Braybrook Community-Engaged Residency
The Community-Engaged Artist in Residence program provides an artist the opportunity to work with and celebrate the communities of Braybrook.
The artist in residence is based at the Braybrook Community Hub, an integrated community facility on Churchill Avenue within the grounds of Braybrook Park. It comprises the Braybrook Library, Braybrook Community Centre, a community health and maternal and child health centre, an early years centre and kindergarten, sports pavilion, and men’s shed.
Current artist in residence
Phong Chi Lai
Slow Colour, Community and Well-Being is a project with Vietnamese-Australian textile artist, Phong Chi Lai of Studio PCL. The project invites the Braybrook and wider Maribyrnong community to connect and engage with each other, their green spaces and to uncover the hidden potential of plants.
The project includes a series of free natural dyeing/eco-printing and stitching/making workshops and drop-in events open to all skill levels, resulting in a collaboratively created patchwork banner that acts as a shared record of the Braybrook community and the natural surroundings.
Sewing and Mending Workshops (April 2025)
Would you like to learn more about sewing and mending? Join textile artist Phong Chi Lai for a series of hands-on workshops exploring expressive mending techniques and the basic skills of improvised patchwork. These workshops will result in a collaborative patchwork banner that will be displayed in Braybrook Hub.
- In the machine sewing workshop (Tuesday 22 April, 10am-1pm), community members will machine-piece naturally dyed fabric swatches together. You will learn basic skills and processes of improvised patchwork and how to include it in other arts, craft or mending projects. These workshops are suited to those with experience using a sewing machine.
- In the expressive mending workshop (Saturday 26 April, 10am-1pm), you will learn various mending techniques to add an artistic and creative flair to repairing. Please bring along a garment with small holes that require mending.
- In the open studio for hand sewing (Wednesday 30 April, 10am-1pm), try your hand at hand sewing, meet Phong and learn more about the community banner being produced.
Community banner workshops (May and June 2025)
In March and April 2025, Braybrook residents explored natural dyeing, mending, and sewing with textile artist Phong Chi Lai, contributing to a collective patchwork banner reflecting Braybrook’s stories and green spaces. Join Phong’s final workshops to share your ideas and add your touch to the banner!
- Friday 23 May 2025, 10am-12pm: Drop in discussion of ‘What does Braybrook mean to you.’
- Saturdays 7 and 21 June 2025, 10am-1pm: Open Studio for community banner making
How to participate
To find out more and to reserve your place in any upcoming workshop, please visit the Arts and Culture events webpage and search for Phong Chi Lai.
Arts and Culture events
About Phong Chi Lai
Phong Chi Lai (Studio PCL) is a Naarm/Melbourne based designer/maker/artist specialising in improv patchwork to create contemporary quilts and soft sculptures from natural dyes and upcycled/deadstock fabrics. His work expresses something of the old world reflected through the eyes and hands of a maker concerned with the social and ethical realities of the Twenty-first Century.
Phong takes a considered and slow approach, creating intuitively, each work is assembled and pieced as a response to the materials and his surroundings. He uses traditional hand stitching and embroidery techniques with an overtly free hand approach, leaving room for the chance encounter that arises in the handmade and natural process.
Previous artists in residence
2023 Braybrook Community Engaged Artists in Residence Activities
Machine Imagining
Machine Imagining is a project with artist Kate Geck, inviting the Maribyrnong community to explore the natural world in collaboration with machine intelligence. Through a series of free workshops, community members were invited to draw creatures from the local area - plants, animals and insects.
These drawings and photos were used to produce a community database of observations of the local, natural world. These datasets then trained machine learning models to generate new, machine imaginings of the Maribyrnong area. These imaginings were arranged through collage into large hanging textiles, and finally were finished with hand embroidery.
Kate worked with a dedicated and ongoing group of Braybrook community members through all stages of the project, spanning from January to June 2023. After a launch event in September 2023, these works will be displayed for all to enjoy in the Braybrook Hub Access Gallery until Friday 6 October 2023.
Image provided by Kate Geck.
Born in a Taxi
Acclaimed local performance company, Born in a Taxi, developed a new performance work about the wonders of being the age you are, with contributions from the Braybrook community! They collected perspectives from people aged 1-100 who were keen to share. During October 2023, Artistic Directors Penny and Carolyn set up conversation areas in the Braybrook Hub Foyer and popped into classes and gatherings for a chat about 'being your age.'
Photography by Bryony Jackson
2022 Braybrook Community-Engaged Artist in Residence Activities
Living Portrait Braybrook
Photograph supplied by Carla Gottgens
Celebrate the creativity and imagination of the people who use Braybrook Community Hub in the Living Portrait Braybrook photography exhibition, available for viewing in April and May 2022. Come along to the Hub and view photos installed along the walls of the entire building, connected by red string.
Living Portrait Braybrook creatively explores the identity of the people who use Braybrook Community Hub. Artists Carla Gottgens, Catherine O’Leary and David Wells collaborated with visitors to the Braybrook Community Hub to playfully explore how they would like to present themselves in a portrait. This interactive project was spread out across the lockdowns and restrictions of 2020-2021.
Together community members and the artists undertook a process of transformation using costumes and props to create an image that tells a story. In the finished portrait, a bright red line connects each photograph to the next, threading lives together and celebrating the spirit and diversity of the Braybrook Community.
Rapping workshops at Braybrook Community Hub
Want to try rapping? Learn how to write your own lyrics and set it to a beat? And what about the rest – copyright and getting it out into the world? Learn from professional rapper and musician One Sixth at Braybrook Edge!
The Western Edge Youth Arts rapping workshops in 2022 were a free 10-week intensive workshop geared to any artists or young people aged 14-25 years old who want to develop and harness their creative skills, and confidently join the global music community! They discussed the various aspects of the creative process and learnt from guests along the way who have experience in the industry and know what it takes to keep reinventing and creating as often as they can.