Climate Aware Creative Practices

A nation-wide alliance of creative arts educators, researchers, and practitioners addressing challenges posed by climate change.

• Investigators

  • • Associate Professor Terri Bird
    • Dr Helen Hughes
    • Professor Tara McDowell
    Monash Art, Design and Architecture

• Partner organisation

  • The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

• Funded by

  • The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools
  • Creative Victoria

Climate Aware Creative Practices (CACP) was established 2022 in the Department of Fine Art at Monash University and has since become a nation-wide alliance of creative arts educators, researchers, and practitioners. We are working together to deepen our engagement with the challenges posed by climate change. We are leaders within our own institutions, and we come together to share knowledge and strengthen our capacity to act, make, and teach ethically through the complexities of the climate crisis.

Our purpose:

• To foster creative practices that are aware of and respond to the challenges of climate change;
• To share strategies, tools and resources for developing and implementing climate-aware creative pedagogies;
• To centre Indigenous knowledge frameworks in climate-aware practice and pedagogy by promoting the inclusion of Indigenous resources, ideas, and people;
• To actively participate in climate justice, acknowledging that climate change has its roots in colonisation, and is entangled with neocolonial, imperial, disruption to First Nations’ ongoing culture;
• To understand the role of the creative arts in contributing to sustainability challenges and solutions (for example, the environmental impacts of producing and presenting work in public).

Relational Ecologies

CACP Network presents Relational Ecologies, a project in two parts, both an inventory laboratory and intensive, in The Charge that Binds opening at ACCA on December 7, 2024. The Relational Ecologies Laboratory is situated within ACCA’s foyer for the duration of the exhibition to generate and model climate aware creative methodologies, alongside the two-day public intensive in February 2025.

Learn more