The Collective Project

Earlier this year I found myself in the company of four creative souls who had formed a new arts collective in my town, Murwillumbah NSW.  It seemed I was the fifth member, and we set about creating community arts events.  As time rolled on our dreams grew bigger and bigger, we envisaged a local arts space that would give the amazing people who live and create here a platform to sell their works, to teach others about tapping into their innate creative talents, to run professional development events for artists and crafter and makers and to be a space where like-minded people could gather.

One of the bigger views was that our arts space could essentially renew or revitalise our CBD. Our hope was that such an inspiring space could breath life into a CBD that was dying.  At last count there were 30 vacant shops in our town, and more and more of these continue to close their doors each week.

We watched as Newcastle's CBD came alive again with the "This is Not Art" campaign and we watched as Lismore's CBD became the host to Pop-Up events, galleries, retail store and open studios.
With these places as inspiring case studies, we hoped that Murwillumbah would embrace this opportunity for change.

We still hope. But it will be a hard race to win.  We still have our dreams for this space, we don't know what form it will take, we don't know if we will get enough support to make it happen straight away - in fact sometimes we feel as if we are holding onto pipe-dreams.

But dreams are meant to be chased and our grand vision may materialise as a tiny boutique space in a hidden laneway or a full store front in main street - we don't know but one thing I do know is that it will take shape, somehow, somewhere and sometime.

I guess that is the beauty of dreams, sometimes they come true.



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