In November 2017 Dr Rowan Conroy (lecturer in Photography & Media Arts) was awarded a 2018 NSW Regional Arts Fellowship, valued at $50,000 over two years. As part of his Fellowship Rowan will be will be undertaking a creative visual arts residency in archaeology at the Paphos (sometimes Pafos) theatre excavations in Cyprus Archaeology. He will be pursuing the creative use of drones to interpret the site, as well as other visual investigations using video and photography. The Fellowship includes a solo exhibition at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery in 2019.

Over the past decade Rowan’s research has focused on picturing place and history through the photographic tradition of landscape and the digital print. Often figureless, his works seek to highlight the dense and discordant histories that can inhabit an image through the visual evidence of material culture and human intervention in the land. In 2016 through the support of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts summer research grant Rowan started using drones for research and visual enquiry. He produced Fence Lines #1, a 4k video created using a drone flown slowly over the Lakebed of Weereewa (Lake George, NSW). In April 2017 this was performed to the public as a projection performance at the ANU SOA&D gallery with a live composition by Dr Alec Hunter and the Canberra Experimental Music Ensemble.

https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/conroy-rm