Daniel Gleeson: Hello everyone. My name is Daniel Gleeson. I'm the Director of Community Engagement here at the National Library of Australia. It's my pleasure to welcome you all here today for this special event.
But before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we're on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land and I pay my respects to their elders both past and present and to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Just a quick mention if you've got a phone on, make sure it's on silent. You don't want to be the person that everyone looks at when it starts ringing in the middle of a presentation.

Look, it's my absolute pleasure today to introduce you all to Matthew Aberline. Matt came to our rescue this year when we discovered late in 2024 that unavoidable building works would mean that the front of our library would be covered in scaffolding for the period of the Enlighten Festival. This was a bit of a disaster because the scaffolding blocks off the marble cladding that we would normally use to project detailed images on. The scaffolding meant that we couldn't progress with our plans to project images from our Fit to Print photographic exhibition onto the building. I just gave a plug there for our major exhibition, which is upstairs and it's free.

So we looked at a number of options, but nothing really seemed right for us. In fact, we then started considering not taking part in Enlighten this year. But thankfully Matt was around the building and he was working with one of my colleagues on a project to enliven the podium. So I asked Matt if he'd be happy if we could use one of his installations to decorate the podium for Enlighten in 2025, and my colleague's loss was my gain. Matt suggested we use The Guardians, which he describes as an inflatable interactive landscape. He said that would be the perfect solution. You can imagine my procurement paperwork that I was filling out. I was looking to lease a inflatable interactive landscape.

But working with Matt has been absolutely fantastic and it's also been great to work with his artworks. It's been my job to inflate The Guardians each evening of the festival and as I've done that, my admiration for Matt has grown. Matt has that rare combination. He has the artistic vision, but he also has the skills and the expertise to be able to achieve that vision.

Each pod is beautifully constructed and very robust. We could really see how deeply Matt has thought about his installation, thought about their construction, and you can see that he's done multiple versions to get it because I can't see how they could be improved. As a client. It's so wonderful to work with an installation that is as carefully considered and easy to use as The Guardians.

And last night I set up The Guardians for the last time and there was a storm moving to the south. The darkened clouds looked absolutely striking against these illuminated works and I thought how much I'm going to miss them when they're gone. I'm getting a bit emotional about it in fact, and I don't know why I've really enjoyed working with The guardians for the last fortnight.

They have also brought a huge number of people onto the podium during the festival, and I've seen how members of the public have walked amongst these artworks full of wonder and enjoyment. In my view, the interactive and tactile nature of the work has given the Library a standout and memorable offering for the Enlighten Festival despite the challenges of our building works.

Now to introduce Matt. Matt started his career in Canberra and has collaborated on projects with the United Nations General Assembly, World Pride New York, the Powerhouse Museum and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, creating transformative public installations that explore themes of community identity and inclusivity. Matt is a full-time working artist. In fact, he probably works too hard. Please welcome Matt Aberline.

Matt Aberline: I'm kind of like full-time working artist? It's kind of all the time working artist, it's like. Hello everybody. Thank you very much for coming to join us today. We're going to talk for about 30 minutes. Hopefully it's going to be really kind of fast paced and I'm going to talk about eight years of this sort of investigation that I've been going through with my artwork and I'm going to do it very, very quickly and hit interesting, the things that I learned at that time, but I'm going to do it very rapidly. There's a lot of content, there's a lot of video. And if you like, we can do questions and that sort of thing at the end, but please thank you for coming and do feel very welcome.

Yeah, I was a Canberra boy, so I grew up in Canberra. I grew up at Canberra in a time where I spent on my time living at Gorman house and working with David Branson and that sort of stuff. And then my career has taken me all around the world. Daniel mentioned very briefly that one of the clients that I worked with was the United Nations General Assembly and we did a project that actually I will talk to you about later, but at the time the UN met us and we're like, 'Hey, can you make a project that makes drug resistant gonorrhoea and untreatable tuberculosis fun?' And we were like, 'yeah, we can do that'. We actually made really interesting work, but it's not pretty. But certainly was a really interesting way for delegates to talk about antimicrobial resistance.

Anyway, hello, I'm Matthew Aberline. We're here at the Library. We're going to talk a little bit about me, some thoughts about how I think creativity works and would be amazing if you could keep kind of looking at, if you're a creative person or a practitioner or somebody works in a public space, if you could keep thinking about, 'hey, that's an interesting idea. How do I apply that to my own practise?' And then I'd like to wrap it up with what I would like to do next.

We just had this fabulous project called The Guardians, which was a collaboration with the National Library and Electric Canvas who did their projections. And I'm not sure if everybody saw it, but it was a really kind of, or I mentioned it's a biographic artwork in that it's about I come from a long line of flower people, all the matriarchs in my family, like my mom and my grandmother and my sister all florists. So this, using flowers to talk about our emotions is kind of something very instilled in our family. If you haven't seen it, I'll show you video.

An amazing work in that it kind of combined these enormous building scaled projections, but there was also kind of a handcrafted, immersive, inflatable landscape that people were able to journey through and have this kind of amazing macro experience that you could enjoy from hundreds of metres away, but you can also have a very kind of personal experience and a really kind of intimate journey in the landscape. And that was something that I found really, really interesting.

I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a second, but I wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into the process of the making of. So we do make everything ourselves. I have a studio in Sydney and so I have a team of people who have been working with me for 10 years plus. We do understand every single stitch of everything that we create. And the design process, you'll see some of the design process in other places, but it starts off in a very kind of deeply analogue space where we're actually scribble and we make things out of sticky tape and cardboard. In fact, some of my earliest childhood memories are in my mother's flower shop upstairs making things out of sticky tape and paper and cardboard and the smell of flowers in the air. And so that's my current workshop.

And so this building objects is like a deeply connected part of our process and our identity, but at the same time, it's incredibly digital. We use every single digital tool that we have at our disposal to, often the process is that things start in very either in a photographic space. On the way here, I stayed at a flower farm, and so as that storm Daniel was talking about was rolling and I was running around the flower farm taking photographs. Sometimes it's about a photographic collage, scribbling, drawing hand work and then taken into a digital space. And you'll see that in this artwork the I'm working in Photoshop to design the actual shapes.

So we're working at scale here. Pause. So just pause. The thing that's really interesting is that when you work at this sort of scale, you might be used to working at A3 or A4, that sort of thing. That Photoshop file is four and a half metres tall because we printed that scale, and so we're working at 150 DPI and off it goes. There's a work that I'll show you a little bit later that the Photoshop file that we're working in to actually divides the work. And we should bear in mind we're not using vectors, we're using [unclear] we're using pixels. It was actually kind of like 13 metres high by 20 metres wide, and there's a lot of processing power.

Some of the things that I thought were really, really interesting about The Guardians, that was the, and I think really we weren't even possibly aware of how unique it was until after we'd done it, was that we were able to provide this macro, giant sized experience. Which is very common. You go to a life festival and you can see these kind of projections. And so it's this massive collective experience where tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people having this experience. But then we were able to provide this very intimate human experience. And one of the things that really guided this part of my practise actually happened in Enlighten about eight years ago when I was seeing an artwork and I was like, 'this is really amazing and I just want to touch it'. And just some very motivated security person there and they're like, 'don't touch it'. I was like, but I just want to complete the circle of understanding and just to understand physically what the artwork meant. So at that time it became an intuitive part of my process that everything that I create should have a tactile experience and people are actually allowed to touch it and experience. Not everybody who does it in a respectful way. And so we have to build that into the process, but I think it's a lovely way to close that sensory loop.

Increasingly, I think there's something about providing different modalities of experiencing an artwork. I've got to look at this further as we go through, but obviously there's the visual that was the audio soundtrack. I'm laughing because it was actually my first soundtrack that I put together and next you know it's been kind of broadcast across the national capitol.

And then there was something that was really interesting that really came through to me just on this particular project, even though it's been happening for years. These our works are acts of mass collaboration and it's a collaboration that's happening way beyond my control or even my understanding. And I'm only just getting clued into that when mostly through social media and you go like, oh, this person's posting this and this person's posting that, and you're realising that there are thousands of people having a creative experience that is motivated by your work and that that work has created an opportunity or an invitation to create, interact, build, have conversations. All of which are a part of that kind of amazing creative process, but something that I don't have any control over, but it resonates across communities and I think that's something that's really, really fascinating about this work.

The first thing that I really, I think is the most important part of my practise is that collaboration is essential for growth. This is probably not one, it's one of my most favourite works. I did it with my colleague Morris Goldberg a few years ago and we collaborated with Wiradjuri artist, Owen Lyons, to create this work that floated on a lagoon in Wagga Wagga. And it was a really, really interesting engineering project because was. The Guardians was an inflatable that had to be continually pumped full of air. These were pneumatic inflatables, a little bit like a pool toy where you blow 'em up once and they just stay blown up. And then the skin of the artwork was made out of recycled PET and the whole thing was powered by solar power. And so it had all these dimensions about the engineering that I found really, really interesting. And so the work floated on the lagoon and it was a kinetic work and moved with the wind, which was a really lovely experience.

This work ended up being used by Create New South Wales in the booklet of how to do public art, which was very flattering. This is the behind the scenes. This is our old studio, and there's Morris right there. Again, the collaboration builds opportunity. So that was Owen there. Builds [unclear]. So in a way the collaboration allowed for deeper permission. And so it meant for accelerated growth. I think if any artist or creative practitioner wants to grow quickly, the fastest way to do it is to go like, 'hey, you're clever at this and I'm good at this. Why don't we work something out?' That is the fastest way to make amazing things happen?

You may have noticed I talk about art in weird ways, so I'm kind of like 'leveraging opportunities and connections'. It's like what sort of artist looks like that? What I think every artist has to know how to leverage the opportunities that are happening. And so if you have more networks through the collaboration, then that's only something that's beneficial. And then of course it's fun, fun to collaborate, fun to grow.

Then something started to change in the work. This idea of kind of art for social change became something that became very deeply embedded into the work. It is interesting that The Guardians is probably the most personal work that I've ever done in 8 years. It's probably the only personal work. Everything else has been kind of about really issues that I've been passionate about. And so we've worked, Morris Goldberg and I have worked a lot within the LGB, the Rainbow Community, and we did a series of projects called Live for Love, which started off as a celebration of 40 years of Mardi Gras. And then World Pride saw that what we did in New York and they're like, 'hey, can you come to New York?' We're like, 'yes, of course we can'. And there was this kind of really amazing experience where we were like, 'well, where are we going to put you in New York?' And they're like, 'oh, well we could put you over here or we can put you over there'. And then six weeks out they go, 'you know what? We're going to put you in the World Trade Centre Oculus' in the middle of this amazing structure. So at that time I was like, 'alright, we're stopping everything. We're starting right from the beginning' and we create this work, the Live for Love tripod, which was three stories high even though it looks like a tiny little thing in the World Trade Centre. And we wanted the work to be a conversation starter about the evolution of LGBTQI+ rights in Australia, starting from treatment of the gay community in World War II, the queer First Nations experience, [unclear] aids activism. Obviously there's a lot of kind of AIDS activism being referenced in the work, but we wanted to do it in a way that was fun. We didn't want to be like, 'hey, AIDS!'. And we wanted it to be like, 'hey, actually there's all these stories and depths and celebrations and sad times that we want to talk to about', and we wanted the viewer to be able to access the work in their own way.

But this idea of creating artwork that became a tool for social change, that it actually became a device that was used to initiate conversation that caused change. Anyway, we did the thing where we interviewed people that were around the work and it was during World Pride. The work also got used by Sydney World Pride bid. So it actually got used as a three story high conversation starter, 'hey, maybe we should do world pride in Sydney. Here's a three story work we can have a chat under.'

Matt Aberline (in video): In one word, how does this work make you feel?

Interviewee 1 (in video): How does this work make me feel?

Matt Aberline (in video): One word

Interviewee 1 (in video): Love.

Interviewee 2 (in video): Included.

Interviewee 3 (in video): Community.

Interviewee 4 (in video): Amazing.

Interviewee 5 (in video): Thankful.

Interviewee 6 (in video): Included.

Interviewee 7 (in video): Inspired.

Interviewee 8 (in video): Included

Interviewee 9 (in video): Empowering.

Matt Aberline (in video): Yay!

Interviewee 10 (in video): Included.

Matt Aberline (in video): Yeah, just one word.

Interviewee 11 (in video): Happy.

Interviewee 12 (in video): Okay, inspirational.

Interviewee 13 (in video): Uplifted.

Interviewee 14 (in video): Proud. Definitely proud.

Interviewee 15 (in video): Emotional.

Matt Aberline (in video): Emotion?

Interviewee 15 (in video): Emotional.

Interviewee 16 (in video): Love.

Interviewee 17 (in video): Love, love.

Interviewee 18 (in video): Love.

Interviewee 19 (in video): Like a unicorn.

Interviewee 18 (in video): That's not one word.

Matt Aberline: So yeah, this idea of not just making art for art's sake or art because it's decorative and believe me, I love decorative art. That is my happy place. The art that is actually designed to initiate really complex conversations was the work kind of started in that kind of really interesting direction. Interesting enough, this idea of leveraging and intellectual property and things growing and developing over time is kind of a hallmark of the practise.

And the Powerhouse Museum saw what we had done and they were doing an exhibition also for world Pride when it came to Australia. And they were like, 'can you interpret some of our collection and make a seven high metre gateway to the exhibition?' And we were like, 'yeah, we can do that'. One of the things that is really interesting about is that the Powerhouse were really nervous that they have a heritage listed.

Everything's heritage listed, you can't touch anything. And so they were very nervous about us working with them. And in this behind the scenes video that, we did test after test of, I call them because my background, it's kind of like in costume design. When I first, when I was in Canberra living in Canberra, all I was doing was doing costume design. So this is in the nineties, and so I would say that we were doing this kind of fittings, we were fitting the work at the museum. And one of the things about reinterpreting the collection, finding stuff in the collection that was particularly triggering and this 'Fierce queen dies of AIDS' is something that I just loved. I won't tell you what the punchline is because it's just right next to it. 'Attitude survives.' Oh, oh, sorry. I sent two videos.

So this is part of the fun kind of testing where we're continually trying to make sure everybody's included in the process during, often arrive at everything being right instantly. Often it takes a few goes to get all the pieces in the right place at the right time. And then finally, I think this is the last fitting. Yeah, there's still a few things that you can see. There's a grey circle at the top of that. That means that's a holding place for something to go in. It's like one of the last fittings that we did with the work. What is really interesting about this work though, now that I think about it, is that if you see this butterfly here, everybody was set up, we set them all up, everybody was like, 'I'm going to be so naughty, and I just got to touch the butterfly'. We had invited everyone to touch that butterfly, and we knew that that was an invitation.

And so that was part of the subtleties about managing the interaction around these sorts of works where we can guide people to have a particular type of interaction. And those butterflies were particularly reinforced so that you could actually, and they were designed to deal with that. So as the work has evolved, these subtleties around knowing how to guide the interaction and get the results, get the participation that you'd like.
Art for social change, for me, I use fun as a trigger to create immediate connection. And then I hope that people will linger and investigate the work a little bit more and be like, 'hey, what does that pink triangle mean?' Or 'what is prep?' Or there's layers of building a inquiry into the work play as discovery is like that's what I'm all about. Play is the most useful tool for knowledge. If you can't have play then, and I actually do not know what that would be, life wouldn't be worth living.

And I think lastly, you could see that the community around the Live for Love artwork will galvanise interaction that will galvanise into being vocal. And I think that's something that's really unique and really powerful. And for me to increasingly make artwork that captures that, I think that's going to be kind of definitely the direction,

The death of the original or what is a project. The practise has evolved so much that when I talked about how in the nineties I was in Canberra and I was doing all these theatre shows, I was in creating all this intellectual property and it would exist for six weeks or a couple of days or a couple of months, and then we just wind up in a cupboard somewhere and never be seen again. And so this idea of capturing your intellectual property and making sure that you're kind of getting every little grain of usefulness out of that intellectual property, and it doesn't just rot away in some cupboard somewhere. And that's why I kind of call it this kind of the death of the original. And particularly for my practise, which is no matter how it starts, whether it's analogue or photograph or just scribbling something, it always ends up digital somehow. So for me, the digital is the original, but the capacity for the digital is limitless.

So we did this work called The Sun is Smiling, the nice smile bag, which was about, we had this invitation to work with Barangaroo and Lendlease where we wanted to work with the community at Barangaroo. And just take a moment to be thankful, have a little reflection on what your work life was and what your home life was, and that transition between the two, because the interaction mostly happened on a Friday as the people are transitioning from their work life to their rest life. You can see this is sort of scribbling that I do. Texta, everybody loves the texta. We're just trying to work out simple ways of communicating what the idea is to nor the key creatives or whoever's involved.

But then the work starts to come together and it comes together in so many different ways where it's like it can go on a wall, it can be a tactile, decorative object like [unclear] or inflatable. And you can see that as the work evolves, that if we hang onto to that idea, that little gesture that originally it starts as this kind of wall-mounted artwork, and then next thing it transitions into this kind of inflatable landscape object. Which means that the intellectual property means that the art has the capacity to change and change and change and also grow and reinvent itself. And I think for me anyway, that is the future. It's like how do we get as much value out of each project as possible? And we ask ourselves, well, what is a project? Is it, are we making a thing? Are we making an object? I'm going to explore that a little bit later, but I just want to show you the video of this activation where we were working really, really closely with a lot of people who aren't creative. They're not artists, they don't kind of identify as creative people, but we gave them an invitation to come and play and to reflect.

[unclear]

That was one of the really interesting things about this project is that trying to find, you may not be a crafty person, but you might be a kind of writerly person. And to give the opportunity for that also was really important. But then the work just kind of kept going. The participation just kind of evolved itself where people wanted to play and photograph themselves and capture the work. And that was something really interesting to see that ripple effect happen. That was really interesting.

So we ask, what is a project now? So every project, and I fail at this, this is something that I aspire to be. It's not something that I've got yet, but it's like I want every project to be like, well, what is a project? Well, we have a public art outcome. What is the engagement that, we want to be really clever about what the engagement is? We want to be able to provide somebody a journey, a creative and intellectual journey. We want to make sure there's play and participation. We want engagement. We want people to have their hearts in it. Leveraging that intellectual property. So because we have all this digital intellectual property, why can't it be animated?

Thanks, Siri.

Is it wearable? Are there wall based outcomes? Yeah, intellectual property. It's all the thinking that you've done about those particular, the thing that makes that work special and how you can get different outcomes from it. And of course different voices and stories. And so the studio is particularly passionate about rainbow community and science and sustainability and children and families.

Creativity loves an obstacle. Something that happened on that last project. And some of you may have seen that one of the wishes was becoming the path of least resistance. That was my wish. And then a few weeks later, we had this amazing collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which I'm going to be really upfront with you about the things that I thought were really successful and things that I wish I'd done better. And something that we were really great at in this project was giving an invitation for participation. And this project was so great at that where we had tens of, if not hundreds of people kind of participating in a creative challenge or question, inquiry. I feel like I want to kind of go a bit forward in the talk and then come back to this. We wanted people to make something that was autobiographical for themselves, but that's terrifying. If you show up to a blank page and you want to write something or create something about yourself, ugh, that's horrible. That's just going to be a really difficult experience.

So how do you make that easy for somebody who's not actually a trained artist? And so in this video that I'll show you in a second is that we realised that starting off with a blank page is really, really hard. So if we are having a creative collaboration with every person who's participating in this project, we can give them a starting kit, an aesthetic valuable starting kit that they can springboard off to make something really unique and their own, but already the aesthetic values are much, much, much higher than they'd be able to do by themselves.

And the other thing that we found is that we gave them a question or something to think about. Is that too small? Can you read that? So as each person came, we would brief them and say, we want you to make a lantern, but as you make a lantern, we want you to think about a series of particular issues. And the work is called Becoming the Path of Least Resistance, which means many different things for many people. But for me it was about letting go of complexity or being so logical or so elegant or so simple that of course it's the only choice. And it was about people reflecting on their own lives about choices that they could make. And so when they make their own work, we give them things that would trigger a response and we'd give it to them like a tarot card we'd shuffle it, and they would just choose one. And we'd say, that's the one that the universe wants you to work with. And it might be design shapes that reflect our nature finds the easiest path, like the curve of a river. I love that one. It's kind of so gentle. Yet unstoppable create shapes that change or adapt easily reflecting resilience and flexibility.

So the thing that was really intriguing about this work was this, I'll show you this kind of aesthetic kit first, that we were creating all this work that people would leverage off or springboard off to make their own work. So we created hundreds of these packs that we'd give to people. And it just went crazy. It was fabulous.

Matt Aberline (in video): Becoming the Path of Least Eesistance at the State Gallery of New South Wales and here [unclear] and look at all the fabulous interaction.

Matt Aberline: You can see that the aesthetic value is actually really high. So all these people who are making an object are kind of meditating upon this question that we'd given. Meditating on their own lives about how they can make their own lives simpler, easier. You have 50 people working, thinking, meditating. The thing that I don't like about this work is that we had focused so much on the interaction and what we wanted the experience to be is that I feel like we didn't quite nail what the outcome was. And I think there's something really important about, particularly in this sort of instance where the participant is not taking home the work, they are contributing to a larger artwork that's there for 3 weeks that I don't think we quite nailed the impressive collection of something or other, but that's evolution.

So creativity loves an obstacle, loves overcoming obstacles, but it has to be the right obstacles or can you invent the right obstacles That's going to make it a really wonderful challenge for somebody to be like, oh God, I can't wait to overcome that obstacle. Personally, I find a blank page can be overwhelming. And as somebody who draws all the time, it takes a certain amount of fearlessness to show up to that blank page sometimes.

But I know that failure is a key part of the process. So I think if you understand that you have to fail to evolve, that's just part of the process. And if you are operating in a space or you have people working you who are trying to operate in a space where they're just trying to get it right, then I think there's nothing more powerful than to be able to provide the support of saying, 'you are going to stuff this up, and that's totally fine'. There's so much power and not trying to get it right. There's so much power in having a play and a discovery and an education and an evolution, and then you learn, you make choices, you implement different things, but I don't think you can get that right if you're just trying to get it right to begin with.

And lastly, I think one of the main obstacles is do you have permission? I think this is an interesting one for the Library. It's like, do you have permission or have you given yourself permission? What is the thing, particularly in Path of Least Resistance at the Gallery, I would see people come in and there'd be like 50 or 60 people working that particular time, and they'll be sitting and watching and I'd be kind of watching them. And then after maybe an hour, they'd leave, I'd scamper after them and I'd be like, 'what happened?' And they're like, 'oh, I can't do it because I'm not creative.' And I'm like, 'okay, I got you. Come on.' And so then they'd have these amazing experiences that were like, oh, okay, realise that there was some boundary that was invisible that only they could see about their permission in the participation.

So we're kind of at the end of the talk, but I want to talk briefly about what I would like to do next. And I guess I think I'm at the kind of like it's okay to fail stage, or I call it the place where the paths merge. I'm just going to show you something different sort of things that I'm kind of up to. And yeah, I think there's something really interesting about parts of the practise are invisible, and I would like to get more of those visible to a larger audience. Now we literally print kilometres, kilometres of original print fabrics every year, but continually sewing and I think to make those things more visible. So I've started experimenting, going back to sewing, with these outrageous applique quilt type things. I'm not quite sure where they're going. This one's called I'm Growing in the Garden of Your Love, but they're an incredibly sculptural, applique, complex, heavy, not quite sure what's going to happen with them. I know whatever it is, the play is going to be deeply embedded into what the future is. To be honest, I think this means I'm not a serious artist or maybe I don't know what a serious artist is.

My friends at, there's this little video I want to show at the [unclear] Regional Museum, which just went through a cyclone. So [unclear] just went through a cyclone. Apparently he's fine. They say that I'm very serious about fun. Can I show you? It's just like a little 20 second. It's really cool dinosaur project about creativity and science.

Matt Aberline (in video): Hey, I'm Matt Aberline. I'm an artist. I'm particularly probably best known for inflatable artwork and I'm super duper excited to be part of the dinosaur exhibition at the [unclear] Regional Museum. In How to Draw a Dinosaur in the project is a total gift to me as an artist because it's an opportunity to combine scientific thinking with absolute creative freedom. And I guess the question that I was given was, if we don't really know what dinosaurs look like and we've made these assumptions, can we take a little sideways step and go, 'what if' and reinvent a little bit of what we know about dinosaurs.

Matt Aberline: That was a really fascinating project. I didn't know this, but the colour of the skin and the texture of the skin and feathers and things like that, that's not in the fossil record, that's all just made up or scientific assumptions. So this whole exhibition is based on re-imagining what they could look like. And I got a message from the curator, and I think this is the power of combining deliberately playful provocations with science. And so the curator said 'we had a third of our yearly visitation in five weeks', something like 7,000 people, sometimes 400 a day when previously 30 or 50 was a big day. So I kind of feel like that sort of project design of like, 'hey, we're going to have fun talking about science in a really unusual way'. It's kind of cool.

Second last thing I want to show you is a project that I find deeply problematic. We gave Tamara Beach skin cancer, and it's probably one of the more noble things is again, it's kind of marrying science with creativity and play. I find it quite ugly, but they were doing tests, skin cancer tests. So I think hundreds if not thousands of people [unclear] finding the utility in art is really, really something that I'm very passionate about.

And then lastly, this is the thing that's most on my mind right now is, and I think this is kind of like a full circle. There's a project bubbling away in my head about kindness and remembering acts of kindness. And so this project was originally going to be called the Matrilineal Line. It's kind of like loosely based on the kind of grandmother, mother flower type thing. But I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if there's some really huge dynamic sculptural intervention that allowed people to participate either visually by crafting or drawing or writing and adding to the work stories about acts of kindness or remembering acts of kindness, particularly from a feminine point of view. And I can't work out a good title for it yet. All the titles I think are a bit dorky. I'm thinking Kindness in a Time of Darkness. It's like, no, but you know what I mean? I just want it to be like, if society values are something that are passed down generationally, then can we cause really good thinking to be passed down through those generations and remembering them and celebrating and telling their stories. So that's the thing that I'm working on at the moment. I'm hoping that will turn into something fabulous.

These are all the fun people that have been kind of part of this project. I do have to say some thank yous, but I have to get my notes out for just one second. So I do want to say thank you. I've just had such a fabulous time working at the Library. I've got to say thank you to Cathie Oats who introduced me to the Library and brought me into start working on a project. I going to say thank you to Kathryn Favelle for rediscovering me after all this time. Kelly Arnold, Jane Edmond, the community engagement team. Luke the boss of the whole building, and of course Daniel Gleeson because Daniel Gleeson rocks. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm going to high five you, so if you have any questions, just can we have the auditorium lights up and maybe it won't be quite as scary. Hello? Did you enjoy that? Was that fun? Was that insightful? Yeah. Is there anything you'd like to know? I'm fairly tell it as it is, as awkward as it can be sometimes.

Audience member 1:
I've got a question.

Matt Aberline:
Yes.

Audience member 1: Are you thinking about selling some of your artworks or the digital prints of some of the artwork? You were saying you're looking at using it in lots of different ways and in different mediums. Have you had people come and ask for a print of one of the sides of The Guardians or as a t-shirt or something like that? Because your stuff's colourful and beautiful and would you use your art in that sort of way?

Matt Aberline: That's a really interesting question. You know what? I've never sold an artwork. Well, actually no. I did an exhibition when I first grew up and wanted to be an artist, and that was a sellout of course. But I realised at that time there's something really awkward for me, kind of hard to be like, 'Hey, I've just spent 6 months working on an exhibition or stuff that's going on a wall and you are my best friend and you're my best friend. I really want you to come and see it. And it would be really good if you could buy something as well.' So at that stage, I decided that I wasn't going to sell stuff. And so mostly the world in which I live in is that I lease artworks to cultural organisations. But the short answer to your question is, yeah, that's a great idea. Why not? Yeah, it sell art. Totally. I love it. I could do that. Yeah.

Are there many artists here? Hands up if you're an artist. Hands up if you're like a cultural institution type person. Oh wow. Gosh. And are you all in public programming sort of? Yeah. And so were the ideas around this kind of participatory, adding to, making art collectively, how did that resonate with you? Does anybody want to say anything about that? You take mine. One second.

Audience member 2: I was just going to say I absolutely love it. It's really nice to have, I suppose that coming in and being able to add to an artwork and kind of be part of the process opposed to, as you say, walking around a gallery and looking at the wall and I suppose interpreting what they're wanting you to see. You can kind of add to what the message is opposed to just being a viewer. You are being a part of the artwork and a part of the cultural as well. It's at the Library, so if what you are adding to it is going to become part of the Library.

Matt Aberline: Kathryn.

Audience member 3 (Kathryn): Thank you for this. It's been really fascinating to dig a bit deeper into your process, having seen the beautiful work, The Guardians on the podium, which was just magical. Two things that struck me about your talk today. I love the idea of the participation and the creation, moving from your hands into the hands of people who are taking their photos for Instagram. I had not thought about Instagraming and photography in that way as being part of the creative process, so that's really lovely. The other thing that I'm thinking about is the need to create, give people permission to use the Library in a variety of ways. And now that you've been with us a little while, I'm wondering where you think we could do better on the permission front.

Matt Aberline: If I could respond first by saying, actually I'll kind of merge the two ideas together. Cultural organisations, these were the notes that I edited from my talk. Then I removed them. I was like, don't go there, Matt. What is the role of a cultural organisation these days? And in particular, I was reflecting on some of the conversations that I had with Cathie Oats earlier, which is the library is a search engine, it is a depository for knowledge. But that is a really awful summary and I feel that's kind of like, it really reduces it.

I mean, you can talk about, for me, the most powerful thing the Library has is that we were talking about how it's a warm search engine. And so it's actually, you get the humanity there versus a digital Google search engine. But there's actually so much value that the Library has that can't be digitised, that is actually about the human experience. And that is things like passion, inclusion, participation, and they're all things that you can't find online, but you can, but not an organisation like a cultural organisation like the Library can do, because it's able to mean something so much more powerful. And you talked about the idea of if you're contributing to a thing, you are contributing to a important cultural institution and you are in it, you're part of it. And I think for a lot of people that changes lives. It may change something small or it may change something significant, but it's a deep cultural gift, I think.

And for me, I think every institution, not just the Library, but I think every institution should be looking at ways of how that opportunity or that the opportunity or the invitation, what that invitation is, that invitation for participation. I think it's so powerful. And particularly big organisations like the National Library, they have got so much weight and so much power and just means so much that I think the institution could be very generous with the invitation and the opportunities. And yeah, I mean I do have quite complex thinking about other stuff around the Library. But yeah. Any other questions?

Staff member: Just one at the back.

Audience member 4: Thanks, Matt. That was really great. It's kind of a follow up to Kathryn's question. I want to delve a little deeper on the topic of play because the Library and other archives come across as somewhat austere institutions specifically for research purposes, but really they're vehicles for telling stories. And I wondered if you had any thoughts other than beautiful inflatables on our podium of the way that the Library might engage in play and storytelling in that regard?

Matt Aberline: I do. Cathie and I actually worked on different modalities, modalities of using the Library. I think it's really important. I am the only person who finds this joke funny, but I'm going to tell it to you anyway. I asked somebody here, I was like, 'well, what happens in the Main Reading room?' And they were like 'mainly reading' and I was like, that is hilarious. And so yeah, that is the core business of the Library, but I feel like I'm, actually, the opportunity or the gift or the provocation is how do you access the knowledge. I actually think that the plague and the discovery is around the accessing the knowledge. Just so much material here. And a lot of it's very, very specialised and rare.

And a lot of the times the experience is not a digital experience. It's not like you can see it on a computer screen. It's actually something that's kind of tactile, has a smell, has a kind of so many parts of that experience that I'd be like, yeah, I would really look at the provocations around how to use play to find knowledge within the Library. Because, this may not come as a surprise, but I've got just a little bit of, I find reading sometimes a little bit difficult and I find lots of numbers quite difficult often. And so whenever I'm that sort of space, I find it hard to access. So me and the jury system we're like, so yeah, I would be like, well, what happens if you weren't a research student, a scholar, a journalist? If you were mom and dad from Bathurst and you were finding out something, then how do you facilitate, empower those engagements? And for me, I'd always go back to play. How do you make a game out of it? But yeah,

Daniel Gleeson: Thank you so much Matt. We've run out of time, but.

Matt Aberline: Half an hour late.

Daniel Gleeson: Yeah, Matt and I know that someone else made the comment too, but about people sharing and reinterpreting your artwork through social media. And I throughout Enlighten, kept getting messages from friends saying, wow, I've seen The Guardians, and here's a photo I've taken of it. And then this morning I was told that someone took a photo of The Guardians and submitted it to ABC weather photos and they ran it with the evening broadcast. So there you go. Even the ABC.

Matt Aberline: And I have no control over it. And I think that's the beauty of it.

Daniel Gleeson: Well, Matt, it's been wonderful working with you. Thank you so much for your help and your assistance and all you've done for the Library. And a round of applause, ladies and gentlemen, for Matt.