Join Manly Art Gallery & Museum and Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) for the 2026 CEAD Forum, a day of ideas, making and conversation at the intersection of art, culture, and environment. Through talks, performances and hands-on workshops, artists and cultural practitioners will share diverse approaches to responding to the climate and environmental crisis.

Participants are invited to explore practices including biochar, human manure, natural weaving, wind, water, grazing and landscape ecosystems, while gathering for lunch and informal dialogue throughout the day.

The Forum is presented as part of MAG&M’s Collective for Environmental Art & Design (CEAD), an initiative that builds on the Gallery’s longstanding commitment to the intersection of art, design and the environment. CEAD acts as an incubator for innovative programming, institutional collaboration, cultural engagement and research.

KSCA acknowledges the support it received from Soil Land Food for the CEAD Forum.

What to Expect

Hear from artist and cultural organiser Ian Milliss, who reflects on how the art world has changed over the past decade, and asks what new models of cultural production might emerge as traditional markets, funding structures and institutions shift. Drawing on the experience of KSCA, Milliss will consider how artists and communities might imagine alternative ways of working together.

Dabee Wiradjuri elder Peter Swain will lead an interactive performance that brings the audience into a shared process of storytelling and mark-making. As a live drawing unfolds, Swain explores the ways rivers and water connect people, Country and memory.

Artist Alex Wisser will present a performance of The Earth Oracle, responding to the ideas explored in the Art of Adaptation exhibition. Reflecting on the limits of scientific knowledge about land and ecology, Wisser turns to the spiritual and the unknowable, inviting audiences to consider how we might listen differently to the earth.

Participants will also take part in Practice Labs, a series of small-group workshops held in different locations throughout the gallery and its surrounds. Participants will be randomly assigned to a workshop on arrival, encouraging new conversations and unexpected encounters as you explore hands-on approaches to environmental art and adaptation.
 
Practice Labs Workshops

Silk water - led by Dr Laura Fisher
How has water shaped the land around us? Take a walk with Laura Fisher and her blue silk flags, and let's tune into where water is resting and moving. We will create a land art sculpture with a story to tell, floating above the concrete.

Grazing on Landscape Literacy - led by Erika Watson 
Participants are invited to take off their shoes, and lay on their fronts, peering into the centre of the blanket and the Country they rest upon. Erika will facilitate conversations about the ecosystem processes which improve (or deteriorate) ecosystem health: water cycles, nutrient cycles, community dynamics, and solar/energy cycles. Participants will have the opportunity to use scientific observation tools to measure functionality on this micro scale. These tools can then be expanded from the blanket to see how human landscape management affects the functional processes that become the brushstrokes across a greater landscape.

Weaving Water - Do not speak for the other, ask a question - led by Leanne Thompson
Where does one creature end and an ecosystem begin? Hands-on playdreaming with foraged wetland plants. Explore how far something bends before it breaks and question if cultural narratives of structural integrity relate to the ‘welling and seepage’ journey of water or multi-strand flexibility of string.

The Grazing Game - led by Imogen Semmler
The Grazing Game invites players to hypothetically experience the challenge of balancing livestock farming with landscape resilience. Juggling livestock numbers with available pasture, variable rainfall, and financial challenges (including fluctuating cattle prices and unexpected farm costs!), each player must reach the end of a grazing season financially ‘in the black’, without degrading their landscape.

Shit cultures - led by Lucas Ihlein and Dr Kim Williams
Join this entertaining workshop focused on the materiality and cultural resonance of human manure. Did you know that every time you flush the toilet, you combine two valuable resources (human excrement and drinking water) to create toxic sludge? Join us for this “pootopian” workshop to learn how the art of human manure composting can revolutionise everything you take for granted about your poo. See the workings of a fully functional humanure system! Inhale the sweet aroma of garden soil created from human crap! And share your own profound (and hilarious) stories about suburban and rural poo-topias.  

Activating Charcoal: Collaborative Drawing - led by Georgina Pollard
Join a playful, process-driven experiment in collective drawing. Developed during Georgina’s time collaborating with Biochar for Sustainable Soils, this activity draws on the distinction between how charcoal and biochar look the same but are defined by different intentions and methods. Engage in a simple, game-based activity that will generate a single large-scale drawing. The process of drawing defines its meaning. By using rules to create the drawing, collaboration becomes a creative, fun and productive practice.