Warracknabeal Creative Circuit

Creating a makerspace for regional Victoria that fuses low-cost technology and craft.

The Warracknabeal Creative Circuit will explore, test, and refine the needs of the community with the community to create a makerspace for local use: material re-use in craft and fabrication, collaborative projects with existing knowledges, and playing with new technologies in Warracknabeal and beyond. Together, this helps build local capacity for creative space management – and embeds community learning through making.

Charity Edwards

The Warracknabeal Creative Circuit is a makerspace project to pilot community-led programs at the intersection of cheap technology and local crafts. While the immediate goal is providing community access to equipment, expertise and creative working space in the centre of Warracknabeal, the Creative Circuit aims to seed new practices, projects, and collaborations with emerging technologies, and scale up such tools for use by the wider region.

In this space, the Creative Circuit will establish a creative-culture building enterprise by setting up infrastructure (basic craft and technology equipment, tools, and materials) and piloting up to 6 maker workshops over 12 months. The project will also:

  • create new employment (the role of Warracknabeal Creative Circuit Project Manager) to oversee day-to-day operations of the makerspace;
  • provide training, mentoring and relationship-building for creative space management; and
  • build systems for accommodating creative co-working activities - such as OHSE, communications, and other organisational requirements.

Warracknabeal Creative Circuit will explore, test and refine the needs of the community with the community. This creates a makerspace specific to local use: fostering material re-use in craft and fabrication, integrating collaborative projects with existing knowledge and new technologies in Warracknabeal and beyond, building local capacity for creative space management, and embedding community learning through making. This will be achieved by pairing creative practice researchers, artists, designers, educators, social innovators, and contemporary makers co-designing and trialling programs with local stakeholders. The community will be represented by the new Warracknabeal Community Working Group (formed in 2019 to develop local programming for the ‘After Warracknabeal’ project: an artist-in-residence program with boutique accommodation in the Warracknabeal Court House). ‘After Warracknabeal’ was successful in gaining Creative Victoria funding from the inaugural round of the ‘Creative State Commissions’ in 2018, and will provide an innovative art and exhibition space at the close of 2020.

Ultimately, the pilot will establish community requirements for ongoing public programming in Warracknabeal, and fill a gap in community creative practice provision with a central point needed now: a space for making, collaborating and innovating together.