The Geography Artist in Residence (AiRG) Program is an innovative initiative of the School of Geography in association with Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne.
About the program
Please note: Currently there is no Artist in Residence program available in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Science. We will post any future updates and opportunities here.
The AiRG works with researchers to rethink ways of exploring and expressing the geographical complexities inherent in the social and environmental challenges of the present and the future. Recognising that the arts have long played a major role interrogating human society and its relationship with the natural world, the program supports practicing visual artists in critical engagement with contemporary geographical concerns.
The program facilitates sustained dialogue between the artist and Australia’s most respected thinkers in the fields of physical and human geography, working to provoke new ways of thinking about cutting edge geographical ideas and generate discussion amongst a broad audience.
The AiRG participates in the everyday milieu of the school with opportunities to join researchers at their field sites and work at the coalface of their chosen geographical themes. The program challenges both artist and researchers to rethink conceptual understanding of wider geographic matters and culminates in a special event and exhibition of the artistic work produced.
Previous Artists in Residence
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Fayen d’Evie and Katie West of the Museum Incognita are the 2018 designated Geography Artists In Residence.
Museum Incognita will co-develop a work in progress in collaboration with Shepparton community members, Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) and Dookie Campus, around the theme of regional resilience. The artists will work collaboratively to develop a public engagement event that communicates the concerns and hopes of members of the Shepparton community for a resilient future.
This new collaboration between the University of Melbourne Regional Arts Collaboration (UoM RAC) in partnership with the Shepparton Art Museum aims to link artistic practice with university research connected to the themes of nature, environment and place. The project is an initiative of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI); the School of Geography Artist in Residence Program; the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences Dookie Campus; and the Ian Potter Museum.
During the artists' residency, the Museum Incognita will invite University of Melbourne academics and the Goulburn Valley community to walk with them along ancestral and present surface and underground water flows, at sites across the Goulburn Broken Catchment. The artists hope that conversations and performative activations in place will bring forward stories of resilience.
You can follow the project through instagram @museumincognita.
Museum Incognita - Water, Weaving, Grasses, Wool website
D'Evie and West's learnings are shared through an evolving stream of fragmented memories and reflections. The stream will shift its course over time, as the artists iteratively revisit, and begin to map the interconnectedness of flows of water and story across country.
Katie West
Katie West is a Yindjibarndi woman from Western Australia, who focuses on the renewal of human connections with and within the more-than-human world. Her previous bodies of work include ‘Decolonist’, which considered the practice of meditation as a means to decolonise the self, and 'muhlu garrwarn/cool time hot time', which engages with natural dyeing processes and text scores as ways to participate with the seasons.
Fayen d'Evie
Fayen d'Evie is based in Muckleford, rural Victoria. She explores blindness as a radical critical position, attuned to complex embodiment, sensory translations, material histories, ephemerality, obscurity, the tangible, and the invisible. She is also the founder of 3-ply, which investigates artist-led publishing as an experimental site for the production, translation and archiving of knowledge. In addition to a fine art background, d’Evie holds a PhD in environmental studies. Her work will be represented in a new installation in the upcoming exhibition Eavesdropping at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, 25 July to 21 Oct 2018.
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Linda Tegg
Linda Tegg was the inaugural School of Geography Artist in Residence. She works with photography, performance, video, and installation to investigate the contingent viewing conditions through which we orient ourselves in the world.
In doing so she operates within ecology and illusion – a world of images that form our idea of the natural and our interactions with others to produce work oscillating between the forensic and the romantic. This is undertaken through collaboration with non-human kinds and cultural institutions to reflect upon the impulses and methods used to draw others into the 'world-for-us'.
As the AiRG Linda has sought to interrogate and integrate herself in the wide spectrum of Geographies examined at Melbourne, lingering on concepts that refract concerns regarding the doing of geography and the practices of looking. A key theme routinely probed by her work in progress is the notion of 'Sensing Climate'. This she has done through extensive academic interviews, fieldwork participation and the production of visual film work gathered during a visit to Timor-Leste with a field class.
Linda’s work has been extensively exhibited in Australia, Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Currently she is collaborating with Architects Barracco+Wright as Creative Directors of the Australian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2018. Tegg was the Samstag Scholar of 2014 and the Georges Mora Foundation Fellow of 2012. Linda is Lecturer in Creative Practice at Deakin University.