About the Program

In 2023, Melbourne artist Grace Wood joined the Carey Artist-in-Residence Program, working with Year 10 and 11 students to explore the theme of protest and propaganda through the provocation "The Personal is Political." Drawing on her multidisciplinary practice in photography, textiles, and installation, Grace encouraged students to consider how personal experiences, identities, values, and everyday choices can intersect with broader social and political issues.

Throughout the program, Grace shared insights into her work as a contemporary artist, mother, educator, and collaborator with artists with disability. Discussions explored topics including feminism, sustainability, environmental responsibility, and representation, while also introducing students to artists engaging with a wider range of social justice issues.

Students were encouraged to develop their own creative responses to the theme, examining how art can communicate personal perspectives and contribute to contemporary conversations. Grace's distinctive aesthetic, which combines photography with references to textiles and craft traditions, provided an alternative lens through which students could consider the relationship between artistic practice, identity, and activism.

About the Artist

Grace Wood works across photography, collage, sculpture and painting to create large-scale and often site-specific image-based installations. Her work dissects the eccentricities of digital, institutional and personal archives, and is concerned with the ways images are found, stored, altered, and dispersed.

Grace introduced the provocation “The personal is political” in relation to themes of protest and propaganda, referencing a key slogan of second-wave student feminism in the 1970s. Students responded by developing digital collage works printed on canvas, which were then overlaid with screen-printing processes.