“Art makes the laughter rise from our bellies, the tears well in our eyes, the courage fill our bodies… Art expands our thinking… Art imagines entire worlds – and then it makes them possible, situating us within their boundaries and then exploding those limits, unsettling what’s real and dissolving it into what’s not yet possible. Art makes that possible. After civilisations rise and fall, after all else is lost or forgotten, art endures…”
From Art creates the future
NAVA, 30 March 2020

“Artists draw on the oldest and richest traditions we have to reframe our perceptions, reshape our thinking and reset our horizons. Their work generates new technologies, new working models, new ways of thinking. Art creates our future.”
From “Creative imagination” or “Quiet Australians”?
Evatt Foundation, 29 July 2020

“The ways we live, work and connect with one another have been destabilised perilously; strengthening the ways we create our culture is the way forward. And we need to be prepared to take a new route this time.”
From Why do arts and culture matter to Australia? You may as well ask about the meaning of life
The Guardian, 24 October 2020

“Artists create work that searches our emotions, compels our thinking, upsets power hierarchies, speaks truths both welcome and unwelcome, and recomposes light and colour and sound and movement and spatial quality in ways that expand the scope of possibility for every one of those elements. Artists define what’s possible – and defy what’s impossible.”
From Taking your curatorial position
Guest lecture, KTH Stockholm, 25 September 2019

“…let’s test what’s possible by offering the city as a playground to teams of creative experimenters. Let’s commission them to design spatial explorations, scenarios, games, scavenger hunts… activities premised on small groups moving confidently across a city for work and play. Let’s scatter and redistribute one another. Let’s test and explore.”
From Postcode 3000 and Beyond
City of Melbourne, City of the Future, 23 June 2020

“Politicians and parliaments are trailing artists, designers and academics who are at the forefront in confronting the most pressing questions of our time. And so, right now, we need artists, designers, architects, planners, academics, scientists and policy-makers working together with rigour and with urgency.”
From Engagement
ACUADS Conference keynote, Friday 15 November 2019, published in NiTRO

“The people I admire most are those thinkers and makers who don’t wait to be told that leadership is up to them, who don’t wait to be told that that the future is theirs to create. The language, the objects, the tools, the institutions and the vision that comprise our world – we don’t have to accept these as ready-made. We make them. We live them. We create and we lead.”
From Leadership? It must be up to us. 
Graduation ceremony keynote, Torrens University, 17 April 2019

 

IMAGE: The culminating event in the quarry for Dookie Unearthed, a Regional Arts Victoria Small Town Transformations project, and a life-changing experience. Photograph by Esther Anatolitis.