Deborah Kelly’s CREATION is a collaboration between artists and communities to develop an art work that offers ways to gather and commune – a counterpoint to the natural disasters, plagues and leadership failures of our era. A work drawn from politics, evidence, mysticism and collectivity, CREATION is developed through a multi-venue series of cross-disciplinary projects, public brainstorms and participatory performances.
Central to CREATION is The Liturgy of the Saprophyte, by artist SJ Norman. The liturgy grounds the project in a Gothic First Nations sensibility. CREATION encourages collective creativity and cooperative decision-making, centring marginalised voices in all its aspects and making workshops accessible and enjoyable practices of communal commitment to shared labours and public pleasures.
A publication will be published by Griffith University Art Museum in 2022, documenting and extending the scope and themes of CREATION with newly commissioned academic, theological, environmental and creative reflections on CREATION, as well as documentation of the project’s various iterations.
Image: Deborah Kelly, For Creation (detail) 2020. Animation from analogue collage on cotton paper.