The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) has announced Dominique Chen, Libby Harward and Caitlin Franzmann as the recipients of the 2022 Carstairs Grant for socially-engaged arts projects. Queensland-based artists Chen, Harward and Franzmann will use the $10,000 prize to collaboratively develop a new socially engaged work that centres fermentation as a way of thinking through culture, diversity and belonging to place. The outcome of the work, Cultures of Care, will be incorporated as part of the Cementa Festival and residency program in Kandos, New South Wales in 2024.

Libby Harward and Dominique Chen, untitled, 2022, ‘Fermenting bonyi/bunya nuts in a bed of river mud’. Installation as part of Caitlin Franzmann’s Natural State exhibition at The Condensery, Somerset Regional Art Gallery, 2022. Photograph: Caitlin Franzmann
The artists, individually and collectively, adopt socially engaged creative processes to explore and exchange ways of understanding, being with, and belonging to, place. Their recent collaborations focus on microbial processes as a way of thinking through these themes both metaphorically and literally.
In 2022, Gamilaraay and Quandamooka artists Chen and Harward collaborated on a relational project (Untitled) Bonyi Living Culture which explored connection to their living culture through ancient durational practices of Bonyi (Bunya nut) fermentation processes. Centred around a bowl of fermenting Bonyi, the artists hosted talks, workshops and shared meals with Yinibara custodians and their guests to reconnect with ancient fermentation processes. It is this work that brought the three artists together to make broader connections and experiences of ferments across cultures, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, adding to paths of (re)discovery and insight. In November 2022, the artists brought their relational practices together for the exhibition Natural State at The Condensery in Somerset region, also part of Yinibara Country.
“Some of the strongest points of the application from Dominique Chen, Libby Harward and Caitlin Franzmann were elements such as working in regional areas, knowledge sharing across cultures and the activation of spaces through food, guided walks and a yarning circle,” said artist Zanny Begg, who was one of this year’s grant assessors alongside artist and 2020 Carstairs Prize recipient Shahmen Suku. “It is very exciting to see the fermentation process centred in the project, Cultures of Care.”
The Carstairs Grant offers assistance to an artist or group to present a socially engaged art project that embraces participatory and collaborative experiences. The aim of the funding is to bring participants into active dialogue with the artist in order to involve audiences beyond the art community.