Bare Skills: Fire

What role will fire play in the end of the world?

Join us on this Youth Week on Friday 17 April, 2–5pm for the next Bare Skills workshop – Fire – where participants will enter an interactive space to think about how fire shapes survival, culture and emergency in an uncertain future. The world is burning — and has been burning for a long time — and on Baramadagal Country we are invited to learn with respect for fire, Country and the knowledge held here.

Bare Skills: Fire will begin outside with a Smoking Ceremony led by Baramadagal custodian Heidi Duncan. Heidi will explain the uses of smoke in First Nations cultures — for ceremony, cleansing, protection and connection — and invite participants to reflect on what it means to carry fire with care.

Fire can bring warmth, cooking and ceremony — and it can also become destructive, creating emergencies and shaping how communities respond. After the Smoking Ceremony, Baramadagal custodian Linda Sainsbury will lead a hands‑on activity about hearths: how fire has been gathered, held and shared since the first sunrise. Participants will make their own hearth example using materials Baramadagal have used across generations, while Linda speaks about the three hearths found on Baramadagal Country in Parramatta Square and what they teach us about continuity, gathering and place.

Afterwards, artist Jack Wotton — a bushfire survivor who documented his experience through quiet moments — will lead a creative response session exploring the role artists play during emergencies. Participants will be guided to make their own responses to images of fire using music, sound, drawing and writing. When art seems to come last, how do we prioritise creativity in extremity? What do we keep, record, archive and pass on? The session will emphasise the importance of documentation and archive — not as an afterthought, but as survival practice.

Bare Skills is a new series of art and survival workshops for young people aged 14 to 25, developed by Parramatta Artists Studios and hosted every second month at PAS Granville.

It is a safe and inclusive space, and people with diverse identities and abilities are welcome. The ground floor of Parramatta Artists Studios in Granville will include a kitchen, communal reflection table, two workshop spaces and a themed quiet area with a resource library.