Artist talk: ‘Art isn’t going to help this town’
2024–25 Kickstart artist Rachel Morley introduces her project in development: Art isn’t going to help this town – a love letter to family, car trips, suburban housing estates and train stations.
Reflecting on the ways that housing and travel infrastructure shape our lives, Rachel and her family recreate their shared memories of Melbourne’s western suburbs through a series of photographs and short films on super 8.
Art isn’t going to help this town will be exhibited at Next Wave in August/September 2026.
Rachel Morley (Kickstart 2024–25)
Rachel Morley is an artist and arts worker based in Wyndham (VIC). Through analogue photography and photo-collage, her practice explores relationships to place and the construction of memory. Drawing on experiences of insecure housing, her recent photographic works reflect on how power and inequality is created both within the rental market and through urban planning in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs.
Rachel has presented works in public spaces; hanging from rooftops, pasted onto bridges, and beamed from an LED light screen installed above a house. She has held solo gallery exhibitions at Analogue Academy (2022) and The Annex (2023), and has shown in group exhibitions at Trocadero Projects, Louis Joel Gallery, the Old Bar Gallery and The Artists Guild. Her work 'Housing should not be for profit' was shortlisted for the 2023 Wyndham Art Prize.
Rachel currently works with Platform Arts as the Digital Communications Coordinator, and is a Research Fellow with Deakin University’s Public Art Commission.