Environmental Artist Residency 2024
Kirsten Wehner, 2022. Image courtesy of Gemma Fischer
Meet the Artist
Kirsten Wehner is an artist, curator and writer based in Canberra in Ngunawal Country.
Her practice explores people’s relationships with the more-than-human world, working across drawing, sculpture, installation and participatory experiences to generate cross-species empathy and care. Kirsten’s current research centres on waterways as places of cultural and ecological potential and on embodied methodologies for engaging with multi-species worlds.
Kirsten has held residencies at the University of Canberra/Belconnen Arts Centre, the University of Sydney and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich. She has delivered experiences and exhibited in Australia and internationally. Kirsten is the James O Fairfax Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment at the National Museum of Australia, a co-director of the independent creative platform Catchment Studio, and serves on the governing committees of the Cad Factory and Plumwood Mountain. Recent projects include River Country, a public installation at the National Museum, the documentary, More than a Fish Kill and the publication, Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the age of environmental crisis (New South Books, 2020)
During her residency, Kirsten will continue her on-going research into conceptualising ‘sustainability’ as a process of community engaged creative regeneration grounded in the liveliness and agency of place. This is about exploring how people are transformed by places, even as they seek to shape and care for them, and how these engagements might open up new spaces for more-than-human cultural and ecological flourishing.
Kirsten will create a new body of work exploring Weston Creek, a largely unknown and little-loved waterway in suburban Canberra. Drawing on her recent learnings about the creek as Country, Kirsten will investigate the waterway’s experience as a channelised, buried and highly colonised entity, that nevertheless continues to call for connection. Kirsten’s project will focus on investigating how people along the creek are seeking to care for it and how the creek cares for them, responding to the materiality and actions of the waterway, its species and peoples.
