Past Projects Archive
Since 1992 Kickstart Arts has been producing arts projects across all art forms in which professional artists work with community members to explore their connection to each other, their place, history as well as personal and collective story.
Our projects also connect people with deeper issues in contemporary thought, culture, politics and society. For example, inviting explorations of the true nature of happiness in regional Tasmanian communities. These conversations bring a deeper dimension to community creativity - inviting particular and specific storytelling through a topic that has profound universal relevance.
Past Projects Index
Healing Ground: 2019
Remembering the Future
This project engaged local children from New Town Primary School in a conscious exploration of their history, beginning in 1833 and then through research, artmaking and discussion, visiting potential futures.
The provocation questions that informed this project were:
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How are we equipping our young people for an uncertain future?
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What values, skills, understandings and knowledge will best equip them to deal with a world facing climate breakdown and pandemics?
We kept this conversation focused upon the active opportunities to make a positive difference both personally and collectively.
85 young people visited the former Boys Orphanage and adjacent City Farm and explored the space with the stories of the orphans from the nineteenth century in mind. They experienced what the space might have been like, even lying down on the dormitory floor in rows and imagining how the boys in the 1830’s managed to sleep there. They then engaged in thought experiments and art making at school, seeing ordinary and repurposed domestic objects as though they were artifacts dug up 200 years in the future over the first two terms of 2019.
Professional artists and New Town Primary School staff and volunteers then worked with 25 grade 5 & 6 students to create sculptural objects from post-consumer materials and short personal video works exploring individual and community thriving in the future through research and personal story telling.
Young people expressed their concerns about the world they are about to inherit. They are dismayed about pollution, waste, inequality, global climate breakdown and how to attain the skills they will need to suit jobs not even invented yet.
The making of this art was a time for conversation, mutual learning & teaching, listening, seeing objects and relationships differently, imagining a whole series of shifting contexts for consumer items and for the act of consuming itself.
This resulted in a public exhibition from September 25 – 28th at the former Queens Orphanage for Boys at the Kickstart Arts and a sculpture slam, video projection art and music event.
Artists: Andy Vagg, Rebecca Stevens, Richard Bladel, Troy Melville and Cary Littleford
Teachers: Mel McCrum and Veronica Marshall
Community volunteers: Allen Rooney, Steve Lovegrove and Joel Roberts
Production Support Team: Jami Bladel, Kardia Gillie Terry, Joseph Barrows, Priya Vunaki, Richard Coburn, Stephen McEntee and Adam Potito.