Creative Arts and Sustainability
Creative Arts play a vital role in health and wellbeing, as well as offering heightened insights to broader, non-specialist audiences. The lateral, propositional approach that characterises the arts provides opportunities for affective responses to issues of climate grief, and avenues for understanding and celebration of the natural world in all its diversity, even, and especially, in times of crisis.
Creative Arts can empower experimental approaches towards imagining speculative futures, as well as slowing down and attuning to the complexities of our present moment with attention, care, and new awareness. In creative fields there is growing call for sustainability within practice, including an examination of material provenance and waste.
Tackling environmental issues with ingenuity and transparency opens spaces for conversations about environmental and social accountability, and models of engagement that can be narrative, embodied, and sensorial. These fresh pathways for mitigating the alienating effects of climate change also map more hopeful futures.
Program Lead
Professor Marie Sierra, Dean, Fine Arts and Music
Early career researcher co-lead
Dr Tessa Laird, Lecturer in Art (Critical & Theoretical Studies), Victorian College of the Arts
Projects and Initiatives
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- Head of Opera Professor Jane Davidson, was the guest editor for the 2024 September edition of Creative Matters, a Deans and Directors of Creative Arts’ publication. The September edition focused on Art and Australia’s Climate Disaster.
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- Professor Jane Davidson and colleagues Dr Gillian Howell and Dr Sarah Woodland devised a mini opera entitled Flood based on the 2022 flooding in Creswick.
- Creating Sustainable Screen Productions is a new Film and Television subject on sustainability tools for film and TV production, making the University of Melbourne the first educational institution in Australia to devise and teach this.
- Listen to Dr Miriama Young’s composition ‘This Earthly Round’ on the effects of climate change.
- Watch Plant Nation, a 2024 dance production inspired by plant wisdom, revisiting Theatrum Botanicum, conceived and choreographed by Gregory Lorenzutti, made with VCA Dance and Design and Production Students. In a time of climate crisis and ‘plant blindness’ (Prudence Gibson) this new iteration of the work applies ecological thinking to performance process and production.
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Sonic Youth is a participatory sound-music project that engages young Victorian people with issues of ecology and sustainability, using music as the connector, led by Associate Professor Miriama Young and Professor Kathryn Bowen.
Participants uploaded soundscape recordings from a place that is meaningful to them. Composer-sound artist Miriama Young used these to create a new composition that will be performed in Melbourne and Sydney as part of the Omega Ensemble's Distant World: The future of our planet in a world gone mad tour in May 2025.