Judges: Professor Anne Dunlop, Associate Professor David Hansen and Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn
Six scholarships of $5,000 were awarded:
INSTITUTIONAL
Angela Goddard, Griffith University Art Museum
Richard Bell: Embassy
About the project
To support transcriptions, editing and reproduction rights from several international contributors for the publication ‘Richard Bell: Embassy’ which will be published to coincide with Bell’s invitation to stage Embassy at Documenta15 in Kassel, Germany, and TATE Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2023. The project will document Embassy’s influence as a site for discussions of race and identity in national and global contexts. The publication will be co-edited by Megan Tamati-Quennell, (Te Ātiawa, Ngāi Tahu), a highly respected curator from Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Associate Indigenous Curator Contemporary Art, Govett Brewster, New Plymouth and Curator Modern & Contemporary Māori & Indigenous Art, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, Richard Bell and myself.
Richard Bell is one of Australia’s most preeminent artists, using his art practice as a provocation for discussions around Aboriginal social justice, land rights and sovereignty and critiquing the legacy of European invasion with satirical humour and wry observations. In 2013 Bell debuted Embassy in Melbourne as a touring homage to the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy, first established outside the Australian parliament in 1972.
INSTITUTIONAL
Lisa Mansfield, University of Adelaide
Leonardo of the North: the polymathic creativity of Jan van Scorel
About the project
This project investigates the multifaceted activities of the sixteenth-century Dutch artist, priest, antiquarian, inventor, and hydraulic engineer, Jan van Scorel (1495-1562). While biographical and survey studies of famous polymaths across history emphasise multidisciplinary breadth of achievements stemming from innate genius (nature), polymathic creativity will be reframed as a personal and professional quality that is equally shaped by imagination, experimentation, and socialisation within the Renaissance workshop (nurture). The project will explore the critical role played by Scorel’s master-apprentice mentoring, networks with other artists and diverse patrons, multimedia training and expertise, innovative approaches to drawing (disegno), project collaborations as problem-solving, and impact of his cross-cultural encounters during his extensive travels in Italy and pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Integrating multidisciplinary insights from art historical, cultural studies, and engineering and science perspectives, my research aims to insert Scorel in the enduring discourse on the Renaissance concept of the ‘universal man’, which to date includes surprisingly little consideration of artist-engineers north of the Alps during the sixteenth century.
INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN
Brenda L Croft, Australian National University
Reimagining the North Australian Expedition 1855-56
About the project
My research proposal has multiple foci, as follows:
The North Australian Expedition, 1855 – 56
Undertaking archival research for a proposed ARC Linkages project based on revisiting The North Australian Expedition, 1855 – 56, sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS, London), which was undertaken by Augustus Charles Gregory and his compatriots tracing the Victoria River in the then Northern Territory of South Australia. Among the expedition participants was artist Thomas Baines, as artist and storekeeper. Baines’ extensive visual documentation of the expedition, comprising watercolours, drawings, maps and paintings, is held in significant collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia and the RGS collection acquired for the Kerry Stokes Collection.
I am proposing to revisit and reimagine this expedition from the perspective of First Nations communities – my patrilineal community (Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra) among them – whose traditional lands and waters the Victoria River wends through, with the intended outcome eventually being a collaborative exhibition at a major national cultural institution – drawing upon my extensive curatorial experience and networks at state, national and international levels – representing work by contemporary First Nations creative practitioners and knowledge holders through multi-disciplinary, multi-modal, multi-literacies creative-led research platforms.
The intention is for Baines work – drawn from public collections in Australia – to be included in the exhibition as a form of historical mirror to which contemporary First Nations creatives respond. A key intent of this scholarly project is to develop a research team comprising First Nations knowledge holders – visual and performative creatives, language speakers, song-people, Rangers, Country custodians – alongside non-Indigenous colleagues with linguistic, ethnobotanical, anthropological, community-engagement expertise.
R + D on retracing the 1855-56 route will be conducted through archives research at the Library and Archives of the Northern Territory; National Archives of Australia, NT and field research with First Nations and non-Indigenous representatives and communities associated with the Victoria River region. I propose to be based at the ANU North Australian Research Unit (NARU), which is located at Charles Darwin University.
Victoria River Downs to Timber Creek to Kahlin Compound, 1925 – 2022
Conjunctively, I propose to expand on creative-led research undertaken during my doctoral research project (2012 – 2021), which comprised a series of solo and group exhibitions – subalter/N/ative dreams (2016); Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality (2017); and People like us, we come from t/here (2018) – and exegesis Karrwa (stone axe/axehead) to Kartak (container, cup, billycan, pannikin): hand-made/held-ground (2021). My father was born on Victoria River Downs c. 1925 and with my grandmother, Bessie Croft, was removed from VRD and taken to Kahlin Compound in 1927. I referred to this history/mystory within my exegesis, Kurrwa to Kartak (unpublished manuscript, 2021).
I propose to retrace the route undertaken from VRD to Timber Creek Police Station, thence to Kahlin Compound, Darwin, as creative-led, performative First Nations autoethnography and First Nations Storying/Storywork with the outcome being a multi-modal, immersive installation, similar to the work Retrac(k)ing Country and (s)kin exhibited in Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality. I will record audio-visual material, collect ephemera sourced along the route and interview First Nations and non-Indigenous community members, historians and academics/researchers.
INDEPENDENT
Alisa Bunbury
Falling Water: theBirrarung and early Melbourne
About the project
This project will research and publish on the early visual depictions of the Birrarung (Yarra) and the city of Melbourne. It will focus on the changing representation of the city by settler artists, particularly in the first century following the Van Demonian and British invasion of Naarm in 1835. Numerous watercolours, drawings, prints, oil paintings and photographs held in libraries, galleries and private collections show the growth of Melbourne, but they tell only one side of this complex story. The inclusion of First Peoples’ art and cultural objects made in the Birrarung valley will aim to redress the Indigenous absence in Melbourne’s visual history.
Historically, many cities have one or two vantage points from which they were depicted. From the first years of settlement, Melbourne was shown from the southern floodplain, looking across the Birrarung to the settlement, soon to be laid out in ‘Hoddle’s grid’, which within a few years covered the rolling northern slopes. However, the location from which such views were taken moved, like a slow tracking shot, as the city developed, allowing a story about colonial Melbourne to be explored. This project analyses this important body of visual material, focusing particularly on the period to 1935, and the stretch of river from the current Immigration Museum to the Botanic Gardens.
The earliest sketches, such as those by Robert Russell and W.F.E. Liardet, show the small waterfall that provided the location of the river port. During the goldrush-rich 1850s, artistic representations, by Ludwig Becker, S.T. Gill and others, moved upstream to include the new Princes Bridge; and in the 1860s and 1870s vistas of distant Melbourne from the Botanic Gardens were popular, as in the paintings of Henry Gritten and Henry Burn. In contrast, by the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth centuries, artists, including Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Clarice Beckett, were increasingly interested in capturing the changing light and reflections of buildings, bridges and sky.
As Melbourne flourished, the abundant wetlands and woodlands of Naarm were destroyed and its Traditional Owners were forced away. Only a few settler artists recorded the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung people and Aboriginal visitors to their Country, but evidence of the impact of invasion and dispossession, as well as resistance and resilience, can be found in written accounts, reports and laws enacted: these will be included in this project. In 2017 the Birrarung was legally recognised as a living natural entity and the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung as its ongoing custodians. In the lead up to the bicentenary of Melbourne’s settlement, this project offers a timely reassessment of this visual, textual and cultural material.
EMERGING
Victoria Wynne-Jones, University of Auckland
Unexpected actions: spontaneity and metastability in contemporary performance art
About the project
What role does spontaneity play in contemporary performance art? How does spontaneity arise, why is it important, and what can it do? I aim to study the improvisational elements in otherwise highly choreographed works and examine how spontaneity might escape co-opting by institutional and rational control.
The originality of my research lies in its focus on works engaging with spontaneity that take place within visual art contexts of museums and exhibition spaces. I will argue that such performances provide a challenge to the standard ways in which such spaces are governed. To date there has been a large amount of research on improvisation in the context of dance and theatre, particularly the role improvisation plays in collaborative processes of composition and collectively devised or written pieces. In emphasising the critical and politically activist aspects of intersubjective spontaneity, my work will build on and extend studies in improvisation which tend to focus on theatre, music, film and dance, rather than performances in a contemporary art context.
I am interested in how exactly artists facilitate spontaneity through the structure of their artworks. My hypothesis is that spontaneity, examples of going off-script and undermining programming that allows some kind of autonomy from within, or away from, such programs and institutional influences can be achieved. I intend to analyse spontaneity with the aid of the concept of metastability, which is taken from cognitive science. I will excavate this concept more deeply, together with literature from improvisation studies, in order to examine the importance of spontaneity in performances that go some way in evading the assignation of pre-defined roles.
This research will examine in detail the role played by spontaneity in performance artworks such as, for example the oscillations that occur between spontaneity, scripts and instruction. As part of this inquiry, I aim to show that spontaneity can be contagious and intersubjective, not simply initiated by the individual: it can be shared or collective. How this intersubjective and spontaneous phenomenon arranged by the artwork can spill over into forms of activism adds an important dimension to this study.
EMERGING
Tets Kimura, Flinders University
Presentation of Japanese Aesthetics and the representation of the WWII memories at the Cowra Japanese Garden in regional NSW
About the project
Though Cowra is a small township in NSW with the population of less than 10,000, it has played a significant symbolic role in the Australia-Japan relationship. During the Second World War, Japanese POWs were imprisoned there, and the breakout by the Japanese in August 1944 resulted in the death of four Australians and 231 Japanese. Despite its tragic history, the local Cowra citizens established the Japanese war cemeteries in 1964, and the Cowra Japanese Garden in 1979, both still actively operating today. Although the history of Cowra has been studied by academics, the garden that symbolises the resilience of the Australia-Japan relationship by presenting an authentic Japanese aesthetic experience and representing the town’s unique experience of WWII, has not received such attention. My research will focus on how the Cowra Japanese Garden was established and has been maintained considering the WWII tragedy in Cowra, what roles are taken by the Cowra people to sustain Japanese aesthetics in regional Australia, and what has been its position in the contemporary Australia-Japan relations.
To increase the awareness and significance of the Cowra Japanese Garden, I will conduct archival research in Canberra, such as at the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, and the National Archives of Australia, to revisit the history of Cowra. Furthermore, in Cowra, I will study the garden and analyse how Japanese garden aesthetics are presented in the township. Attention will also be paid to the 50-year-long Cowra-Seikei high school exchange program to discover meanings of the Cowra Japanese Garden from the Japanese perspective too.
Note: Tets Kimura is due to visit Japan in 2022 as a visiting research scholar at the Center of Asian and Pacific Studies, Seikei University, the parent organisation for Seikei High School.