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Mick Douglas’ diverse art practice involves forms of performance, installations, video sound and text, socially engaged art activism, curated collaboration platforms and expanded exhibition initiatives.  His work has been presented internationally in festivals – including the Havana and Venice Biennales, in galleries – including Hobart’s MONA, and more often in non-art contexts and urban public spaces and streetscapes.  Relationships of performance and mobility weave through much of his work: through temporary public art with cultures of transport, particularly around tramways, bicycling and walking, and solo durational performance relations with other than human movements.

Socially engaged large scale public projects include ‘W-11 Tram: an art of journeys’ commissioned by the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, and the ongoing ‘tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways’, also a book in the same name. His solo durational performance projects ‘Container Walk’, ‘Carriage‘ and ‘Return‘ have been presented by the Performance Arcade and Aotearoa-New Zealand Festival of the Arts. These led to ‘Container Island Walk’ and the ensemble project ‘Collective Return’ at MONA in 2017.

Collective creative process-driven collaborations include ‘Idleness Labourity’ projects presented in New York at Everson Museum of Art and 1067Pacific People, ‘Shuttle’ through North American deserts, PPPPP events in Melbourne, and ‘Turning’ as part of Treatment III at Melbourne’s Western Treatment Plant in 2023.

Mick curated ‘Performing Mobilities’, the Australian contribution to the PSI#21 Performance Studies international globally distributed 2015 project Fluid States. He developed a serial performance installation project ‘Circulations‘ to contribute to Fluid States events in Croatia, The Bahamas, Raratonga, Japan, Melbourne, and the Philipines, directing attention to human relations with natural systems, resources and trade through the medium of salt.

Mick is honorary associate professor of transdisciplinary creative practice at RMIT University in Naarm / Melbourne, where he researched and taught for 3 decades. He contributed to the development of the internationally regarded Creative Practice Research PhD program at RMIT, and has supervised more than fifteen creative practice research PhD students to completion, and been external examiner of more than twenty PhD’s and international invited speaker and facilitator of practice research.  His ficto-critical and performative approach to writing has been published in numerous anthologies and the journals Performance Research, JAR Journal of Artistic Research, Architectural Theory Review.

For five years he has lived on unceded Djab Wurrung & Jardwajali Country in Western Victoria, where he inhabits the emergence of ‘unsettling station’: a 16-hectare regenerative and re-indigenising land-art-ecology-practice project of relationship entangled place-based living. In the present context of changing climate, this work creatively explores and shares approaches toward increasing biodiversity; reintroducing fire as a traditional tool for tending to Country; and with acknowledgement of the unceded sovereignty of Traditional Custodians, increasing access to Country and partnership approaches to caring for Country, generating food and sustaining people. Mick currently chairs the community based Black Range Land Management Group.

 

 

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Academic Profile at RMIT University

contact:   mick (at) mickdouglas.net