Story Worlds | Ao Pūrākau , Puke Ariki + Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre (2025)

Story Worlds / Ao Pūrākau was conceived as a festival of ideas and encounters exploring how stories shape worlds—across ecology, culture, language, and technology.

Co-led by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and Puke Ariki, it positioned Taranaki as a living site of storytelling and exchange, where art, writing, and knowledge practices intersect.

At its heart, the festival celebrated storytelling as a shared cultural practice that transcends disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. It aimed to foster creative exchange between artists, writers, scientists, and communities—positioning Taranaki as a place where ideas and stories can be lived, tested, and reimagined together.

Guided by three interwoven themes:

The festival was bilingual, with te reo Māori translations provided for all program titles and key communications. This ensured accessibility for Māori speakers and affirmed the festival’s commitment to cultural equity, partnership, and linguistic vitality.

• Language as Living: recognising that language is always in motion, and that stories evolve as languages shift across time and culture.

• Participation as Creation: acknowledging that storytelling is not solitary, but emerges between people, shaped by collaboration and shared meaning-making.

• Ecology as Becoming: affirming that humans are inseparable from the living world, and that stories can reveal and renew our relationship with land, water, and climate.

Story Worlds created a framework for artists, thinkers, and audiences to engage in dialogue that was both poetic and practical, local and global.

*In my position as Head, Public Practice + Creative Enquiry at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre and Puke Ariki I worked alongside a working group to deliver Story Worlds.

Relational Ecologies, ACCA (2025)

Relational Ecologies was a three-day Intensive hosted by the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network (CACP) at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 21–23 February 2024. Situated within The Relational Ecologies Laboratory—a living artwork, archive, and environment developed for The Charge That Binds (7 Dec 2024–16 Mar 2025)—the Intensive gathered artists, educators, and researchers to test climate-aware creative practice through embodied, collective learning.

My contribution moved through three intertwined modes—support, collaboration, and social agitation:

• Support (Yarning Circle): I supported the facilitation of a yarning circle following the protocol guided by Ngalakgan researcher Tristen Harwood, holding space for dialogue, reciprocity, and shared accountability.

• Support (Watershop): Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris led Watershop: Currents & Vessels; I supported the session’s delivery, assisting participants to work with water as a medium for sensing, relation, and embodied knowledge.

• Social Agitator: I led Galvanising: Assembling, Agitating, Actioning, activating productive agitation as a method for collective transformation.

Together these roles enacted what I describe as a fermentology—a slow, situated, transformative praxis that treats fermentation as metaphor, methodology and method. Through support, collaboration, and agitation, Relational Ecologies operated as a living curriculum, inviting participants to practise being-with—attending to ecological precarity through relation, care, and collective change.

Brewshop, Penrith Regional Gallery (2022)

 Brewshop was a collaborative, two-hour workshop created in dialogue with artist Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris and her work Precipitating the Hydrocene (I’m raining in your lungs) (2022). Bronwyn’s text-based rain installation framed rain as a durational, performative practice, and Brewshop extended this thinking into a shared, embodied experiment.

Ahead of the session, we collected rainwater from the gardens of Penrith Regional Gallery. Together with participants, we explored boiling, brewing, and infusing this water with place-based ingredients, observing how each infusion evolved in smell, taste, and texture. The process foregrounded the intimacy of water—how rain not only circulates through landscapes but also through our own bodily hydro-relations.

The workshop was attuned to both place and time. Held between 10 am and 12 pm, it invited participants to ingest brews that reflected the cultural, social, and intuitive choices of the group within that fleeting window. In this way, Brewshop became a meditation on circulation, temporality, and the ways water connects environment, body, and collective experience.