Friends of Kolkata

Kolkata, India - Melbourne, Australia 2004-present

Friends of Kolkata is a volunteer run Melbourne based organisation that arranges fundraising, educational and volunteer exchange activities on behalf of the Institute of Social Work (ISW), a non-government organisation in Kolkata, India.

Five friends - Chris Turton, Yoriko Otomo, Christian Clark, Lara Thurlow, and myself, volunteered for approximately a month at two Kolkata-based NGOs - the Centre for Communication and Development and The Institute of Social Work in 2004. We managed to have a positive impact on the children in our time there despite our inexperience, and were encouraged by the Indian organisations to take our enthusiasm further on our return to Australia.

So after returning to Melbourne we set up Friends of Kolkata, incorporating and organisating the first event - a fundraising exhibition in August 2005 at Irene Community Arts Warehouse Brunswick. It featured both my own photographs, and some of the images of the Indian children who I had been teaching photography.  In 2007 I led a volunteer trip back to Kolkata which resulted in another, larger photographic exhibition at Melbourne University that shared the stories and experiences of the children.

Friends of Kolkata continues to work with ISW today. The latter organisation seeks to protect children’s and women’s rights by providing communities with access to education, vocational training, microcredit and health services, and by assisting women and children affected by family violence.


Friends of Kolkata


The Institute of Social Work


The Centre for Communication and Development

Choose Your Own Library Adventure

Mudfest, University of Melbourne, 2007

"This project created a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' interactive literary adventure in the Ballieu library at Melbourne University.

Some motivations for the project:

• To enable students to re-engage with the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' narrative format.
• To bring creative writing into a broader art festival.
• To enable students to experience a familiar library setting in a new way.
• To explore non-linear narratives and the relationships between discrete text fragments and the books that they are concealed within.

The project was also an experiment in collaborative artistic endeavour in terms of generating and disseminating the fragments. Those who ‘view’ the project will also be collaborators in the sense that they construct their individual aesthetic experiences by determining their own pathways through its literary terrain.

Mapping Your Place

Mudfest, University of Melbourne, 2007

Two very large maps of the university – of the university grounds, and of Union House – were mounted on a prominent wall inside Union House. Participants were invited to contribute an interesting personal experience they have had on-campus by writing it concisely on a coloured sticker, then sticking it to the map at the exact location where they had the experience.

In this way the map built up with students and staff’s experiences and evolved to become a multi-layered and fascinating artifact showing the dense intersections of the lives of people on campus. The stickers had distinct categories that helped group the events and made the map more visually interesting.