2021 - ‘Critical Urban Policy Brief: Creatively Engaging the Community in Urban Planning’, RMIT University Urban Futures ECP. By Clare McCracken, Karien Dekker, Kristen Sharp, Kat Ferguson, Grace McQuilten & Angela Clarke.
This briefing draws upon the expertise of RMIT creative arts and urban planning researchers to inform policy makers and the wider community on opportunities to enhance community involvement in urban planning through creative engagement. Extensive development in Melbourne’s middle and outer suburbs is changing the living experience of communities. Conventional forms of consultation in urban planning do not adequately engage communities about what aspects of their suburbs and liveability are important to them, and have limited reach into under-represented groups. This policy brief signals ways in which creative practice can be used to increase community participation and “amplify voices” in the future development of our suburbs.
2021 - ‘Dystopias for Discourse: the role of the artist in rapidly reconfiguring city’, Global Discourse: An interdisciplinary journal of current affairs, Volume 11, Numbers 1-2, February 2021, pp. 67-78. Summer. By Clare McCracken.
This paper grew out of a collaborative research project with Knox City Council, a local authority located on the eastern fringe of Melbourne (Australia) around 35 kilometres from the city centre. It articulates the role site-responsive artworks can play in interrogating the individual impact of climate change and new and old technologies on specific communities by exploring the development and reception of Section 32, an immersive performance installation that converted an ordinary suburban home into a speculative vision of the Australian suburbs, somewhere at the end of the 21st century. Located in an area undergoing rapid population increase, and therefore reconstruction, where residents had little opportunity to engage in a discourse about the planning process, Section 32 became a critical platform for discussion, revealing a public sentiment that was at odds with what local government was seeing in the local press.
2020 - ‘Snowman Killer: art, spatial relations & the Mobilities turn’, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), RMIT University,
This practice-led doctoral project is based on artworks, fieldwork, and the investigation of family archives to research how mobility systems coproduce social space, place and landscape across generations in Australia. Through three carefully framed projects in different geographical milieux, I enact creative dialogues on the social impact of mobility through site-responsive artworks exhibited in public space. These artworks are embedded in the emerging interdisciplinary field known as the 'mobilities turn' and the acknowledgement that in an increasingly mobile world our concept of place is distributed across time and space. Mobilities mould structures of power, identity and the microgeographies of everyday life and my project aims to investigate the social meaning of such shaping through practice-led research.
2017 - ‘Travels and Tapestries: Possibilities for creative exchange in Melbourne and Phnom Penh’, Transformations: Art and the City, Elizabeth M. Grierson (ed), Intellect, Bristol, United Kingdom, pp.73-90. By Clare McCracken and Roger Nelson.
This chapter centres on an exchange between Melbourne-based artist Clare McCracken and a creative community in Phnom Penh's 'White Building' neighbourhood, including artists Khvay Samnang and Sok Chanrado. The chapter presents a critically engaged discussion of a number of recent projects, with a particular focus on work that explores the experiences, needs, desires, and ideas of sectors of less-visible communities. For artists in Cambodia, this has chiefly involved those with lower incomes, and creative communities. For McCracken, this has primarily included women, the elderly and migrants. Through an evaluative discussion of exchanges between McCracken and artists in Phnom Penh, the chapter offers critical insight into the practices of each, while also reflexively arguing for a mode of creative exchange that is based in an equal dialogue and an attentiveness to what the authors term the 'locality-specific'.
2014 - Our Place. Written and illustrated by Clare McCracken, Photography by Pia Johnson.
In 2014 Clare and photographer Pia Johnson spent two months exploring Fawkner, a multicultural, post Second World War suburb in Melbourne’s north. The interviews they conducted and the drawings and photographs they created were turned into an artist book which captures the people, objects, architecture and stories that make Fawkner unique – the narratives of place.
Hard copies of this book are still available upon request - clare@mccracken.com.au
The eBook can be downloaded for free