A Day of Slow (Looking, Reading, Writing, Being)

An intimate day-long series of workshops-on-a-theme, celebrating a variety of responses to some books we love.

Inspired by Olivia Meehan’s book Slow Looking: The Art of Nature (Thames & Hudson, 2025) - as well as by the works of other writers like Vanessa Berry, Antonia Pont, Georges Perec, Jazz Money, John Berger, Teju Cole, Anne Carson, Annie B. Parson, Beverley Farmer, Anne Truitt, Valeria Luiselli, and so many others who encourage us to be attentive to the world around us – this April we are offering a day-long event that takes its cue from the practice of slow looking, and incorporates a combination of sitting, reading, drawing and writing workshops which are intended to help us focus our attention and explore the ways in which the worlds on and beyond the page enliven each other.

Due to the nature of this intimate event, the number of participants will be strictly limited to 20. All participants will take part in all workshops.

Never drawn before? Don’t worry! The drawing workshop is not a drawing lesson, but an untutored opportunity to look closely at something, or some things, for an extended period and to experience what happens when we pay attention in this way. I can’t draw at all, for instance, so I plan to use this time and space to draw in words, so to speak.

Never written anything before? Fear not! This writing workshop is, again, an exercise in looking and noticing and you can record what you see in any way that works best for you (although we discourage a reliance upon phones and their cameras, preferring a piece of paper and a pencil instead).

Olivia and I have structured the day in such a way that each session provides a foundation for the next. This is a format inspired by other workshops Olivia has run, for instance at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

When: 9:30am to 5pm on Saturday 18th April

Where: Coates Community Arts, Suite 6, Level 4, 20 Collins St

Cost: $99 (incl. GST) plus a 10% discount on the books that have inspired us, and to which we will refer during the day (see the list below)

Places are strictly limited! Booking is essential!

Reading List*

Olivia Meehan, Slow Looking: The Art of Nature

Antonia Point, Plain Life

John Berger, ‘Drawing’, an essay in the collection Permanent Red

John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook

Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

*Please don’t feel that you need to buy any of these books. We list them here because they are central to our thinking about this Day of Slow and we will be referring to them (and others) over the course of the day.

Here’s how the day will unfold:

9:30-10:00 Registration and time to settle in with tea and coffee on arrival

10:00-11:00 Welcome! Followed by a sitting practice led by Antonia Pont

11:00-12:30 Slow Looking with Olivia Meehan

12:30-1:30 Lunch (you’ll be on your own for lunch, with time for a breath of fresh air)

1:30-3:00 Drawing with Louise Klerks (this will include a combination of working with objects and a life model)

3:00-3:30 Afternoon tea together (catered by us)

3:30-5:00 An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Melbourne/Naarm, inspired by Georges Perec and led by Anna MacDonald

5:00 We might wander over to Bard’s for a drink and time together to digest the day

Bios:

Antonia Pont is a long-time practitioner of writing, thinking, moving and stillness. She founded Vijnana Yoga Australia in 2009 and alongside a practice of philosophy and creative research, she queries questions of time, capacity, ethics, wanting, bodily and psychic stability, sustainable states and non-violent transformations. She tests, in her creative and scholarly works, the necessity of space and patience for any kind of non-programmed future and ways to think and live beyond ultimatums and reactivities. A teacher and supervisor in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University, she is author of The Memory Library (fiction), You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel (poetry), A Philosophy of Practising (philosophy), and the recent Plain Life: on thinking, feeling and deciding. Her essays have an international following and can be found in Overland, Literary Hub. She lives, works and rests on unceded Wurundjeri lands.

Olivia Meehan is an art historian and teaching specialist with a focus on slow looking and contemplative pedagogies. She received her MPhil and PhD in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge. Since graduating Olivia has worked in museums and galleries, and as a lecturer and tutor in the History of Art. Her research practice focusses on Observation, Imagination and Slow Looking. She is the author of Slow Looking: The Art of Nature published by Thames & Hudson (2025).

Lou Klerks is a curator and educator. She has founded several contemporary art and community art spaces in the City of Melbourne, including Chapter House Lane, Missing Persons and Coates Community Arts. In 2008, Lou founded a public life drawing class, which she has facilitated weekly for the past 17 years. The class provides a space for like-minded individuals to connect, build relationships within the arts community, and benefit from a sense of social wellbeing.

Anna MacDonald is the author of Between the Word and the World (2019) and A Jealous Tide (2020). She is a bookseller, and one of the custodians of the The Paperback Bookshop.