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 through solo durational performance activating relationships with material earth system 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. In 2025 Sundarban Tramjatra will take the form of a Kolkata festival of learning with climate change hotspots.
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, been external examiner of more than thirty Higher Degrees and been an 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.
Since 2019 he has lived on unceded Djab Wurrung & Jardwadjali Country in an ancient granite landscape, where he inhabits ‘unsettling station’, a project of relationship-entangled place-based living. In the present context of intersecting crises, this land-art-ecology-community work creatively explores increasing biodiversity and landscape resilience, decolonising and cultivating communities of stewardship, partnering with Traditional Owners in land management through reintroducing cool Cultural Burning tending to Country and community well-being. Mick has reinvigorated the community based Black Range Land Management Group, which he chairs.
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Academic Profile at RMIT University
contact: mick (at) mickdouglas.net