Our vision is for industrial estates and manufacturing precincts across Australia to be humanised, renewed and revitalised by local artists as part of a major new Circular Economy and Creative Community initiative – Light Industry.

Australia’s manufacturing sector comprises 104,000 businesses and supports 1.27 million jobs. 1980s industrial estates like Kunda Park on the beautiful, unceded Kabi Kabi lands of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast (where our fabulous new Light Industry studio is located) are commonplace across the country. Typically they are poorly designed, underresourced and isolated from the rest of the community. They certainly don’t feature on local tourist brochures and are often overlooked in local planning and renewal projects. Kunda Park is jam-packed on workdays but deserted at night and on weekends, and that presents a great opportunity for a whole host of arts and cultural activities. Manufacturing businesses consume a lot of energy and generate a lot of waste, so they are a vital part of effective climate action. There are great opportunities to implement circular economy approaches, but there is no one to join the dots at the moment.

Through Light Industry, artists will be supported to run their businesses and deliver their work from within their local industrial estates. In exchange for subsidised rent, artists would apply their creative and making skills to connect with local businesses, build new networks, renew, recycle, experiment and create!

The Kunda Park Light Industry program and studio, a pilot for the national initiative, will officially launch in April 2023. We are assembling a team of brilliant local artists and collaborators and devising an exciting, flexible, participant-driven arts program – visual arts and making workshops, design, showcases, installations, dance, public art, photography, fashion, video, lighting and music. We will be guided by our First Peoples First practices and principles, and we will support the Kunda Park community to share their stories with the broader community -‘a place for every story and a story for every place’. Our Arts Front software platform will be adapted to gather and share new knowledge and build a national Light Industry network.