WHAT
Wild City is a place where animals are considered citizens. This is the preeminent workshop in the program! Children will be shown images from around the world in the first half hour of the workshop and Kathy will provide a narrative to help think about co-habitation. The final hour of the workshop will be hands on, where children get the chance to change the city into a thriving green metropolis where humans and wild animals share a habitat.
WHERE
St Martins Chapel, Martin Street, Blackwood
AGE
• KIDS 6+ session (adult supervision required at all times)
• KIDS 2-5 session (adult supervision required at all times)
BOOKINGS
This event is to be confirmed. Booking will become available in a month or so, or closer to the date. Stay tuned
ABOUT
Wild City is an arts based workshop for children where we consider wild animals as citizens in urban spaces. The project is concerned with providing an experience for learning, making and creative expression through a series of workshops for children that are based on real environmental issues.
In the workshops, I provide a miniature sculptural city and introduced children to ideas of human and animal architecture and show hybrid examples of co-existence. The children then draw, plant and construct their ideas onto the mini city turning it into a lush green space that includes animal habitat. The city becomes a hybrid of human and animal habitat. The children’s work is sometimes curated into a collaborative exhibition where their ideas are shared with others.
Wild City was born at ArtPlay upon return from completing my masters in the Netherlands where I researched a human made, rewilded ecology as an example of urban co-existence. I was able to engage 15 Melbourne based urban ecologists, researchers and conservationists in the creation and delivery of this project. This clarified ideas on what challenges wild animals encounter in ever expanding human landscapes, and how these issues are currently being tackled. These specialists helped me to further my research in urban co-existence with the wild animal. Many of them actively participated in the workshops with children, delivering interesting talks on species that live in the area and what they require as habitat. This methodology of including informed real world knowledge into creative workshops is the inspiration behind the Blackwood Art & Ecology Club.
Wild City won the people choice award at the Art For Social Change Exhibition and has held workshop or exhibitions at The Sydney Opera House, Hyphen Gallery, Dream Big – South Australia Museum, Melbourne Knowledge Week, Gertrude St Projection Festival, Kyneton Town Hall, Hawthorn Arts Centre, , Trentham Primary School
