Vision

To enrich the culture of the City of Port Phillip and the lives of its people.

Mission

To engage the community by creating a rich environment that integrates a public park and the arts.

Chairman’s Message

The challenge and stimulus in shaping the Mission and Vision of the Park lie in the fact that the park is based on a dialogue. It is an urban parkland which belongs to the community and where the arts have a living presence.

The park values the arts, for the quality of imagination, of beauty, or humour, of surprise, for their capacity to connect us to other realms, suggest other ways of seeing, other forms of being and other realms of existence. They may relate to and stem from our everyday life, but alter and transform it so that we are not so sure whether the way we saw it before is the only way to see it. Or they may not relate to our daily life at all, but invite us to open ourselves up to things which we had not noticed before, or to which we had closed ourselves off. They may also on occasion provoke or be associated with political statements or social and economic concerns.

The park values the community that surrounds it. Partly because that community owns the park, identifies with it and pays for what happens there. But, more fundamentally, because the community, however multifaceted, represents us all in our daily life and needs, our desire for a civilised life and our aspirations for something beyond that. Saying that the community is important means that we value the potentiality for expression and appreciation in everyone.  These qualities are enhanced through the experience of the arts and contribute to their development.

Gasworks Arts Park believes that the arts and the community can grow and be enriched in dialogue with each other. New realms can be reached, new subject matter articulated, new imagery created and what has not been expressed can come to be expressed. It is an experiment that has dialogue at its core.

Obviously that will not happen equally in all parts of the program all the time. It will happen in many different ways, each expressing only one possibility across a spectrum. All aspects of our program can contribute to it, whether that is art for children, the program in the theatre, the work of onsite and other visual artists, work by and with people with disability, or any of our other projects. No one element claims exclusive or preeminent importance: their multiplicity and variety enrich the park.

The guiding principles are interplay, mutual respect and curiosity, artist to public and public to artist, a knowledge that any one of us does not have the whole story, and that the other may know something which we do not. It is a place characterised by respect, dialogue, openness, delight and adventure.

To reach these goals may take years. But because the park conveys a sense of transformation, it can ask that of those that have contact with it.

James McCaughey, Chair, Gasworks Arts Park