SEEDFUND Residency – Caitlin Franzmann and Dominique Chen
sub/urban/human
by Caitlin Franzmann and Dominique Chen.
Artists Caitlin Franzmann and Dominique Chen will undertake a place-based residency exploring the ecologies that emerge between human and more-than-human worlds. Working within an urban fringe environment where backyards merge with wildlife habitats, the artists will investigate relationships between local residents and the surrounding plant and tree life through processes of listening, conversation, movement, and embodied observation.
“Navigating new environments we take no road, nor travel, and sit quietly into the deep dark recesses of our belly buttons (guts) while simultaneously listening and responding in place. Through our active listening, talking and feeling, we enable our bodies to map relations in place.”
Their research will consider how felt experiences and environmental knowledge are registered in place, ultimately distilling into a new public experience – to be announced.
SEEDFUND Residencies support artists to test ideas quickly, experimentally, and with low pressure. Artists receive space, funding for artist fees and project expenses, and creative guidance to explore new concepts, collaborations, and small-scale public outcomes.
This SEEDFUND Residency and Metro Arts Program is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its funding and advisory body.
Caitlin Franzmann
Caitlin Franzmann is an artist who creates installations, performances, and participatory works that explore human relationships to ecological processes and change. In response to the fast pace and sensory overstimulation of contemporary urban life, she invites people to slow down, listen, and contemplate interactions with their surroundings and with other living entities, including plants, insects, fungi, and microorganisms. She creates intimate situations for gathering, sensing, ritual, and storytelling to raise awareness of environmental issues specific to a place. She was a member of feminist art collective LEVEL (2013-2017) and a member of Ensayos (2018-2024), a collective research practice centered on extinction, human geography, coastal health and peatland conservation.
Photo courtesy of Rachael Archer.
Dominique Chen
Dominique Chen is a Gamilaraay woman, and interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. Her research areas include Indigenous Art and Indigenous Research Methodologies, and applied relational creative practices as they relate to the care of people and Country, including land management and cultural food growing. Dominique is a mother, writer, maker and avid gardener, and is passionate about the role of creative practice in making positive contributions to community, culture and Country. She is a co-founder of Aboriginal-run not-for-profit, Yuruwan, an organisation which supports learning opportunities for culturally-centred, urban-based food and medicine growing; and co-founder of The Blak Laundry, a collaborative performance/installation work with Ngugi Quandamooka artist Libby Harward.