Art is not just something to look at, it’s something to experience together. Through shared experience, dialogue, and collaboration, art becomes a tool for building connection and raising awareness. It fits into what we now call social practice, a kind of art that involves the public, invites participation, and starts conversations.
This way of working is part of arts-based research, a growing field that uses art not only to express ideas but to explore real world problems. Exhibitions become spaces for shared thinking, where research, storytelling, and feeling all come together.
In this case, art can act as a tool for emotional connection, social change, and shared understanding. For me exhibitions are not just for showing art, but for starting conversations, creating understanding, and helping people feel less alone. And this was has happend in Moores Building Art Space in June 2025!
Musicians came and played music, poets and writers came and wrote and read poems in response to works of art. An author and illustrator of children's books came and we had a deep conversation about art as a tool for dealing with emotions.
To deepen this engagement, I organised a public panel discussion as part of the exhibition program. It featured powerful speakers: survivor and advocate Sheree Schonian, and social worker and educator Justine O’Malley. Together we spoke about gender-based violence, advocacy, children’s experiences, and the role of language, education, and art in shaping culture and creating change. It was a meaningful exchange between professionals, artists, and the community, and it showed once again that art can be a bridge between lived experience, social systems, and collective reflection. The event was a vital extension of the exhibition’s purpose, encouraging action, awareness, and solidarity.
Poem written on 12th of June 2025 at the Feminie Fragility Exhibition by Francesca Meehan.
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves"*
the primeval power of
Woman
was once revered
is frequently feared now,
denigrated - 'man' does indeed
too often 'kill the thing he loves'
for some men a woman becomes
a focal point for their anger
engendering a rage
that surely engulfs them
when they contemplate
the killing of those
they love reducing us
to a fear
as though loving us lessens,
weakens them somehow...
fear of the power this love
wields over them
turns into loathing
lloathing of the need
of us mutates into shame.
they can't overcome
and like a glaze love is reduced,
dwarfed, morphs into power-over
as they strive to overcome their
wanting some would as lief crawl
back inside us as desire us -
being rejected by one can
engender a repudiation of all
fearing what they can neither
fathom nor control they hit out
strike smite some even kill -
so to smash us from the pedestal
they'd mistakenly set us upon
little knowing all they had
to do was embrace
us as fellow beings to
acknowledge they didn't need
to be alone that loving is not
weakness
such fear, so misplaced prevails
some quail before both
feminine power and fragility
unable to resist the urge
to exert their power
their failing dominance
in a failing patriarchy, they rise
up against us refuse to allow
we could also be the
source of so much joy if only
they could, would resist
falling into the murderous abyss
that has them kill the one
they purport to, fear to
love
dear men in embracing the feminine
within, the sHe that enfolds he
you would find a wealth of wholeness
of peace of abundant love.
Lamentably femicide is worldwide.
*[Title quoted from The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde]