Winner

Museum of Brisbane

Play Moves

Applying universal design principles and learnings from ongoing consultations with community groups, disability advocates and organisations, the Museum of Brisbane transformed their exhibition galleries into a place of wonder and exploration, creating an immersive, safe interactive space for visitors of all abilities to have fun, share experiences and moments of joy.

Play Moves featured six large-scale installations designed to reignite our sense of play and to challenge the traditional ‘look, don’t touch’ gallery visitor experience.

The exhibition’s content and design encouraged inter-generational learning and access for all abilities. Significantly, it enabled visitors to choose how they experienced, explored and interacted with the artworks.

The outcomes of this project were numerous. From 10 December 2022 – 16 April 2023, Play Moves attracted more than 83,000 visitors, received 198 media mentions reaching an audience of 17.1 million people; and engaged over 1,400 students from traditional and non-traditional school groups including home school, English as second language and special education.

Play Moves built the capacity of the Museum of Brisbane through:

• providing staff with valuable learnings around how to tailor visitor experiences and engage diverse audiences;
• a paid internship program – three of these interns became paid employees in 2023;
• community and stakeholder engagement; and
• expanding their digital capabilities.

Finalists

Gympie Regional Gallery

22.96 / receding

In February 2023, Gympie Regional Gallery presented 22.96/receding, a multi-faceted exhibition commemorating the one-year anniversary of the devastating Gympie floods. This was the second highest recorded flood in the region, measuring 22.96 metres.

22.96/receding was an impactful, collaborative exhibition that filled the Gallery between 14 February to 15 April 2023. It invited the community to engage with a narrative that was not defined by the worst that the river can do, but rather by what the river provides.

Gympie’s community and the strength of its people were at the heart of this exhibition and accompanying public programs.

Working with local artists Miriam Innes, Joolie Gibbs and Leeroy Todd, and with not-for-profit arts groups, environmental bodies, academics and community groups, Gympie Regional Gallery’s exhibition 22.96/receding gave voice to the unspoken impacts of the natural disaster on the social, environmental and economic fabric of the region.

Ipswich Art Gallery

Just Be Your Selfie

The origins of The Great and Grand Rumpus exhibition lie in the limitless imaginations of children. The fifteen-month-long community engagement project invited children from around Brisbane to expand their imaginations and, in doing so, dream up a collection of the most fantastic, astonishing and magical things one could expect to see. State Library of Queensland (SLQ) staff worked with young people to create a larger-than-life immersive exhibition that brought a sense of intergenerational play and whimsy to SLQ Gallery.

Over the course of the project 1,562 participants were intimately engaged in the Imagine, Design and Build phases of the project. The participant body was made up of 414 primary students, 414 secondary students, 531 tertiary students and 203 members of the public.

During project development, participants involved in the Design and Build stages of the project were brought into The Edge and guided by SLQ staff through a design thinking and fabrication process where they learned to build large-scale cardboard creatures and integrate immersive technology and lighting in order to bring to life the imagined creatures of The Great and Grand Rumpus.

The judges commended State Library of Queensland for its leadership and vision, being a place where the community can gather to engage in project-directed education, and for offering the community access to tools, expertise, and one another in an immersive, hands-on, intergenerational and intersectional learning context.

Mapoon Cultural Centre

Creating a New Cultural Centre for Mapoon

In February 2023, the Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council opened the Mapoon Cultural Centre, an exciting new, multi-purpose cultural centre that caters for locals and visitors to the community.

Designed as an integrated centre, it comprises:

• A cultural keeping place;
• An Indigenous Knowledge Centre
• An arts studio space
• A recording studio
• Outdoor, undercover performance and activities areas
• A full serviced kitchen/catering facility
• A gallery

The Mapoon Cultural Centre is a direct outcome of a whole of community master planning project that was initiated in 2016 by the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships with Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council and undertaken by AECOM Australia PTY LTD.

By liaising and engaging specialists and stakeholders from the planning and the cultural sectors, Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council has ensured that their new Cultural Centre is informed by best practice and industry standards. They are also commended for investing in their staff – this training and professional support in areas including exhibition displays, collection storage and management, has been a valuable part of the project and its success.