Kirsha Kaechele is an artist, curator and the First Lady of Mona. She’s the founder of Material Institute, which supports Tasmanian communities through programs such as 24 Carrot Gardens, where schoolchildren learn to grow and prepare their own food. She’s passionate about nature, bringing together loggers and environmentalists with the Forest Economic Congress and proposing creative solutions for dealing with invasive species in her book Eat the Problem.
When I was a girl, I remember asking what a philanthropist was and thinking it sounded pretty amazing. Although fascinated by the idea, I was never really motivated by money. I was motivated by adventure. From an early age I had strong ideas about how things should and shouldn't be, especially in our urban and natural environments. If I saw a place that made no space for nature or didn’t work well for the people living there, it drove me crazy. I wanted to restore order, to see everything in its right place.
So, really, I came to philanthropy through aesthetics—a desire for things to be beautiful. Not just in physical form, the environment we live in, but also in our social structures and our relationship with nature. I seek beauty in all of these dimensions—social, spatial, and environmental.
I have a strong sense of justice. I don't believe wealth reflects talent or an innate ability—it's luck. So, I absolutely believe in the redistribution of wealth. If you happen to find yourself in that lucky sliver of society, in the 0.01 percentile, then you have an enormous duty to address the multitude of problems that stem from the inappropriate concentration of wealth.
As philanthropists, we're the beneficiaries of this concentration, and we don't deserve to just laze around enjoying it. I'm a notorious hedonist, but I’m always thinking about how to build the society I wish to live in. The fact that philanthropists exist is evidence of a broken system—I want to invest my energies in redreaming that system and instilling a new one.
By nature of being an artist, I move through worlds. Artists are always moving into the spaces that are unwanted or forgotten, so that means becoming intimate with the systems that aren't working. I ended up working in communities as a result of being there. My projects always start very small, just by noticing something and creating a shift. Things grow organically from there.
In New Orleans, I didn't set out to start a social project. I was doing an art project in a community where there was a lot of poverty and structural disadvantage. I loved my neighbours, and I didn't have any intention of trying to fix or change them. The kids were facing a lot of challenges and many of them were missing a parent due to gun violence. I began to really care about them and wanted them to have better outcomes. They liked hanging around the art project and being part of the activities. Some artists were really great at engaging them so we started offering structured classes. The kids were so into it that I decided to host multiple classes a week. It started with volunteer teachers and little funding, but over time it grew.
It was in one of these classes that I noticed the kids didn't know what the vegetables were because they had no connection or access to real, healthy food. I was interested in urban planning and had been an architect, so I created a garden and started growing food with the children. It was a hit, and inspired 24 Carrot Gardens, because I saw the change that happens literally overnight, through one small project. Over time the little boys involved in the garden turned into teenagers, and they got caught up in gang wars. Every weekend there was another death. I was so heartbroken that I created a four-month artwork called CA$H 4 GUN$, which was a gun buyback program. Part of that artwork involved a recording studio where the young boys made rap albums, and it was so popular that they asked me not to close it down when the artwork concluded. This became the seed for Material Institute, which is now a large art school in New Orleans and Tasmania combining music, fashion, gardening, and culinary art.
My art is always living. It’s Life Art. (Most people would call it social sculpture, or conceptual, interactive installation art.) It engages with the environment and it’s made in conversation with the ecosystem that it’s part of. I believe the same is true for my philanthropic projects. They're born of the place and respond to the needs of that place. They're not an imposition. They're continuously communicating with what's happening, and growing according to feedback.
When I started my project in New Orleans, it benefited from my being young. I was hands on. I lived in the abandoned bakery at the heart of the artspace, and was present in the community every single day, which meant I could respond with agility. The project was authentic—if less organised. I think young founders are better at initiating that kind of radical, site-specific project. Youthful passion is a really powerful starter but there are also challenges to being young. I was a control freak / micromanager; I wanted to own the project and was afraid to share credit. It's natural as a young person to feel that way, but it doesn’t always serve the project because ego is counterproductive to the work.
At the same time, I don’t think there’s an accelerated passage out of that, it’s more a natural progression. As you grow older and start doing more, it's impossible to control and micromanage everything. You have no choice but to let go, which gives other people the opportunity to step in. With my work in Tasmania, I’m not a micromanager. I still like to control the aesthetics, but I’ve learned that when I find the right person, I can let go and trust them, and my projects have grown significantly as a result. The benefit of age is that you have more capacity to cede control, and I'm humbled again and again because my team has a real quality of care—they don't really even need me. I think that is the goal. If you want to be a successful philanthropist, you have to put yourself out of a job.
In the case of 24 Carrot Gardens, I believe it contributes to real generational change, so I want it to grow. I’m inviting other philanthropists to come on board and help build a vision that scales up. I want to see the program in every school. We also need to advocate for the allocation of government funds, because there’s an opportunity for real change, and we should invest in it. It’s difficult because election cycles are brief and politicians aren't focused on 20- or 40-year returns. But we need to make sure that we're not just putting Band-Aids on everything. It should be a given that children have access to healthy, beautiful food, and that they learn to grow, cook and share it. Things will be very different for their children when they do. This is a structural societal shift that is entirely achievable.
I'm also very motivated to work in Aboriginal communities. I would love to partner with Indigenous educators and leaders to build projects that respond to their traditions and the culture of their communities. I want to help elevate Indigenous culture because I don't like the way opportunity is currently distributed. When it comes to health, Indigenous communities are at extreme disadvantage. There’s been an absence of appreciation for Indigenous culture in general. We should be celebrating it—what a privilege to live among such longstanding traditions. We should do everything we can to elevate it.
And then my personal giving involves urban greening and native restoration and protection work. I am passionate about nature. All my advocacy work over the last three years has been around preserving old growth forests. I’m always thinking about how to improve our relationship with nature as a society because so much of our wellbeing derives from our connection to nature. I'm very inspired by caring for our environment and I want to weave this into the popular psyche and into our political systems, regardless of who's running the country. Nature is larger than us. It transcends politics, dissolves barriers and connects us.
It’s interesting what happens when women come together. You look at these powerful male leaders negotiating global peace deals and doing a very bad job. We need to consider what women can do. I think a female peace accord would look very different, and be a lot more effective.
What I love about the Ladies Lounge, is how it dissolves differences—class, age, politics, all fall away, and there’s a connection between women simply because they are women sharing an experience. Through the Ladies Lounge I see art melt the barriers away more than any work I've been a part of. It makes me think that there should be a Ladies Lounge at Davos and other centres of world power. Imagine women coming together and saying this is our accord. We’ve made our own peace agreement.
Is an artist, curator, and the First Lady of Mona (Museum of Old and New Art). She’s the founder of Material Institute—a non-profit social project with branches in New Orleans, USA, and Lutruwita / Tasmania. She is interested in the space where complex problems exist, and places transformation at the heart of her work—turning flaws into features, shit into gold. For Kaechele, problems become the medium through which art emerges. Projects past and present include: the Ladies Lounge—a lavish, ladies-only haven in the museum (no men allowed, except the butlers); Forest Economics Congress—an act of radical diplomacy uniting economists, the forestry industry, scientists, conservationists and artists at Mona to tackle the question, ‘what is the true value of a tree / forest?’ (like the Congress, this question is evolving, the project ongoing); Eat the Problem—a food and art compendium (typically, gob-smackingly deluxe) featuring a series of ‘recipes’ using invasive species, both real and surreal, with an accompanying exhibition at Mona; and CA$H 4 GUN$—a conceptual artwork in the form of a gun buyback scheme in New Orleans.
