Research groupings
Visual Art and Design Research Group
The Visual Art and Design Research Group (VADRG), a collaboration between the Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design and the South Australian School of Art, is the only official research grouping at the South Australian School of Art. The VADRG website provides details about its members, aims and activities.
Digital Art Research Experiment Group
The Digital Art Research Experiment (DARE) was established to investigate practices and boundaries around the evolution of digital media, as expressed through the work of its constituent members - six recognised visual artists. It is one of the South Australian School of Art's core research concentrations.
DARE aims to:
- develop research focused on digital media and its cross-overs within the SA School of Art's art and design specialisations
- examine best practice within the digital media industry
- interlink with industry and to undertake collaborative research.
- seek sponsorship as appropriate
- interlink with other relevant research disciplines within the University in order to develop innovative creative work
- develop a research profile for SASA and the DARE group
- promote the group's research outcomes through exhibitions.
Members
Olga Sankey, Greg Donovan, Andrew Hill, Di Barrett and Toby Richardson and Mark Kimber
Exhibitions
View DARE's exhibition Transmission (SASA Gallery, 7-31 August 2007).
Critical difference: cultural diversity and regionality
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Weaving the Murray, Art Gallery of South Australia |
Initiated in 2007, Critical difference: cultural diversity and regionality is a new research cluster that brings together the scholarly and artistic activities of four academic staff members at the South Australian School of Art (SASA). While Nici Cumpston, Dr. Kathleen Connellan, Professor Kay Lawrence and Dr. Pamela Zeplin have each undertaken collaborative research, this cluster has been initiated to enable them to work together with research degree candidates to develop cultural diversity and regionality as an area of research strength in the School.
As researchers, they share a number of common and overlapping interests that address diversities and disparities within the representation and interpretation of visual and material cultures. Their work embraces a range of methodologies, from postcolonialism to intercultural-cultural, art historical and grounded theory approaches. In examining issues of intercultural exchange and diversity amongst craft, design and art practitioners, the research cluster will enable them to build upon relationships established with previous educational and professional partners across Australia. Prior collaborative research includes the following two projects.
Projects
In 2001 Kay Lawrence and Nici Cumpston worked with five other Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to create the Centenary of Federation project Weaving the Murray that explored the meaning of the Murray River for communities from Corryong to Goolwa. The final installation was shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia in January 2002 and toured to regional River communities before being accessioned into the collection of the South Australian Museum. Their joint paper on this project 'A story is like a river' was published in Fresh water: new perspectives on water in Australia by Melbourne University Press in August 2007.
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Heri Dono, Artist in Residence at SASA, and artist collaborators assembling the Trojan Horse in the SASA Gallery. Photo by Tok Basuki. |
In 2007 Pamela Zeplin curated a major project with renowned Indonesian artist, Heri Dono, the culmination of a series of seminars on art in the Asia Pacific region developed in partnership with Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre. The project included an artist's residency (co-convened with Olga Sankey) at the South Australian School of Art, and the exhibition The Dream Republic at the SASA Gallery, a collaborative programme involving three art schools and thirty artists.
In 2007 the emerging focus of the cluster is 'water', in both symbolic and literal form. 'Water' will be the subject of a panel discussion incorporating visual art, writing and performance by the researchers at the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness (ACRAWSA) conference in Adelaide in December 2007.
About the researchers
Nici Cumpston
Nici Cumpston, recently appointed to a joint lecturing position in the David Uniapon College of Indigenous Education and Research (DUCIER) and SASA is a practising photographer and emerging researcher of Aboriginal and Afghan/Irish descent. Her work has been widely exhibited and commissioned throughout Australia and focuses upon relationships between place, country and family. Her current research focuses on the environmental impact of managed water flow on the Murray River and its surrounding trees. She is currently researching Lake Bonney in the Riverland, creating work for the exhibition Power and Beauty curated by Judith Ryan and Zara Stanhope for the Heidi Museum of Art.
Professor Kay Lawrence AM
Kay Lawrence, currently Head of the South Australian School of Art maintains a visual art and writing practice engaged with textile processes and their meanings. She has exhibited internationally, received national commissions and published widely. Of Welsh descent and brought up in Papua New Guinea, her research engages with the colonial history of settler groups with particular emphasis upon material culture. She is concerned with negotiating the 'uneasy spaces' between cultures and the relationship of communities to place. Her most recent work explores the use and meanings of pearl shell from northwest Western Australia, and will be shown in the exhibition This Everything Water at the SASA Gallery during the 2008 Adelaide Festival.
Dr Kathleen Connellan
Kathleen Connellan, originally from South Africa and of Irish descent, lectures in design history and theory at the South Australian School of Art. Between 2001 and 2002 she undertook research that mapped the history and theory of design curriculum in Australian Universities. Her findings were presented to the discipline through a series of national seminars and the online publication 'Opening Pandora's Paintbox'. Her areas of specialisation also include colour theory and critical race theory and she has presented papers and written articles on whiteness and hierarchies in design and craft in Australia and overseas. She is co-convening the 2007 ACRAWSA conference with the theme 'Transforming bodies, nations, knowledges'. Her current research is focused on investigating displacement, gender/race/class boundaries and how these are entwined in aspects of domesticity and fixations about cleanliness.
Dr Pamela Zeplin
Senior Lecturer and Head of Art & Design History & Theory, Pamela Zeplin is a writer, curator and artist whose writing on contemporary visual craft and art is published widely. Born in Australia of English descent, her current research focuses on cultural diversity, cross-cultural exchanges and issues around regionality and artist-run initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region and the wider Southern Hemisphere. She has embedded her research in the undergraduate program through the development of innovative courses that engage including Aboriginal art and visual culture, Cross cultural studies, Asia-Pacific art, and Race, place and art history. Pamela has been invited to South Project gatherings in Melbourne, Wellington and Santiago and is concerned with issues of marginalised and potentially transformative spaces and places, including the often overlooked space of bathrooms.