Rockhampton Museum of Art 2024

“Build and Destroy”

UnitePlayPerform was invited to Rockhampton Museum of Art to present a large scale, multi-faceted project as part of the institution’s annual program. Conceived as a five-week activation, the project repositioned the museum as a site of living, participatory inquiry. Drawing on UPP’s regenerative methodology, the exhibition sought to dissolve the passivity of conventional spectatorship, guiding audiences through embodied cycles of creation, destruction, and renewal.

UPP Universe Adaptive Hybrid Habitats

Values Driven End-To-End Delivery

We delivered this project through our structured framework that aligns UPP’s values with each phase of end-to-end project delivery. Each stage is embedded with the application of UPP Methodology, our values, principles, pillars, practices, and prompts to ensure strategic, regenerative, and relational impact.

We Served

Context & Alignment

At the centre of Build and Destroy was the Hyper Temples Playkit Series — a living, breathing constellation of large-scale sculptural object-works described by Offerings (the artist, Melissa Gilbert) as forms that “morph, shift, and relocate” across the architecture of RMOA. These works resisted the fixity of conventional exhibition display, instead existing in a state of flux, relocation, and embodied reactivation.
Delivered in partnership with Rockhampton Museum of Art, Riverfest, Rockhampton Regional Council, and Advance Rockhampton, the project cultivated a wide network of engagement with local First Nations community, artists, educators, creatives, and the broader intergenerational, multicultural, and diverse minority public. The museum’s ambition was to expand its curatorial programming beyond static display models, engaging audiences through embodied dialogue, participatory ritual, and collective cultural imagination.
‘Build and Destroy’ Exhibition crystallised the alignment between UnitePlayPerform and Rockhampton Museum of Art, both committed to expanding the function of cultural institutions beyond passive display into active, embodied engagement. For RMOA, the project advanced their ambition to enliven regional programming with innovative, participatory forms of practice. For UnitePlayPerform, it affirmed the capacity of our regenerative methodology to translate within an institutional framework — dissolving the hierarchies between artist, audience, and museum, and repositioning the gallery as a living system of cultural repair. Together, we demonstrated how a regional museum can operate as a laboratory for collective imagination and embodied transformation, grounding contemporary art practice in cycles of renewal and community dialogue.

We Delivered

Creation & Process

Across five weeks, the project unfolded as shifting installations, durational performances, professional development programs, Playshops, and community ceremonies. Works evolved in response to RMOA’s architecture, regional context, and the concurrent exhibition Maximum Madness (16 March – 30 June 2024), which examined George Miller’s Mad Max legacy. Where Maximum Madness explored dystopian collapse, Build and Destroy staged participatory cycles of destruction and renewal, offering an embodied counterpoint grounded in regenerative practice.
The six-phase methodology structured the program:
- DISARM — Threshold rituals softened museum codes.
- DISRUPT — Four non-traditional installations destabilised static display.
- UNITE — An opening ceremony activated 40+ community members in public space.
- PLAY — Utopia + Build & Destroy Playshops invited improvisation and collective making.
- PERFORM — Four durational works and three gallery responses expanded into temporal ritual.
- TRANSFORM — Professional development embedded regenerative tools in local practice.
The UnitePlayPerform methodology operated as the program’s structural spine, guiding design as an experiential journey across the six pillars of space, sense, movement, form, language, and energy.
- Applied to Artists — Taught through three professional development programs, where participants activated soft sculptural materials and documented felt states in a Hybrid Handbook.
- Applied to Community — Extended into Utopia and Build & Destroy Playshops for children and adults, where dismantling and reconstruction became tools for ritualised play.
- Applied to Performance — Shaped Melissa Gilbert’s durational works, where the six-phase arc became a temporal score for embodied endurance and ceremonial activation.
The methodology is held by a system of guardrails — colour theory, archetypes, Internal Family Systems, polyvagal theory, pedagogical play, and embodiment — ensuring the work remains adaptive, sensory, and regenerative.
The UPP methodology informed every aspect of artwork design—form, colour, materials, and process. Hyper Temples, Utopia, and Kinship began as paper forms, each cut with one breath and intention to channel one of twelve archetypes. These paper studies evolved into large-scale, soft sculptures: interactive, tactile, and tangible works that engaged audiences somatically, enhancing mood and shifting emotional states of being through colour, materiality, and participatory play.

We Activated

Impact & Legacy

- 4 large scale socially engaged installation artworks across 5 weeks
- 3 professional development programs for creatives and artists 6hrs sessions
- 4 durational performance works by OFFERINGS (Melissa Gilbert) 4hrs each
- 1 community opening ceremony performance (40+ participants) outdoor
- 4 Utopia Playshops 3 hrs sessions
- 4 Build and Destroy Playshops 3 hrs sessions
- 1 live gallery durational response
- 1 children’s Utopia program
Multi-disciplinary artist and UnitePlayPerform (UPP) director and founder, Melissa Gilbert delivered a multi-tiered project at Rockhampton Museum of Art (RMOA) in June-July 2024 which included a moving exhibition and a series of professional development workshops designed to enhance wellbeing outcomes whilst teaching new methods of expression.
These workshops, offered for free by the program commissioned by RMOA, invited local and Queensland-based artists, performers, creatives and others to learn the UPP method and dive into how experiential art is created via a series of full-day tactile and tangible workshops, culminating in various activations as part of Rockhampton River Festival 2024, where participants had the opportunity to facilitate and participate.
Participants also helped co-design the moving sculpture as part of these workshops, ‘BUILD AND DESTROY’, a living, breathing series of tactile object-works that morphed shape and moved to various locations throughout RMOA as part of the month-long exhibition. To further foster community engagement, audiences were also invited to participate in ceremonial activations and iterative movements facilitated by Gilbert, to break down and then build up the multi-part sculpture anew.
RMOA is committed to fostering artistic expression and community engagement, and we recognise the importance and significance of this project and its ability to invite creatives, artists, practitioner’s and community to explore how experiential art, abstraction, contemporary art and design theories are practised through the UPP embodied learning platform.
RMOA offers its fullest support for Melissa Gilbert, UnitePlayPerform and look forward to supporting the creative capacity of this artist.
Dr Jonathan McBurnie
Director, Rockhampton Museum of Ar
- 8,994 visitors to RMOA during Build and Destroy
- 5 weeks of activation
- 200+ direct participants in Playshops, performances, and programs
- 40+ community members activated in opening ceremony
- 5-10 volunteers enagaged
19 EOIs successful applications for UPP professional development program
Audiences described the project as “transformative” and “a new way of seeing art through the body.” Artists and educators reported greater confidence in embodied, participatory methods, while museum staff recognised UPP as a model for future programming.
Build and Destroy affirmed RMOA as a site for experimental, regenerative practice, seeding new cultural networks and expanding the role of regional museums as laboratories for collective imagination and cultural repair.

Exhibition

“Build & Destroy”

Build and Destroy transformed Rockhampton Museum of Art into a living laboratory of regenerative practice. Over five weeks, shifting installations, Playshops, performances, and community ceremonies invited audiences to dismantle, rebuild, and reimagine. Through embodied play and ritual, UnitePlayPerform dissolved spectatorship into active participation, activating cycles of repair and renewal.

Program

Professional Development Program

UPP Professional Development Program accepted emerging and established artists, creatives, facilitators and cultural practitioners to explore UnitePlayPerform’s methodology using space, sense, movement, form, language, and energy. Guided by UPP Founder, Artist, Educator Melissa Gilbert, participants explored Neuroscience, Internal Family Systems, Polyvagal theory, Pedagogical play, Archetypal and Colour theory.

Experiential practice was designed to move the participants to find their edge, reshaping perspectives, capturing behaviours, patterns and felt sense experiences through the interactive UPP Hybrid Handbook. Themes explored through application of the method were embodiment, interconnectedness, play, healing, interactive and sensory design, and regenerative art.

Performance

Durational Performances by Offerings

Melissa Gilbert’s durational performances embodied UnitePlayPerform’s cyclical methodology, unfolding as three-hour live rituals of destruction and renewal. Museum voyeurs were swept into non-traditional formats as Gilbert responded directly to RMOA’s architecture. Through socially engaging gestures and sculptural morphologies, the gallery became a participatory site of endurance, imagination, and ceremonial repair.

Process

Behind the Scenes

Build and Destroy was developed through a methodology of abstraction: circumambulatory sketches, elemental correspondences, and directional mapping structured the exhibition’s spatial logic. Non-traditional sites staircases, lifts, thresholds were inscribed as performative zones. Across five weeks, the orchestration of soft sculptures reconstituted RMOA’s architecture into a multi-layered choreography of embodied movement, ritual, and encounter.