks at the picket fence as a colonial symbol of boundary-making. We are reclaiming that through story-making. I worked with five different Aboriginal communities over the past year, and through yarning and making together, we put those stories back onto the fences as a way of reclaiming it."

"A lot of what we worked on is how communities engage specifically with the environment. A lot of the fences talk about traditional food sources and caring for Country. Quite a few worked with the whale being a significant animal on Dharawal Country." 

Michelle Heldon – Artist, Drop-in – Play & Pause: Breathing Spaces 

"I'm running this slow-making workshop. It’s a collaborative, nature-inspired scape that has been growing over the day. We are inviting people to slow down, find a little nature item, and notice the details on it. They can trace around it or draw some details they love." 

"For me, nature is what drives my whole practice. Just being in nature is one of the greatest forms of being able to connect with our own creativity ... and the wonder of it! Nature has its own creativity and we aren't separate from it."

Alison Mellor – Native Bee Drop-in 

"We've been talking to people about Australian native bees, which most people don't know much about! People are really curious and often surprised by what they learn. We've got some live native stingless bees that people can look at. They are really important pollinators for a lot of our local native plants." 

Adara Enthaler – Typewriter Poet

"I’ve been asking people to give me like a word or a theme and I write a poem on my typewriter for them. A 12-year-old girl was like, 'birds'. And I was like, 'you got a favourite bird?' and she went, 'nah, just birds'. But then someone else was like, 'Silence. I like the moments of stillness in between the wind and the rain.' And then other people were like, 'I love banksias' and 'autumn', so it's all different stuff."

"I don’t think it is possible to remove yourself from the world if you want to create art. You can be conceptual or intellectual about it, but ultimately the things that we write are directly inspired by what we experience and what we see. And we live in the natural world. We have removed ourselves from it a little bit, but nature is all around us. So much of art is influenced by our environment.

"I particularly love seeing when that environment is quintessentially Australian. I love seeing poems about banksias, and dancers with kookaburra laughs, and drawings of flame trees. It’s so familiar and almost nostalgic, even though it all still exists. We have a very specific environment here in Australia – a lot of stuff you don’t find anywhere else in the world.

In The Music Lounge, the audience was treated to an immersive presentation by Nicole Smede entitled Plants & Music. Nicole opened her talk with a performance sung in Gathang language, accompanied by the real-time, translated acoustic signals of a living plant wired into the sound system.

"Language for us comes from Country itself. It’s the sound of place, listened into being by our old ones... What you can hear underneath me right now is not a synthesiser. It’s a plant, a living plant endemic to this Country, singing in real time."

Nicole, a Worimi woman whose practice weaves together traditional Aboriginal language, vocalisations and the physical vibrations of flora, spoke passionately about her childhood growing up at the foot of Mount Keira (Mother Geera). She described her creative process as a form of "deep listening – not just with my ears, but with my whole body."