The Work Beneath the Work
by Kelly Drummond Cawthon
After the scale and exhilaration of SEE’s 20th Anniversary season in 2025, 2026 becomes a year of settling in, listening closely, and allowing the future shape of our work to emerge through care, conversation and time - at the pace real relationships require.
At SEE, we’ve learned that ideas need time to breathe, partnerships need time to deepen, and trust is not a pre-condition to artmaking - it is the artmaking.
Our Artist and Artform Development Program maintains its centre of gravity: spacious, iterative and artist-led. It’s where ideas are nurtured with care and courage - given room to take risks and push against their own edges. It’s where emerging artists build real agency, and where core artists continue to experiment boldly and deepen their practice through collaboration and shared leadership.
Our labs - dance, sound, animation, and collaborative practice - become sites for curiosity, risk-taking, discovery, and collective authorship. The success of our 2025 Soundtrack Lab and Animation Lab brought new skills, new artists, and new artworks into the studio, and in 2026 the program expands again with a new DanceLab in partnership with House of Dance, TasTAFE and Youth ARC.
Creatively, 2026 is steady but powerful:
The Opera continues its multi-year evolution, transforming the waterfront into a living instrument of civic storytelling.
What the Stars Remember grows through community workshops across Lutruwita/Tasmania, guided by Elise Romaszko’s leadership and a methodology rooted in attunement, sensory exploration, and co-creation.
[Let the] Art Speak opens a new national conversation about anonymous creation, unlearning gatekeeping, and foregrounding agency over identity labels.
Blue Genes begins as a wearable-art excavation, slow stitching, shared labour, and the reclamation of materials and stories that refuse to be discarded.
Michael Fortescue, lead artist for The Opera. Photo by Alex Moss
Elise Romaszko, lead artist for What the Stars Remember. Photo by Jesse Hunniford.
Maggie May Jeffries, lead artist for Blue Genes. Photo by Despard Gallery.
Our partnerships with Contemporary Art Tasmania, Youth ARC, House of Dance, Rosny Barn, Ten Days on the Island, Tas Ports and local communities create new spaces for emerging artists to step in - not rushed, not tokenised, but invited into genuine collaboration.
In a world that feels increasingly fractured, 2026 is SEE doubling down on what we know: art takes time, relationships are creative practice, and belonging is something we build deliberately, together, again and again.
