What is THINKING GROUND?
In 2024, VIMH launched a five-month pilot program aimed at unpacking our civic responsibilities as artists through the process of developing new work.
THINKING GROUND is an experiment. We want to see what happens if we carve out spaces for artists to interrogate their ideas and create robust foundations for the work they wish to make, whilst reflecting on the following questions:
– What are the skills that we as artists take for granted that others might benefit from right now? How do we share and proliferate them?
– How can we collaborate with non-arts sectors to regenerate and revitalise our communities? What can we offer? How can our work have a civic function?
– How do we gear the principles of connection inherent in our art form towards responding to the climate emergency, and every other social challenge that exists on a global scale but requires local action?
We do not have the answers to these questions. We hope to have a conversation together as a creative community about what might be possible if we locate them at the centre of our practice.
How can I get involved?
There are two ways to join THINKING GROUND.
Stream One: Undertake the full five-month process. This includes attending three workshops at Brunswick Mechanics Institute (dates and info outlined below), monthly one-on-one conversations with VIMH co-AD Liv Satchell (dates to be worked out together) and opportunities for group art dates (heaven). If you’ve got an idea bubbling away, have been wondering about how to contribute meaningfully as an artist right now and are up for participating in an experimental development process, this is for you and you can fill out the EOI below.
NB: This EOI process is now closed.
Stream Two: Workshops only; play it by ear. If you’re interested in this program but don’t have capacity to commit to the whole process right now, there will be registration available for each individual workshop. You can check out what’s going to be covered in them in the outline below and registration will open in the leadup to each session.
NB: This stream is capped at 25 participants and will be selected on a first-come, first-serve basis for each workshop.
THINKING GROUND is being run by VIMH without funding because we believe this work is vital and urgent. We believe artists will play a crucial role in how we imagine our future and we want to hold space for this imagining. Please also reach out to thevoiceinmyhands@gmail.com if you have any questions.
THINKING GROUND Workshop Series
WORKSHOP ONE: BUILDING AN IDEA (Sunday 4 August; 2pm-5pm)
This first session is an ‘Ideas Club’ of sorts. Artists will be invited to gather and identify the set of questions/ideas/themes that they are keen to explore in their current practice. Gentle prompts will guide this: What are you drawn to right now? Fascinated about? Terrified by? Feel hope for? Individual responses will be shared and responded to in turn by the group, opening up space for the cross-fertilisation of ideas between participants as well as the potential for ongoing conversations beyond the workshop itself. This will lay the groundwork for project vision-building as well as identifying purpose in relation to practice – why does this idea feel important now? What is it contributing to who?
WORKSHOP TWO: EMPOWERED GRANT-WRITING (Sunday 25 August; 2pm-5pm)
Too often, artists exclude themselves from grant applications because of the overwhelming odds against success. It is possible to reframe this relationship by approaching grant-writing as a tool for working out your project’s vision, how you’re going to make it happen, and who you’re making it for. Treating grant applications as a road-map for practice – and continuing to examine how civic and creative outcomes might align – allows you to maintain agency in this crucial (and often painful) process by making it valuable beyond the success of any one application.
This workshop will use one of VIMH’s projects as a case study for applying for funding in different contexts and there will also be space for a big Q + A (so attendees can bring their own questions and share information/experience with each other).
WORKSHOP THREE: WRITING ORDINARY (Sunday 8 September; 2pm-5pm)
This generative writing workshop places the experience of participants front and centre. Breaking down the barriers of who is a writer and who isn’t, this process centres the expertise of every individual to cultivate material from their own lives as the foundation for new projects.
VIMH co-AD Liv Satchell (The Grief Trilogy, NAYIKA: A Dancing Girl) will facilitate this workshop, sharing the process she uses for every new writing project. Liv says, “I write from my own life – not autobiographically, but using conversations I’ve heard on the tram, humans I’ve met while volunteering, memories, family myth, histories, collecting them all together in a sort of bowerbird nest. The first draft of every play I’ve written is really just a collection of anecdotes that slowly get streamlined into a cohesive text.”
Workshop participants will work through observation and association-based exercises that focus on the specificity of their individual experience, revaluing ‘ordinary living’ for its rich potential as an entry point to the writing process.
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