Events
Exhibitions
Writing the West
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Photo: Bodies of Water, Monique Nair, Christy Tan, Hiếu Phung. 2022. Photography: Matto Lucas
Exhibitions
Writing the West
Exhibition Dates: 8 January – 28 March, 2027
Event Information
Expressions of Interest are now open.
To submit your interest, please complete the online form below.
Writing the West is an upcoming creative development opportunity for 16 to 25 year olds. It brings together art, writing and public space, asking how young people might respond to Melbourne’s west at a time of change.
As an artist-in-residence at Footscray Community Arts in 2023, Gurmeet Kaur began to think differently about what writing could do beyond the page. Working alongside the Maribyrnong River, she became interested in poetry as something spatial: something encountered while walking, something that can sit on a wall, interrupt a pathway, or change how we look at a familiar place.
Writing the West emerged from that thinking. It is both a continuation of her writing practice and an expansion of it into poetic installation and collaborative curatorial work.
The project begins on Wurundjeri Country, alongside the Maribyrnong River, evoking questions of migration and belonging. As a settler-migrant, Gurmeet has often encountered these questions through frameworks of diaspora, displacement and place. But these frameworks can too easily centre settler-migrant narratives rather than the sovereignty, knowledge and culture of the First Peoples of this place. For this project, Country is the place from which the work begins.
Through consultation with First Nations Elders and advisors, the project asks participants to listen first: to the river, the land, its histories and the knowledge held within Country. From there, young people are invited to think about their own relationships to place through language, land, memory, migration and ecology.
The workshops are a space to walk, map, remember, listen, and write. They are also a space to ask what poetry might become when it moves beyond the page. The resulting works will bring young people’s words into the public landscape through text, installation, and other forms.
In doing so, Writing the West asks whose words we encounter in public space, whose histories are made visible, and how young people might connect to place by writing themselves into a changing landscape while recognising that this is Wurundjeri Country, with histories, knowledge and sovereignty that long predate the stories we bring to it.
The works will be fragments rather than a single story of Footscray. They hold a moment in which young people are looking closely at where they are, where they have come from, and what it might mean to belong here.
Writing the West is an extension of Gurmeet’s own movement from writer to artist and curator, from writing about place to making work with people, and from the page into the spaces we share.
Presented by Footscray Community Arts.
This project is supported by the Maribyrnong City Council Community Grants Program, and the Footscray Rotary Foundation.
Date & Times
- When
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Friday 8 January 9:30 am
Sunday 28 March 4:00 pm
- Venue
- Entrance Gallery
- Cost
Free
Accessibility
While our heritage building and outdoor spaces pose challenges, we’re actively seeking solutions and value your input. Our warehouse venues are wheelchair accessible, and we offer assistance for those who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have speech impairments. Please call or email us if we can help plan your journey.
Phone: 03 9362 8888
Email: reception@footscrayarts.com
Expressions of Interest are now open.
Are you aged 16–25 and interested in writing, art, design, poetry or telling stories about where you live?
Submit the form below to express your interest in joining Writing the West, a six-workshop creative project with Gurmeet Kaur and Footscray Community Arts exploring the Maribyrnong River, Country, migration, memory, belonging and change through writing and public art.
You don’t need to be an experienced writer or artist. We’re interested in your ideas, perspectives and curiosity.
Selected participants will be paid an honorarium of $100 for their contribution, and your work may become part of a public exhibition at Footscray Community Arts from January to March 2027.
Expression of Interest Form
Applications Close 5pm, Monday 28 September 2026
Meet the Artists
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Gurmeet Kaur
Gurmeet Kaur is a writer, poet and curator working across poetry, criticism, and curatorial practice. Her writing has appeared in Liminal, Best of Australian Poems, Cordite Poetry Review, Debris, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Sydney Review of Books and elsewhere. She has been recognised in the Ambit Annual Competition and The Next Chapter Fellowship, was a 2023 New Critic with Kill Your Darlings, and has received a Varuna Residential Fellowship and a City of Maribyrnong residency. She is a 2026 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow.
Gurmeet’s curatorial practice has developed through working with artists, communities and cultural institutions. She was Lead Creative Producer for Culture Makers, a four-year partnership at Museums Victoria supporting artists through collaborative and co-making processes, and co-curated Threads, an immersive installation presented at Melbourne Museum and the Immigration Museum. She also edited Culture Makers (Museums Victoria, 2025), a publication documenting the project.
Her relationship to public and site-responsive practice has grown through her work at Footscray Community Arts, where she was an artist-in-residence and developed Flood Myth, a poetic installation responding to the Maribyrnong River, exhibited as part of Same River Twice at the Emerging Writers’ Festival. This experience led her to think more deeply about poetry as a spatial practice and how writing can be encountered through movement, landscape and shared public space.
Gurmeet’s work has been supported by Creative Australia, the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund, Grand Plan Funding and the City of Maribyrnong. Gurmeet is a qualified teacher and studied International Relations and History at the London School of Economics. She is currently completing an MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia.
