The Australian National University School of Art and Design is delighted to announce that the recipient of the 2020 Stephen Procter Fellowship is Alexander Rosenberg.

Please join us online in welcoming Alexander for a Visiting Artist talk at ANU, 10AM Thursday 30 April (8PM Wednesday 29 April, Philadelphia time), 2020. He will introduce his practice, share in his experience as cast member of the Netflix reality TV show Blown Away, and tell us about his upcoming Procter Fellowship project.

Alexander Rosenberg is an artist, educator and writer working with glass based in Philadelphia (USA). His interdisciplinary practice questions the parameters, demands and opportunities of a media-specific, studio-based methodology. He his concerned with ethics of production and life cycle of the objects we make;

“As I interact with the surrounding environment by applying techniques collected from studying the past and imagining the near future, I question how we might experience multiple, simultaneous, overlapping histories in a single site or object. Can we unravel these complicated, fraught narratives while shaping new identities for today--and for tomorrow?” *

We are thrilled that Alexander will travel to Canberra to conduct a residency based in the ANU Glass Workshop. His research project will draw on resources gathered from the Rakow Library archives, and include fieldwork and studio-based experiments to develop new tools for survival, responding to the unique Australian environment.

The Procter Fellowship Panel, comprised of Nadege Desgenetez, Christine Nicholson, Rohan Nicol, Chris McAuliffe and Virginia Rigney, deemed Alexander’s proposed project highly poignant, as it seeks to address environmental and societal concerns now emphasised by the global Covid-19 pandemic, in the aftermath of a summer marked by fires and hail in Australia. We look forward to hosting Alexander’s gravely optimistic project.

The Fellowship was established in 2001 in memory of Stephen Procter, Head of the Glass Workshop at The Australian National University from 1993 until 2000. The aim of the Fellowship is to assist Australian and international artists working in glass to work and study abroad. Travel and the experience of other cultures were very important to Stephen and this fellowship is a significant and exciting link between glass communities around the world.

* From Alexander Rosenberg’s artist statement, 2019.