City of Sydney

I write for City of Sydney from time to time. Here is a selection of my best works.

Intangible Goods blog

A vending machine for mental health? It goes a little deeper than that.

Developed in collaboration with mental health professionals and presented by Art & About Sydney, Intangible Goods was an interactive artwork installation that moved around key areas of the Sydney CBD between 26 March to 8 April 2018.

Surveys run by artists Mark Starmach and Elizabeth Commandeur showed ten core things missing from the lives of everyday Sydneysiders.

For the City of Sydney What’s On blog, I wrote about the 10 things Sydney craved most.

Presented by Art & About Sydney, Intangible Goods takes the humble vending machine and fills it with all the unspoken psychological and emotional needs of our consumer-driven harbour city. The artwork aims to bridge those tricky conversations around mental health, where visitors can purchase snackable, bite-sized pieces from the vending machine. 

“Each Intangible Good is designed to elicit a different emotional response, depending on the good you pick,” said local artists Mark Starmach and Elizabeth Commandeur. “We live in a society where, for most of us, our physical needs are largely met. Yet increasingly our emotional and psychological lives go unfed.”

To create Intangible Goods, they worked with mental health professionals and consulted over 600 survey responses to unwrap what Sydneysiders felt were missing in their lives. 

When asked what they need most right now, these were the most commonly nominated psychological and emotional needs.

sYDNEY CULTURE WALKS APP

To promote the Sydney Culture Walks app, I took a couple of very leisurely strolls through my home city. I also wrote all website content to highlight a few choice landmarks for each of the 15 inspiring walks around Sydney.