Brecknock Consulting P/L an Australian cultural planning and public art consultancy, established in 1988.  

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The consultancy was founded in Adelaide by Richard Brecknock in 1988 before expanding to include an office in Brisbane with Director Chetana Andary in 1998, an office in Sydney in 1999 with Director Ric McConaghy, who brought creative play-space design services to the mix.  In 2000 the Melbourne office opened with Director Carol Atwell heading that team. The national operation benefitted from the project management skills of Adey Brecknock who worked across all state offices. The company provided both Public Art planning, curating and project management services and Cultural planning and strategy/policy development for the public and private sectors across all Australian states and territories.  Overseas experience included activities in New Zealand, England, Norway and the UAE.  

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During thirty-three years of consulting Brecknock Consulting’s team of dedicated and highly experienced cultural strategists, public art curators and project managers developed 130 public art strategies/plans and curated and project managed over 300 public artworks for public spaces and buildings across Australia. 

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The team worked in collaboration with a wide range of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture firms to contributed to a diversity of projects for civic/commercial buildings, residential developments. town centres, streetscapes, parklands, foreshores and new cities.  The public art commissioning provided hundreds of artists with the opportunity to develop concepts and to produce an amazing range of artworks from the massive scale landmark sculptures with budgets in the hundreds of thousands to small intimate details with budgets in the tens of thousands.  The team had the opportunity to curate some of Australia’s most experienced public artists and to provide young and emerging artists their first opportunity to undertake work in the public realm.  This included a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait artists, especially through the Brisbane office. (For more details of completed projects see the PDF link below and Project Download page)

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The Brecknock Consulting  team worked in partnership with over one hundred regional, suburban and inner-city local governments across Australia.  

In addition to the work with local government around Australia the Brecknock Consulting offices undertook projects for Federal, Queensland, South Australian, Victorian, NSW and Northern Territory government agencies. delivered a wide range of projects.  This included a significant collaboration with QLD Health between 2003 and 2011 to oversee their integrated art projects for new hospitals and aged care facilities across the state from the Gold Coast to the Torres Strait Islands.

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Private sector work included public art plans and implementation projects for inner city corporate developments, such as in the Melbourne Docklands and in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide CBDs.  The company also delivered a large number of public art projects for major residential developers such as Lend Lease, Mirvac, Stockland and Landcorp.

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Brecknock Consulting’s second stream of services relates to cultural planning, research and policy development mainly at the local government level.  The team developed over 80 cultural policies and plans for inner-city, outer metropolitan and regional councils across Australia and NZ.

The company’s cultural planning work had its origins in the 1995 Creative Councils project for the LGA which “set out to raise awareness that culture is much more than arts facilities and programmes; that is requires looking beyond the arts as traditionally defined to examine the wider potential for cultural development”. Brecknock Consulting’s team worked in association with Colin Mercer from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies (ICPS), Bill Chandler, Chandler Consulting and Joanne Petidemange from ArtsPlus.

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Another early ground-breaking project was the 2002 Creative City strategy for Brisbane City Council which was one of the first “Creative City” strategies in Australia.  The Brecknock Consulting team in association with Charles Landry from the UK think tank COMEDIA developed this strategy around six core principles: embracing history, building creative capital, ensuring access and equity, encouraging innovation, investing in culture and providing leadership.  The process involved extensive consultation and reflection on the nature of Brisbane and its people, their experiences, the subtropical style and can-do way of innovating and risk taking.

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Charles Landry was a key contributor to the project especially at that time he was instrumental in promoting the notion of the “Creative City” through his books, The Creative City (1995) and The Creative City: A toolkit for Urban Innovators (2000). https://charleslandry.com/

 

For more details of Brecknock Consulting's previous public art and cultural planning projects see:

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