WHO
The Children’s Sensorium projects, exhibitions and research is led by curator Grace McQuilten with artistic direction from Boonwurrung elder N’Arwee’t Carolyn Briggs. It has been developed with leading contemporary artists including Larissa Hjorth (play and games), Hiromi Tango (colour and textile installation), Fiona Hillary (light), Philip Samartzis (sound), Heather Hesterman (planting and cultivation of plants), Anna Schwann (scent installation) with designer Anthony Clarke (Bloxas) and embodiment specialists Tamara Borovica, Angela Clarke and Camilla Maling (Live Particle). Strategies for emotional resilience and wellbeing have been developed with the guidance of critical mental health researchers Renata Kokanović and Tamara Borovica and industry collaborator, Live Particle.
Anthony Clarke
Anthony Clarke is a practicing architect and educator. Anthony established BLOXAS – A Practice for Empathic and Experimental Architecture in 2010. BLOXAS’ approach is led by research, experimentation, curiosity and care. These elements are inherent in their philosophy and drive their interrogative and empathetic response. Specialists from a variety of disciplines contribute to their curative understanding of individual and collective behaviour, sensory perception, physiology and phenomenology. BLOXAS investigates how people affect – and are at the effect of – their designs. Anthony completed his PhD in 2023 at Monash University titled: Architecture of Care; Using an Auto-Ethnographic Design Approach to Rearticulate Practice.
Moon Girle
Moon Girle is a neurodiverse artist that is part of the LGBTIQ community, residing in Naarm, Melbourne. Her artistic narratives playfully transcend individual experiences, engaging with the pulsating heart of globalisation and community.
Discarded objects are foraged and crafted into whimsical interactive installations, sculptures, paintings and engagingly playful workshops. Pulled between physical reality and her imagination, she crafts textural, eclectic and vivid symphonies of colour which evolve as she makes them. Facilitating a bridge between the observer’s inner child to be explored and nourished. Moon Girle’s work illuminates the majesty of circular economies using kitschy aesthetics.
Heather Hesterman
Heather Hesterman is an artist/educator/researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne who investigates intersections of place, people, and plants.
She explores a site's spatial, political, and historical perspectives, incorporating installation, walking, and public art practices.
Combined expertise in Fine Art and Landscape Design provides complementary perspectives from which she investigates the tacit and explicit effects of human interactions in the environment. Heather is a current PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, addressing human-plant relations by cultivating chlorophilia- a love for plants and investigating how plants might inform creative practice.
https://heatherhesterman.com/
Fiona Hillary
Fiona Hillary is an artist and academic based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works in the public realm and is passionate about site-specific fieldwork practices and the human/non-human relationships that reveal themselves across time.
Photograph: Jody Haines.
Larissa Hjorth
Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is a socially-engaged artist and digital ethnographer. Hjorth has two decades experience working in interdisciplinary, collaborative, playful and socially innovative digital media methods to explore intergenerational relationships in cross-cultural contexts.
Live Particle
Live Particle share embodied practice & somatics for mental, physical & creative health.
Phillip Samartzis
Professor Philip Samartzis is a sound artist, researcher, and curator with an interest in the social and environmental conditions of remote regions. His work encompasses the Australian Antarctic Territory, the Swiss and Australian Alps, and the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. Philip is currently a chief investigator on an Australia Research Council Discovery Project titled Creative Antarctica, Artists and Writers in the Far South, and leader of the Sound Art and Auditory Culture Lab in the School of Art at RMIT.
Anna Schwann
Anna Schwann works in an expanded sculptural practice that uses sensory prompts to engage with the audience. Living on unceded DjaDja Wurrung land of the Djaara people.
Hiromi Tango
Hiromi Tango is a Japanese Australian Artist who migrated to Australia in 1998 from Shikoku Island, Japan. She has been a resident of the Bundjalung Country, Tweed Heads, NSW since 2014.
Tamara Borovica
Dr. Tamara Borovica (she/her) is a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow and creative artist at the Social Equity Research Centre, the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. Tamara's research focuses on innovative psycho-social approaches to emotionality, mental health, and resilience, with particular expertise in participatory and arts-based methods and interventions. Her work is grounded in using creative, embodied methods to make research more inclusive and transformative for diverse communities. Committed to applied, lived experience and participatory research, Tamara collaborates with groups and communities to improve mental health and wellbeing, ensuring that those directly impacted by trauma, inequality and loss have a voice in shaping the research that affects their lives. Tamara's role in The Children's Sensorium project is evaluation and contributing with mental health advice.
Renata Kokanović
Renata Kokanović is a Professor of Sociology (Mental Health) and an RMIT University Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow. She is the Lead Investigator of the Borderline Personality as Social Phenomena project.