Malcolm McKinnon

Malcolm McKinnon

The title for this forum is CEAD, which of course stands for community environment art and design, a fairly loaded kind of name and a fairly loaded sort of agenda. The title is CEAD, Does It Make A Difference, or CEAD, So What, is really what we're looking at. I thought it was useful to define some of the terms first of all and particularly I think to talk about where CEAD comes from. It's interesting that the last time there would have been a national community cultural development gathering like this in 1986, the term CEAD had no currency at all I don't think. I think that it dates only from about 1989 in Australia.

I'd have to say that one of the things that I think has been a little bit lacking in the conference is a bit of that articulation of the historical overview because I think that the field has made a number of remarkable transitions over the past decade and one of those has been transitions in terms of the type of work we do.

There are a lot of people now here in this room who work in the CEAD area and who work in the area of cultural planning who 10 years ago were probably working more as or describing themselves as community artists amongst other things. I think that that shift is a substantial shift in terms of not just the type of work that we do, but the type of thinking that we do in terms of integrating our work within other sectors and so forth. That's I think an issue perhaps that we could have dwelt a little bit on. We might deal with it a bit in this forum hopefully.

So it's worth saying that CEAD is a relatively new area of practice but it has gained considerable currency particularly in the field of local government. In fact it's fair to say that probably the CEAD area has been the major reason why in the last 10 years there has been a substantial increase in the sophistication of local government's engagement in cultural development because it relates to the area they most understand, ie the planning and development of the built environment and it's been a very effective subterfuge in many ways for encouraging local councils to adopt a more creative approach towards various aspects of their agenda.

For those people who don't have a good working knowledge of what CEAD stands for, community environment art and design. Essentially we're talking about collaborative, consultative and creative approaches to the planning and design of built environments. Another term, place-making, which I think has American origins, is also used in a fairly synonymous kind of way. It's worth saying though that the term is used by all sorts of people to refer to all sorts of things and not attributes of CEAD in a literal sense, ie the involvement of communities, the consideration of environmental sustainability issues, even the involvement of artists and designers, is apparent in all projects to which the CEAD moniker is attached. That's worth noting but it's a little bit 'by the by'. I wanted to give us a working definition of the term.

In terms of where it's happening, it's fair to say that CEAD projects or projects which have some CEAD attributes are happening all around the country and significantly happening a lot in regional areas of the country. It's been a very effective program for councils and organisations of all descriptions in far-flung regions all over the place to utilise the services of artists and to think creatively about the community identity issues and issues of community meaning in a whole range of places and I think that's significant, the regional coverage of the practice. There are of course significant projects in all major cities and a number of people from this group would have gone on a tour of some of those projects in Brisbane yesterday.

The main question that we want to look at though in this session is not so much what it means, where it comes from, where it's happening, but does it work? That's really the question. We know that it's time-consuming. We know that it's expensive. We know that it's complicated and we want to look at some of those complications but we also want to be a bit critical about its successes and its failures.

I guess the view is that within this forum we can afford to move away from the position of simply saying that it's good and pointing to projects that we know have been successful and saying instead that we know that it's good but we know also that it's difficult and it's fraught with problems and we want to articulate, from the experience of the people on this panel, what some of those problems are. So really we're doing a little bit of a critical deconstruction from our own experience of some of the good things and also some of the not so good things.

Sitting with me up here on this panel are five people and an interpreter. The five people, not the interpreter, will introduce themselves in a little bit of detail but just to let you know who they are very briefly - on my right, Margaret Worth from South Australia, John Mongard based in Queensland, Marily Opperman based in the ACT and New South Wales, David Hinchliffe a Councillor from Brisbane City Council, Techi Masero based in Darwin and moving around the country including a fair bit of moving in the last few days in the forecourt out - whichever direction it is, where she's finished a fantastic work that we're going to go and look at later on, and Techi will be assisted if necessary by Patricia, who's sitting down the end here.

Techi, would you like to move to a slide and give yourself a brief introduction? I should also say we've got a number of slides because we're talking about visual environment and we'll be whizzing through the slides at a fair rate of knots within the next 45 minutes.

Techy Masero

Marily Opperman

David Hinchliffe

Margaret Worth

I'd like to add my personal thanks to the Murri people for welcoming me to this land. I work for an artist and designer in public space. It involves concept development out of cultural and spiritual aspects and goes further then to what best might be explained over five days, visual and spatial planning. I've worked in this area for almost 10 years now and eight of those years have been consciously with a notion of CEAD practice.

My personal interest is in the relationship between people and place and the urban and regional and remote area cultures that are a result of that relationship. It involves working with the legal owners of places, such as the government, and with the user owners of spaces, the people communities and it requires extensive collaboration between a whole range of people - the artists, the designers, the engineers, the planners, council and community. What price public space?

John Mongard

I've worked on six or seven CEAD projects, the first one being I think in 1989, and I guess I've come around a full circle now and feel that I can give something back to CEAD in the ways that practice has changed. I've worked a lot in small country towns, perhaps about 10 or 12 in the last two to three years, and trying to work out a way of being with people in place and working out strategies for their futures which are unique. We're working on a couple of fairly major streetscape projects at the moment, one of them being at Mooloolaba which is not far away from here on the beach and that's under construction at the moment.

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