Expression of Interest: Artist and mentor for an Art with the Stars Project
Would you like to work with Shooting Stars participants in your local community, sharing your creative practice and journey, and teaching them skills in artmaking?
What is Art with the Stars?
Art with the Stars is a project by Shooting Stars that aims to connect Shooting Stars participants with a locally based Aboriginal artist. Art with the Stars uses art, performance and storytelling to strengthen the participants' cultural identity and connection to Country.
The project offers a platform for the participants' stories and experiences of cultural strength and resilience to be shared, and it helps to provide a measure of cultural wellbeing for the Shooting Stars program, which compliments the Yarning with the Stars project (Whitau and Ockerby 2019).
Art making has always been a fundamental part of Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing: "Art-making feeds us and gives us a place and a way of knowing whilst being deeply embedded in the cultural legacies of Australia's First Peoples" Lawson et al. (2019: 93). Making art can be a powerful source of healing.
Providing Shooting Stars participants with access to Aboriginal artists through the project, we hope that they will learn new skills and develop and explore new ways to (re)connect with themselves, their communities, and their country (Grierson and Brearley 2009).
What is involved?
Shooting Stars is based in a number of locations across remote, regional and metro Western Australia and South Australia. To see whether there is a Shooting Stars site in your community, visit: https://shootingstars.com.au/our-sites
As a mentoring artist, you will be required to commit up to 12 hours of contact time with participants during or after school hours. You will share your technical knowledge of artmaking and you are invited to discuss ideas about Aboriginal culture with participants. The project is collaborative, and while participants will determine and make their own artwork under your guidance, you are invited to create an artwork alongside them.
All art materials will be provided by Shooting Stars.
Your payment:
There is an artist fee available, paid at an hourly rate for contact time with participants and the production of a new artwork as part of the project.
If you have an ABN and conduct a business as an artist, please note your hourly rates in the relevant part of the EOI form below for consideration. Otherwise, we can provide advice on hourly rates of pay should your application be successful.