Dr Julie Brooke

Dr Brooke is a recent PhD Graduate from ANU School of Art Painting Workshop. She will collaborate with Dr Vanessa Robbins and Professor Tim Senden in Applied Maths, in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. She proposes to use painting, drawing and the manufacture of 3-D objects to address the following question: what is the role of mental imagery in the understanding of abstract mathematical concepts, and how might it be visualised in material form?

Dr Kirsty Darlaston

This collaborative research project with Professor Tom Gedeon, Research School of Computer Science would start with questions about how people interact with art with their eyes, hands and bodies. What gestures do people make when viewing art? How do their hands move when they describe an image? What do their bodies do? Where do their eyes travel? Using the artistic tropes of the figure and ground, which have been posited as visual and haptic spaces respectively, the research would look at how the body reacts to artworks that span a spectrum of highly patterned (ground) to figurative. Where does the eye travel when an image is mainly in the haptic space of the ground, such as the space of a Mondrian? Where does the eye travel when there is a figure on the ground? Do the eyes and the hands of the viewer trace Dutton’s pathway out of the landscape image?

Dr Alison Munro

Dr Munro, a recent PhD graduate of the School of Art Textiles Workshop will collaborate with Dr Vanessa Robins in the department of Applied Maths, College of Physical Sciences and Engineering, to undertake collaborative research into ways that the forms and structures possible in crochet can be described via mathematical formulae, and how mathematics might be described in crochet and related textile methods. Focussing on mathematical and textile ‘descriptions’ of curved forms, the project will realise a series of crochet objects and corresponding formulae, which develop through a process of translation from fibre to formula, back to fibre and so on. This collaborative research project will draw on work completed in my recent PhD into the relationship of textiles to geometry, as well as current work being undertaken by Dr Vanessa Robins at the ANU Department of Applied Maths in the field of topology and the mathematical description of complex surfaces.

Dr Nicola Dickson

Dr Nicola Dickson is a PhD graduate of the School of Art Painting Workshop and her proposal involves collaboration with Associate Professor Bronwen Douglas, Adjunct Senior Fellow of the School of Culture, History and Language in the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific. Dickson’s studio research will trial and develop a manner of painting to engage with and re-present to a contemporary audience the artefacts from the Bruni d'Entrecasteaux voyage to Australia and the Pacific in 1791-1794. This research enables an engagement with history that is distinctly different to a written textual response, broadening the range of possible outcomes from the project.

Sally Blake

Sally Blake is a doctoral candidate in the Textiles Workshop at the School of Art. Her Fellowship project involves collaboration with Dr Emina Subasic, a social psychologist working as an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Psychology at the ANU. Blake’s practice-led visual arts research is motivated by a deep concern about the anthropic-driven destruction of our natural environment and a belief that artists have a key role to play in communicating this concern. The research question now generated by my PhD involves the role visual arts can have in influencing people’s attitudes towards current ecological problems and the global warming crisis. This Fellowship collaboration will entail a quantitative social psychology experiment in which we will investigate how visual imagery (specifically artworks) may be used to mobilise people for social change.

Dr Ursula Frederick

Ursula Frederick undertook her doctoral research in the School of Art in Art Theory and Photomedia. Her broad research interest involves how human beings are shaped by their surroundings and likewise how people create their worlds. Aiming to understand this dialogue - between people and their material environments - is also a central concern of archaeology, a field in which she has trained and worked professionally. It is her practice as an artist with experience in archaeology that she aims to bring to her collaboration with members of the School of Culture, History & Language, in ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. She aims to explore the possibilities of making art and archaeological knowledge mutually, with archaeological materials, in collaboration with archaeologists Dr Sally Brockwell and Professor Sue O’Connor.