Foreword Jane King
I am delighted to introduce this anthology 25 for 25 as a celebration of our collaborative project Curtin Writers Respond, produced to commemorate the Gallery’s 25th Anniversary. This project involved creative writers, both academics and students from the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, who developed new work in response to artworks and exhibitions here at John Curtin Gallery. There has been a history of collaboration between artists and writers at the Gallery, and the opportunity to re-engage with this ‘other’ art-form was a welcome one for the Gallery, as we emerged from COVID in 2021. As far back as 2004, the Gallery initiated a program called Writing the Collection: a collaboration involving the Curtin community and the Curtin University Art Collection itself. The result of this collaboration was a series of exhibitions and installations held over several years between 2004 and 2011. So, when Rachel responded to a call out from the Gallery for academic staff to be involved with our upcoming Perth Festival exhibition at the beginning of 2021 we enthusiastically supported her idea. At that time, we were looking at some new ways to engage with audiences that were very much still in the grip of COVID, and largely staying away. Whilst Western Australia was never locked down to the extent that other states were, we were behind a closed border, with frequent short, sharp lockdowns interrupting any sense of business as usual. Engagement activities that could reach new and different audiences, that appealed to our campus
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