This session was hosted by Richard De Martin
Criminology lecturer and social justice scholar Dr Alice Neikirk is working to improve the experiences of less privileged groups to create a more equitable world. By understanding and challenging the rhetoric, she’s making change happen.
In 2024, we began a community art project with the goal of building connections, fostering engagement, and creating a space within a gallery where communities from diverse backgrounds felt welcome. Thirty-five ‘clay-days’ were conducted to build 600 tiny homes which symbolise the resettlement of refugees in the Hunter Valley over the last two years. By the end of the project over 700 people built with us and contributed to a larger art exhibition in the Watt Space Gallery as part of New Annual Festival.
The goal of the exhibition was to create a ‘restorative space’. A restorative space asks its visitors, ‘what was the past impact and continuing legacy of harms, and how can we contribute to correcting this?’
At its core, a restorative space provides a physical space where members of diverse communities can encounter the experience of each other, and that encourages acknowledgement of past and continuing harms, in an effort to identify possibilities for redress and reconciliation. A restorative space encourages engagement and empowerment in addressing the past and present harms.
Initially the exhibition in the gallery was conceptualised as the restorative space but it quickly became clear the workshops also had restorative elements – an opportunity for engagement and returning control to stakeholders. For clay work this was quite literal. I had to let go of idea of what a house or home might look like. It became an image from a Disney movie which reminded them of their hometown or a garden, rather than a house.
I also initially approached a house as an individual project – likely reflecting my own cultural background. Participants had different ideas, wanting to build collaboratively. By the third workshop, I virtually stopped giving any direction beyond specific clay techniques. Rather, I encouraged them to approach ‘home’ however they liked.
More about Alice Neikirk