Beci Orpin

Beci will share her personal journey from her alternative political upbringing to uni drop out to her commercial success, and everything in between. With experimentation, sharing of ideas and realistic positivity at the forefront of her work, Beci will discuss how she balances this with both her freelance clients and personal work, and also how her creative process (and in particular the use of her sketchbooks) lends itself to both. She will also share her unique take on creativity, and how not fitting into any box has worked for her.

Beci Orpin is a creative practitioner based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work occupies a space between illustration, design and craft. Beci has run her studio for over 20 years, catering to a wide range of clients including Facebook, Disney, Google and Uniqlo. Beci also exhibits her work both locally and internationally. She has authored and illustrated four D.I.Y books and four children’s titles. Her work is described as colourful, graphic, bold, feminine and dream-like, and she has been referred to as a ‘national treasure’. Beci completed her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Textiles at RMIT University.

Mikala Dwyer

In this keynote presentation Mikala will discuss her own journey through various education systems and why she believes art is in itself an education, and one that has the potential to support the survival of life-forms besides our own. Known for her idiosyncratic and evocative sculptural installations, Mikala will share her personal stories including having dyslexia and how she has navigated the education system and artworld. Mikala will share insights into her early work to her most recent work showing at MUMA and how this work explores the effects of ecological change, what might be lost and the need to close the gap between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems and land management. Art can be a carrier of knowledge, mythologies and cultures across time. We see the immense and profound knowledge of kin and country carried through indigenous dance, song, painting and objects across millennia. All art can hold knowledge in ways that other things can’t.

Mikala Dwyer has pushed the limits of sculpture, painting and performance, establishing herself as one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists. She has been honoured with solo survey exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, as well as at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, ACCA in Melbourne, and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. She has had many international exhibitions and several residencies and has received numerous scholarships, grants and awards. 

Martine Corompt

Join interdisciplinary artist Martine Corompt and panel in a Think-Tank breakout session exploring the role of art in our evolving society. How is our Arts Industry changing and what does this mean for education? We know that art has never been more important but how do we respond to an ever-changing landscape that is both exciting and challenging? Contribute to the conversation where you have your say and where we share the learnings beyond the conference context.
Panel members:
* Dr Martine Corompt – Program Manager Bachelor of Fine Art RMIT
* Dr Kelly Hussey Smith – Lecturer in photography and a co-leader of CAST Contemporary Art and Social
Transformation Research group

Martine Corompt is the Program Manager of the Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) in the School of Art RMIT and specializes in interdisciplinary art practices including Video, Sound, Animation and expanded media installation. Since 1995 Martine has exhibited widely in individual and group exhibitions, locally, nationally and internationally including works such as Torrent exhibited at Contemporary Art Tasmania and the Centre for Contemporary Photography 2015 and Tide exhibited at Westspace gallery 2012. Subjects such as the reductive representation of bodies of water and the natural and unnatural landscape contributed to theme of her PhD research project titled: Cartoon and the Cult of Reduction completed at the VCA Melbourne University in 2017.

Carly Grace

This interactive workshop will include guided practical Visual Thinking Strategies sessions in RMIT’s Gallery exhibition, Future U, where participants will gain insights into VTS methodology. This will be followed by a conversation about the power of authentic art experiences to foster our students’ flexible thinking and resilience. VTS is a powerful and exciting student-centred teaching pedagogy that promotes Visual Literacy. VTS discussions provide a space for our students to practise respectful, democratic and collaborative problem-solving. VTS nurtures emotional and social intelligence and builds students’ confidence and willingness to participate in group thinking and discussion. These skills and abilities are essential for our students in the 21st century.

Carly Grace is an artist and visual arts educator based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in interpretation education and has an extensive experience in designing and delivering diverse education and public programs within museums, community arts and diverse educational settings. Carly is an experienced Visual Thinking Strategies facilitator passionate about introducing Australian teachers to VTS. Carly’s philosophy for visual arts’ education is to connect people with the opportunities that art making and engagement in art culture can have in enriching their lives.

Image credit: Uncanny Valley, Beautiful the World, 2020, video still.  Acknowledgements to Julia Zemiro.

Troy Innocent

See through new eyes…
Troy Innocent – Artist, Game Designer & Urban Play Scholar

In this workshop participants will be introduced to ways of making urban play with augmented reality and led through an exploration and demonstration of 64 Ways of Being on location at RMIT campus. While digital games have led to a recent focus on the technology of game development in education, seeing the world through a playful lens also opens up a broader range of creative methodologies inspired by play – in the arts, in design, and in the world. Mobile technologies such as augmented reality situate people within new experiences of place and space, allowing us to remake, reimagine and reconnect with the world around us. 64 Ways of Being puts these ideas into practice, bringing together live art, game design and public art. People and place are connected at 64 locations across the city via augmented reality encounters capturing different ways of being. These experiences re-imagine Melbourne’s identity as expressed through its creative, linguistic, cultural, social and urban diversity.
Materials: please bring your fully-charged phone.

Troy Innocent is an urban play scholar and creator of 64 Ways of Being, a mobile platform for experiences blending live art, game design and public art. Based at RMIT University, his work connects digital media poetics, creative code, visual language, mixed realities and playable cities. Innocent develops augmented reality games that blend physical objects with digital interfaces to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways; situating his work in Melbourne, Bristol, Barcelona, Istanbul, Ogaki, Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong. Working with the city as a material, his practice explores ways of being that reimagine, reconfigure and reconnect with the world.

Sonia Leber

Video installations: the non-singularity of multi-screens
Sonia Leber – Artist 

One way that video art differs fundamentally from the cinema is in its embrace of multi-screen video installations, where screens are simply placed side by side, or carefully distributed across a gallery space. In this workshop we will discover different ways of building up multi-screen projects by investigating how different moving image relationships can be established across rhythms and energies, parallel views, and conceptual mirroring. We will consider what happens when ideas and screens combine and coalesce: the potentialities and the pitfalls. We will work towards using our own mobile phones to collaboratively build up a series of thematic multi-screen video installations.
Materials: please bring your fully-charged phone.

Sonia Leber is known for her distinctive installation artworks, using video, sound, architecture and public participation. Her practice draws on cinematic methods (sonic and visual) to build up highly detailed and conceptual videoworks that emerge from the real, but exist significantly in the realm of the imaginary. In collaboration with David Chesworth, exhibitions include 56th Biennale of Venice (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); ‘Freedom of Sleep’, Fondation Fiminco, Paris (2021); ‘What Listening Knows’, Messums Wiltshire, UK (2021); ‘The State We Are In’, Galeria Labirynt, Poland (2018); ‘And Tomorrow And’, Index, Stockholm (2018); ‘The Score’, Ian Potter Museum of Art (2017); ‘Call of the Avant-Garde’, Heide (2017); ‘Borders, Barriers, Walls’, MUMA, Melbourne (2016); and ‘Melbourne Now’, NGV (2013-14). Their survey exhibition ‘Architecture Makes Us’, curated by CCP in Melbourne (2018) toured to UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2019) and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2019).

Sonia Leber is a Senior Industry Fellow in the School of Art at RMIT University.
A full project history can be found at leberandchesworth.com 

Paper on Paper/Collage
Beci Orpin

Beci will give a brief presentation specifically related to her collage work and use of sketchbooks before encouraging participants to share with each other effective ways to work with students to get the most out of using collage as a medium to make art and using sketchbooks for idea generation and planning. Learn the ins and outs of collage with Beci Orpin who will guide you through her methods and processes of making art with paper collage. You will experiment in mark-making as well as learn about various papers, glues, composition and colour. Included in the workshop is a take-home copy of Beci’s Paper Collage handbook.

Fleur Summers

This workshop will explore positive and negative space using simple casting, plaster and sugar cubes. Participants will make a small geometric plaster work to take home.

Fleur Summers is the studio leader of the Sculpture Studio at RMIT University. She has experience in hand modeling and casting bronze for public art and her work can be seen at Jewell Station in Brunswick. She is also interested in installation, video and social practice.

Hannah Caprice

Artists’ Books
Hannah Caprice – Artist           

In this workshop, you will learn how to make a simple stab-bound book measuring 14cm high and 19cm wide. You will learn how to tear and fold paper using a bone folder, cut and fold a cover, and stitch your pages together using waxed thread. We will also explore ways you can experiment with layering your pages using different types of paper, and we will discuss various book cover options.

Hannah Caprice is an emerging artist and graduate of RMIT’s Fine Art Printmaking program. She adores working with all things on paper and never ceases to be amazed with its extensive versatility and material qualities.

Hannah was awarded the 2020 APW Collie Print Trust Scholarship for Emerging Victorian Printmakers. She was a 2020 Studio Sponsored Resident at Baldessin Press, and most recently she received the Emerging Artist Award from Castlemaine Art Museum’s Experimental Print Prize exhibition. When she’s not scraping away at copper plates, she works as a visual art technician at a school in Melbourne’s inner east.

​Image credit: Hannah Caprice – Artist Book, Animalgamations

Dr Greg Creek

The ‘Drawing as Discovery’ Workshop will present attendees with a hands-on experience of creative thinking through making. A cycle of drawing activities will demonstrate iterative approaches to creativity that demonstrate how to generate visual ideas and then synthesize them into new developmental and resolved artworks. These drawing workshop ideas can be used in various settings by teachers working with a range of students. All materials will be supplied.

Greg Creek is Studio Lead Drawing & Video and a practicing artist of 30 years’ experience creating large painting, drawing and installation projects. He has held group and individual exhibitions in Australia, Asia, the U.K. and Europe, and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.

Dr Mark Edgoose

In this workshop, you will explore variations in pattern and colour using simple everyday accessible tools in order to make a pair of earrings for you to take/wear home. All you need to bring is your creativity and energy, we supply the materials with a touch of alchemy. A selection of students’ work will be on display.

Mark Edgoose is studio Lead of Gold and Silversmithing and a practicing artist/craftsperson working at the intersections of craft, design and architecture fueled with an interest in both traditional and hi-tech materials. Dr Mark Edgoose has made a significant contribution to Australian object-making since 1989. A global expert in titanium, Mark’s material-driven research manifests in exhibitions that explore the form and metaphor of craft objects as they exist in space and time.

Piper Press a contemporary art book publisher is supporting the conference by providing a complimentary art book to all attendees on 19 March 2022!

WooHoo and thank- you Margaret and John  : )