Towards the latter period of Field Theory’s time as a tightly held collective, the practice began to loosen. Individual members initiated parallel lines of enquiry, often still aligned with the group’s methods but operating with more autonomy. The Keeper emerged from this shift.

The project began when Jason Maling was invited to the Sunshine Coast to run a community workshop. Rather than arriving with a defined outcome, he undertook an open-ended process of immersion, drawing on earlier Field Theory approaches, particularly the long-form, conversational method developed during The Stadium Broadcast. He spoke to anyone and everyone in Coolum. Walking groups, surf club members, volunteer nursery workers, local artists, activists, social workers, council staff, retirees, teenagers. The process was not about extracting stories but about building a dense, lived understanding of place through accumulation, repetition and presence.

From this, The Keeper took shape.

At its core, the project establishes a rotating role within a community. A “Keeper” is embedded in a town for a defined period, tasked with paying attention to the life of that place and responding to it through small, public acts. These are not framed as major artworks. They are gestures, encounters, invitations, disruptions and acts of care that unfold in everyday settings. The work privileges duration over spectacle and relationship over outcome.

The model has since expanded into a long-form civic program on the Sunshine Coast, developed in partnership with Red Chair and Sunshine Coast Council. In later iterations, multiple artists are invited to take on the Keeper role sequentially, each inheriting the conditions set by the previous participant. This creates a continuous chain of attention, where the work evolves through handover rather than reset.