Story Worlds, Puke Ariki Museum and LIbraries | Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre (2025)
Story Worlds is a new festival that invites audiences to experience storytelling as a rich, interconnected practice—through the written words, material cultures, and oral traditions. Join a brilliant line up of thinkers, storytellers, authors and artists across four days as we explore how stories shape our understanding of the world, especially when viewed through the lenses of language, ecology, and participation.
Story Worlds is an invitation to see storytelling not only as something we tell or hear, but as something we live, carry, and co-create.
At the heart of Story Worlds are three guiding themes:
Language as Living
Language is always shifting. It lives in what we say, write, and make.
How do stories reflect the rhythm of language as it moves through time, place, and culture?
Participation as Creation
Storytelling is not a solo act—it emerges between people.
How do stories grow when many voices shape them, and what does it mean to make meaning together?
Ecology as Becoming
We are inseparable from the natural world.
How stories reveal our evolving relationships with the land, water, climate, and more-than-human life?
Story Worlds offers an open invitation: To listen deeply, speak honestly, and imagine boldly—together.
Join us for a festival that celebrates storytelling in all its forms and honours the ways stories help us make sense of ourselves, each other, and the world we share.
Program highlights include:
Kaye-Maree Dunn
Kaye-Maree Dunn, co-founder of Making Everything Achievable, is a renowned Māori tech entrepreneur. She leads Āhau NZ and Indigital Blockchain and is a Sir Edmund Hillary Fellow.James Bridle
James Bridle is a writer, artist, and technologist. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet.
Indigenising Place: Making, Being and Knowing alongside First Peoples
WharehokaSmith (Te Atiawa, Ngā Ruahine, Taranaki) speaks from a deep commitment to kaitiakitanga and Toi Māori sovereignty within institutional relationships. Architect and changemaker Elisapeta Heta (Ngāti Wai, Waikato Tainui) brings an intergenerational design lens grounded in Te Tiriti and Mana Whenua collaboration. From Australia, Clarence Slockee (Cudgenburra, Bundjalung) shares how cultural ecology can reshape urban space and reconnect people with Country; and Inga-Wiktoria Påve (Sámi, Sweden) brings the power of ancestral craft and Sámi visual storytelling to the conversation.
The Waterhouse, rīvus, 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2021 -2022)
Image: Images: School of Water for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at The Cutaway, Barangaroo. School of Water was presented in partnership with Hayball. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight.
The Waterhouse was anchored at The Cutaway at Barangaroo. It was the place where our programs, learning encounters and community gatherings exist, challenging where knowledge lived and how it was shared. The Waterhouse was built with the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, titled rīvus, that imagined rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems as dynamic living systems. It extended upon the foundational principle of rīvus, “building upon what’s already there” and gifted agency to those who connected to it by empowering audiences to recognise that their journey held great value.
The Waterhouse acknowledged the ‘teacher’ in all, manifesting in animals, plants, environments and humankind. It celebrated waters, trees, insects, and children as places and spaces that hold an abundance of knowledge to be collected and shared. It createed conditions where the generative accumulation of knowledge was facilitated. By enabling learning to happen through the various teachers of life, we aimed to shift the way we humans think about our place in the world and slowly, over time, change our practice of being ‘with’ the world.
The Waterhouse was a place with a history, developed in response to Casa M, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Artistic Director José Roca’s earlier project which formed the heart of the 8th Mercosul Biennale (2011). Casa M provided a habitat for gathering, a newly constructed, physical place for the community to come together, engage in critical dialogue, make and learn. Casa M was born from an identified need for greater infrastructure for artists and audiences.
As a product of its time, The Waterhouse was a place-responsive encounter that worked with pre-existing architecture within The Cutaway at Barangaroo. Sustainable in thinking and in practice it looked towards questioning accepted modes of learning and sharing by presenting alternative possibilities. The methods and approaches were fresh and unexpected. They aspired to ground and expand our connection with rīvus and what it could offer us all.
As a tangible entity, it lived, and it breathed. Envisioned as a wetland, its edges were porous, like liquid – holding space for mystery, growth and symbiotic relationships.
The Waterhouse asked to be experienced – with consciousness and care.
Images: anti-symposium for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at The Cutaway, Barangaroo. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight.
anti-symposium: arts pedagogy as social practice, Biennale of Sydney (2022)
anti-symposium: arts pedagogy as social practice explores educator practice as a form of relational and social work. Held across three days, anti-symposium invites educators from all sectors including primary and secondary school, community, tertiary, arts and cultural environments to contribute to a ‘pond’ of ideas sharing practices, experiment and challenge one another. anti-symposium is grounded in building strong, community foundations and relations with peers and leading pedagogical thinkers across the world. By modelling diverse educative approaches, the anti-symposium will gift educators with new tools to explore within collaborative learning environments, through newly created exercises and resources that extend beyond the three-day experience.
Each day of the anti-symposium will be led by artists and pedagogical practitioners including Pablo Helguera (Day 1), Stephanie Springgay (Day 2) and collective project, Creekulum (Day 3). The structure of anti-symposium is inspired by artist Asad Raza’s Schema for a School, 2015 and includes tea, meditation, active exercises, reading groups, reflective strategies and collaborative resource construction.
Emerging from educator and social practices, anti-symposium intends to build and inspire a collective of facilitators, learners and thinkers, together acknowledging the importance of pedagogical practice.
anti-symposium will include a loving lunch daily created by social enterprise and asylum seeker kitchen Parliament on King. Food will be used as a tool for grounding the learnings built throughout the three-day experience.
Images: School of Water for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at The Cutaway, Barangaroo. School of Water was presented in partnership with Hayball. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight.
School of Water, Biennale of Sydney (2022)
Bringing 12 different practitioners together from the rīvus exhibition program, The Waterhouse public program and the pre-Biennale program Water Lessons, School of Water is a critical project that flows across a two-year period embedding feedback and key learnings from the public and their curiosity about water.
Developed in partnership with Hayball architectural studio, the two-day project will pop-up and takeover The Waterhouse encouraging intergenerational audiences to collectively consider the following questions through sharing and making.
How can we collectively heal the urban Watering Hole?
The Watering Hole in the School of Water is a place of nourishment, connection and co-dependence. It speaks to the need for healthy, abundant water systems and environments, but also a spiritual relationship with water and nature more broadly. Across the two-day period the public will collaborate with artists, architects, scientists and dynamic thinkers in the construction of a real-life watering hole that will live at The Waterhouse. To enable the project to live on beyond the two-day period, a collective Manifesto will be written mapping how we can continue the healing process of the human in the environment and with water.
Images: Water Lessons for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at South Eveleigh Community Rooftop, Watchtower, La Perouse and Indigigrow. Water Lessons is presented by the Biennale of Sydney with assistance from Mirvac, Parliament on King and Randwick City Council. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight and Document Photography.
Water Lessons, Biennale of Sydney (2021 - 2022)
Water Lessons celebrates learning through doing. Taking place on the third Sunday of each month throughout April 2021 – May 2022, Water Lessons is an opportunity to connect with community in the lead up to and throughout the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022). Diverse water specialists from various fields of interest, knowledge and research are invited to host each monthly lesson and to facilitate interaction with participants. Each lesson provides a new lens to understand the complexities of water as material, muse and resource. Water Lessons embraces the reality that we all hold water expertise through our social, cultural, political and historical relations with it. Collaboration, dialogue and exchange are foregrounded through Water Lessons as essential tools for learning and sharing. Water Lessons aims to unpack the qualities, powers, threats and future imaginaries of water, together.
Images in order of appearance: Courtesy of WalkingLab a SSHRC-funded international research-creation project co-directed by Stephanie Springgay (McMaster University) and Sarah E. Truman (University of Melbourne). Detail from the Slow Spatial Reader, courtesy of the Slow Research Lab. Still Seals;kin Lament Hannah Tuulikki and Space In Between Designs courtesy of Biennale of Sydney.
Space In Between, Biennale of Sydney (2022)
Let us walk. Together. Alone. Quietly. Consciously.
Let us turn our gaze – inward, outward.
Let us pay attention to place. To the natural and built world that surrounds us, hugs us, nourishes us.
Space In Between connects the 23rd Biennale of Sydney locations from National Art School, Museum of Contemporary Art, Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay Arts Precinct and The Cutaway at Barangaroo, through mindful walking. The paths, like the river, flow both ways; there’s no beginning or end – you can move in both directions and start or finish wherever you like.
As you view the exhibition, walking from point to point, take note of your journeys and soak in the creative potential embedded in the natural and urban environments through unearthing stories of place, both visible and hidden. Along the way visit unexpected locations like the Tank Stream, where place-responsive activations will shift your perspective (up, down, around), and experience the City as new, despite the time spent previously (or not) deep within her belly.
Participants include: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris (Sweden/Australia) Cave Urban (Chile/Australia) Embassy of the North Sea (Netherlands) Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway, Australia) David Haines (England/Australia) & Joyce Hinterding (Australia) Pablo Helguera (Mexico/USA) John Kelly (Dunghutti, Australia) & Rena Shein (Australia) Astrida Neimanis (Canada) José Roca (Colombia) and Juan Francisco Salazar (Chile/Australia) Slow Research Lab (Netherlands) Stephanie Springgay (Canada) Hanna Tuulikki (Finland/Scotland) Tais Rose Wae (Bundjalung, Australia) Judy Watson (Waanyi, Australia) Caroline Woolard (USA)
Further Afield
Image: Ebony Wightman’s pilot contribution to the Radical Care Kit. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.
Radical Care Kit, Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation (2023-2024)
The Radical Care Kit is currently in its pilot phase, and supported by the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation. Facilitated across the Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick and The Children’s Hospital, Westmead for 8 weeks (Monday 18 September – Friday 17 November 2023); the Kit is being evaluated by Monash University’s Art.Creativity.Education research group, who work in collaboration with the Art Program to determine the futurity of the Kit in the clinical environment.
Featuring three contributions by diverse practitioners Nadia Odlum, Hannah Donnelly, Omar Sakr and Ebony Wightman, the KIt centres First Nations, culturally and linguistically diverse, people with lived experience of illness, injury and disability and queer voice. The Radical Care Kit envisions a transformative approach to the art exchange within the clinical environment, placing emphasis on process over product. It hopes to foster deep connections between the patient or group, the art exercise, and the facilitator. Built as an accompaniment to art and play-based experiences that are offered in clinical environments serving as distraction and sources of transient joy, the Radical Care Kit seeks to facilitate lasting relationships within the larger Hospital community, including friends and strangers undergoing similar experiences with illness.
The Radical Care Kit underscores the principles of collaboration and time, with exercises that are often durational, it responds to and evolves with the young participants who shape its direction. By fostering these enduring connections, the Radical Care Kit aims to create meaningful and enriching art exchanges within the clinical setting.
Image: Learning from Home Pack, issued to Year 2 students of Auburn North Public School during COVID-19, paper /cotton / plastic / wood / metal / synthetic, compiled by teachers of Auburn North Public School, Auburn, New South Wales, Australia, March 2020.
Hidden Lessons, Powerhouse (2022)
Who do we learn with? Where do we learn? What do we learn with?
Hidden Lessons created in Sydney on Darug Land over six months, is the culmination of a student-led, pedagogical project that encourages learners to interrogate their own educational experience: who we learn with, where we learn, and what we learn with in the wake of Covid-19, incorporating objects of everyday life from the Powerhouse collection.
The students from Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta, took part in this project developed and led by Lleah Smith, Artistic Associate of Powerhouse and Nadia Odlum, Artist in Residence at Parramatta Artists Studios. Through collective knowledge generated in the sessions together learners created their own temporary ‘Museum of Hidden Lessons’ which honours a significant shift in educative practices and invites speculation on how learnings from the pandemic may inform future pedagogical models. This ‘museum’ sits alongside a display of Powerhouse collection objects explored through the project.
Housed in a temporary structure, a canvas tent, this museum was erected first on the grounds of Our Lady of Mercy College, and later at the Powerhouse Castle Hill, alongside a display of Powerhouse collection objects explored through the project. As ‘caretakers’ of the Museum, the project participants were encouraged to share the project with their peers and school community, by inviting them into the tent and engaging in reciprocal knowledge exchange rooted in dialogical and material practices.
Future School (2021-2022)
FUTURE SCHOOL was co-created with Kandos Public School and teacher Rachelle Connellan, and conceptually developed and delivered in collaboration with theatre maker Bonnie Cowan and video producer Ankit Mishra for Cementa 2022. The project unfolded across four key components: a film, a performance, an installation, and a student-led public program.
In 2020 and 2021, amidst a global pandemic, government restrictions saw most young people across NSW learning from home unless provided with an exemption. Whether at home or in the ‘traditional classroom’, learning looked vastly different in 2021 to what it had been pre-2020. The spaces where learning happened shifted, the people it happened with transformed, and the objects young people learned with radically changed.
At its heart, FUTURE SCHOOL was a creative reimagining of the pre-pandemic ‘school’, capitalising on the cracks and fractures exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. It invited a renegotiation of the place, purpose, and point of school itself. Rather than rules, young people generated a set of guiding Principles—to be gifted to new children at the school—as a way of reinstating the type of ecology they wanted to be part of. In this way, FUTURE SCHOOL sought to radically transform the role of the school in the shaping of young people and in its function within the community.
In the spirit of Rees and Graham (2013), FUTURE SCHOOL redefined what a school could be: “not only a site for learning but also as a place for cultural production” (p. 213). By approaching the school through this lens, FUTURE SCHOOL enabled knowledge sharing through acts of exchange and generosity, positioning the classroom as a place of collective imagination and cultural creation.
FUTURE SCHOOL was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, and was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
p.u.b.l.i.c.s.c.h.o.o.l (2021- ongoing)
p.u.b.l.i.c.s.c.h.o.o.l is a pedagogical collective driven by artists, educators, curators, arts workers and arts writers in Australia who desire to ‘do differently’.
The collective is fuelled by experiments and conversations that push boundaries and play with radical forms of learning, connecting and sharing for our communities locally and abroad. As a method for holding ourselves accountable documentation and evaluation are a critical part of p.u.b.l.i.c.s.c.h.o.o.l’s process and practice.
p.u.b.l.i.c.s.c.h.o.o.l has grown from a desire to develop a malleable and fluid ‘pedagogical approach’ to collectivising that is open to change and adaptation. For this reason, the boundaries of our group are not concrete, we welcome new members and discordant voices.
p.u.b.l.i.c.s.c.h.o.o.l embraces plurality, and a concept-driven speculative approach. This may manifest many forms of outputs, including exhibitions, gatherings, workshops, publications and events, as well things that fit all or none of these categories.
Images: Ankit Mishra and courtesy of Birrong High School.
Youth4Care Party (2020)
Youth4Care PARTY was presented as part of the inaugural Bankstown Biennale. It was a ‘political party’ and a ‘celebration’ that redirected the focus from ‘emergency’ to ‘care’ The project was student-led and created in collaboration with the year 9 and 10 students from Birrong Girls High School. It was an essential artwork for the time, harnessing the power of the rapidly growing movement of youth-led climate strikes, political engagement and togetherness.
Slogans, placards, flags, giant birthday cards and a ‘make a wish’ station were created during a series of workshops facilitated by Lleah Smith, as language, material, sign and symbol were explored as tools for communication. All messaging focused on ‘positive action’ and ‘change-making’, whilst borrowing from birthday rituals which cultivate feelings of belonging as a way to collectivise.
Image: Video still from Good Chat Productions.
Your Public Art Project, Kaldor Public Art Projects (2019)
What is public art?
How can in transform your local environment?
Your Public Art Project was a Kaldor Public Art Projects learning program delivered in partnership with The Arts Unit, NSW Department of Education. The program was designed and led by Lleah Smith in collaboration with Public Programs and Education Manager, Antonia Fredman.
Primary and secondary students from NSW Department of Education schools were invited to reimagine public space within their communities. The project had an extended reach and involved rich engagement with students from Bourke, Dubbo, Parkes, Wilcannia, Western Sydney and Sydney’s Inner West. Smith travelled across NSW facilitating experimental and process-based learning experiences that aimed to challenge students understanding of public art practice and invited conceptual approaches to art-making.
Images: Tushikur Rahman, Saurav Khurana and Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA).