Colleen Hughson

PRACTICE IN COMMUNITY PROJECT

Stories from the Sea: Art, Place, Community
Community-led creative reuse and storytelling project addressing marine debris and volunteer fatigue along Shipwreck Coast.
Primary Project Location: Shipwreck Coast, Victoria

This two-year project will be based along the Shipwreck Coast of southwest Victoria, centred in Warrnambool and the coastline between Peterborough and Discovery Bay. It will be co-designed with BeachPatrol 3280–3284, a place-based volunteer community responding to persistent marine debris washing ashore. The community-identified priority is addressing volunteer fatigue, the accumulation of unrecyclable plastics, and the lack of systems for creatively re-using collected debris. Colleen's CACD practice will focus on facilitated conversations, participatory art-making, storytelling, and creative reuse experiments to support broad, intergenerational participation and help transform clean-up labour into shared meaning, agency, hope and connection to place.

“I’m incredibly grateful for this support. After eight years of working closely with this coastline and community, this funding creates a rare opportunity to step beyond clean-up and work together on thoughtful, creative responses to an issue that continues to grow in scale and complexity.”
- Colleen Hughson

ABOUT COLLEEN

Colleen Hughson is a Warrnambool-based filmmaker and community arts practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of storytelling, environmental action and creative reuse. Working along Victoria’s Shipwreck Coast, her practice is deeply shaped by place, using film, photography and participatory art to explore our relationship with marine debris, care for Country and collective responsibility.

With over 20 years’ experience in community-engaged practice, Colleen creates projects that invite people to connect, create and act. She is the founder of BeachPatrol 3280–3284, a long-running community initiative that has removed and documented over two million pieces of marine debris, transforming this material into artworks, data and shared stories.

Her work is driven by a belief that creativity can turn concern into action. Through projects such as Better Buds and Bottles Overboard, she demonstrates how locally grounded, collaborative practice can spark environmental change and strengthen community connection.