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| Paper on Skin (wearable art)from https://burnieartscouncil.com/ |
To take our minds off the calamity for a moment. Here is some interesting information via our committee member Dawn Oelrich about the QUT – ARC national study Burnie Regional Art Gallery is taking part in. Dawn of course is the Director of BRAG. The preliminary work was done in 2019 and BRAG only just got started this year and then of course everything halted. BRAG have had interviews and some zoom meetings but apart from being interviewed myself, Dawn is also liaising and organising with the researchers to contact and connect with arts programs and activities up here. Paper on Skin (wearable art) and Burnie Shines are two projects that are in doubt at this stage so she is communicating with the researchers about how they go from here.
The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia: A social impact model
This project,
headed up by Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Brisbane, will address the challenge to effectively target regional arts
funding to programs and activities that build capacity and have lasting impact
for end-users. It will deliver a framework for evaluating the arts, to argue
for the arts to be included in a broader understanding of community and
national wellbeing and success. This framework will position Australia as an
international leader in articulating and responding to
the social impact of the arts. The research field sites have been chosen in
consultation with our partners as communities whose capacity and challenges are
reflected throughout much of regional Australia. Included in the partnership
are Burnie City Council (Art Gallery as liaison), the combined Red Ridge
Councils of Central Queensland, the Australia Council, the Regional Arts
Institute, Regional Arts Australia and the Central Western Qld Remote Area
Planning & Development Board.
The term
regional arts is a catch-all for vastly different activities and areas, from
large prosperous regional centres to isolated remote townships. The current ‘one size fits all’ approach to
regional arts funding, by
Federal/State/Local governments and philanthropic bodies, leaves communities on
the margins of decision making and often dealing with unwanted and expensive
fly-in-fly-out arts programs. While social impact is an increasing field of
research and investigation, its application to the creative arts has not been
significantly understood or examined from an end user perspective. This
research will collaborate with two geographically opposed regional communities,
northwest Tasmania and central Queensland, both of whom face considerable
challenges while also having an activated creative landscape, to develop a
social impact toolkit. This holistic toolkit will consist of an engagement
and evaluation framework to uncover, articulate and measure the social impact
of the creative arts in their communities in order to secure funding and
investment for community-led and sustainable arts programs.
The
processes and outcomes present a radical new approach to collaborating with
communities to create avenues of communication about the centrality of arts and
cultural activities to the success and wellbeing of regional communities. The
specific benefits include evidence based research to maximise existing
investment in regional arts programs, to develop responsive long-term policy
for sector stability, and to advocate for a recalibrating the “urban-centric”
approaches to regional arts services. Collaborative research from the
respective centres presents a rare opportunity to address the long standing
problem facing regional and remote communities in Australia of how to
strategically communicate and effectively evaluate the social impact of the
creative arts in their communities. The consequence of this ongoing issue
is the lack of policy for regional arts funding that responds to community
capacity and need, which is potentially failing regional communities.
Thankyou Dawn!
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