ABOUT
Featured Artists
Harvest 2024
Photo by Karen Brothers Photography
Ryan F Kennedy
Anthony Sawrey
WHO / WHAT / HOW
Radical Fields is a regional, artist-led curatorial platform based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Glenlyon, Victoria. Founded in 2023 by Ryan F Kennedy and Anthony Sawrey, the platform develops projects that connect contemporary art with everyday regional life.
Led by a curatorial team of artists — Ryan F Kennedy, Anthony Sawrey, and Gav Barbey — Radical Fields approaches curatorial practice as a way of shaping the conditions for art to happen. Rather than focusing only on finished works, the platform creates situations where artworks emerge through the interaction of artists, communities, and place.
Working through a spirit of serious play, projects begin with a clear artistic framework and unfold through shared experience — spanning performance, installation, land art, and public events. Artists lead the direction of each work, while local familiarity, participation, and lived experience influence how it develops.
Through direct forms of communication, shared activity, and local cultural familiarity, Radical Fields creates work that gently disrupts expectations of contemporary art — opening space for broader audiences to engage, while maintaining a strong artist-led approach.
Gav Barbey
The ways we create
Radical Fields is grounded in a set of values that shape how art is made in the first place. We back artists to test ideas, take risks, and develop work over time — not just arrive with finished outcomes. Working across performance, land art, installation, sound, and participatory forms, projects are allowed to shift, adapt, and unfold through process, while remaining connected to the histories and traditions of the places they sit within.
Connection is built through doing, not just viewing. Work is developed in dialogue with place and alongside the people around it, creating shared experiences rather than distant observation. Participation isn’t an add-on — it’s often part of how the work comes into being. This approach supports a more inclusive way of engaging with art, where different forms of knowledge, access, and experience are valued.
Collaboration drives the program, bringing artists, communities, and partners into the same field. Through this, art becomes something active — shaped by time, place, and collective input. The aim is not just to present work, but to create the conditions where something can happen — where art can open up new ways of relating to place, to each other, and to everyday life.
If you’d like to understand the work more deeply — from our CV and social impact to ways of connecting or supporting — explore further, reach out, and join the serious play.
Radical Fields is a not-for-profit incorporated association and is governed by a Committee of Management.
The current committee includes Madeleine McClelland- President and Matthew Anderson (Treasurer), alongside members of the curatorial team — Ryan F Kennedy, Anthony Sawrey, and Gav Barbey.