2022 Re-assemble Art Education Conference
Theme: Sustainability: creating our futures
SAT 27 AUGUST 2022
Art Education Victoria is thrilled to present our annual conference in 2022 and we are re-assembling in-person this time around! The theme for this years conference is Sustainability: creating our futures.
In partnership with RMIT University School of Art, this event will take place at RMIT’s city campus. Our program will include keynote speakers, breakout sessions, Q&A’s and opportunities to network and connect with your peers.
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Keynote Presentation: We are connected
Patricia Piccinini – Contemporary Artist
Our keynote speaker is Australia’s foremost contemporary visual artist Patricia Piccinini. Working on the border of art and science, Patricia has spent close to three decades exploring humanity’s relationship to technology and the environment. Her work has been exhibited at major Australian and international institutions/galleries and events including the recent Rising Festival in Melbourne, the Vancouver Biennale and Venice biennale. Patricia will discuss the overarching themes and ideas within her practice, while exploring how contemporary technology and culture change our understanding of what it means to be human? What is our relationship with – and responsibilities towards – that which we create.
Increasingly, these concerns have drawn Patricia towards the relationship between people and the environment, and in particular the way that our understanding of that relationship impacts on sustainability. Her work aims to question the fundamental fallacy that separates people and nature, and in doing so allows us to imagine how we can exploit nature without risk to ourselves. Patricia observes that as a key issue for our times. Patricia’s interest is in making works that wonder how we might imagine a new relationship with nature that is progressive and positive for all of the species on earth, including humans but not just for humans?
Check out ArtEdVic’s, Patricia Piccinini teaching resource HERE ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Breakout Presentation: Artist Interview
Kerrie O’Brien, Senior writer, arts and culture
The Age/SMH with artist Debbie Symons
Communicating the environmental crisis
All art is political; the personal is political. Or is it? Every artist has a different perspective. In this session we delve deep and investigate what art means to artist Debbie Symons and how her practice communicates the politics of the environmental crisis, informed through statistical data and cross-disciplinary collaborations with scientific organisations. What does being an artist mean today, what role do they have or should they have informing our society and how has it changed in the past decade? What does it look like in terms of Australia – and how should it look, ideally.
Kerrie O’Brien is a journalist, writer and editor with more than 25 years experience. She is a senior writer, arts and culture, for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and a regular contributor to the Lunch With column. Kerrie has written about architecture and design, food and wine, travel, business and finance. Kerrie is a Board member of ACRE, a not-for-profit organisation based in Beechworth, which teaches students how to create a business using the social enterprise model. Kerrie also enjoys being an occasional Triple R presenter.
Debbie Symons was born in Melbourne, Australia. Symons’ formative training was at Victoria College Prahran (VCA) in the fields of painting and printmaking. In 2014, Symons completed her PhD, Anthropocentrism, Endangered Species and the Environmental Dilemma, at Monash University with the assistance of an Australian Postgraduate Scholarship. Symons’ practice is multi-disciplinary, and her work addresses a range of themes, including humanity’s complicated relationship with the natural environment, the dynamics of the global political economy and the effects of consumer culture. With a strong research base in contemporary science and species, Symons utilises databases to investigate the links between these themes and collaborates with scientific organisations such as the IUCN Red List to facilitate the statistical data pertaining to her works. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Breakout Industry Presentation: Contemporary Conservation: Sustainability, Collaboration and Culture
Robyn Ho – Interdisciplinary conservator & interior designer
Conservation is a collections care practice that has traditionally been a hidden activity of museums and highly-trained experts, tasked with preserving cultural heritage and art for future generations. This presentation aims to uncover what contemporary conservation is and the underlying frameworks that guide conservation practice. This presentation will provide an insight into the innovative and collaborative ways that conservation is adapting to contemporary art making practices.
Presented by Robyn Ho of c/o Studios, a contemporary and modern art conservation practice based in Collingwood. Robyn has selected projects undertaken by the practice which will provide insights into the current challenges faced when conserving contemporary art. Particularly as contemporary art practices have progressively dematerialised the art object with increasing use of unconventional and ephemeral materials, this challenges the preservation ethos that has guided traditional museum practices. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Breakout Presentation: Artist Educator
Taylah Aimee Eid – Textile Artist
Teaching Art (Indigenous Perspectives) – Through Flora and Fauna
Taylah’s presentation will focus on what local flora and fauna can teach us in the art classroom. Taylah will speak about her experience as an Artist and Art Educator and how her weaving practice connects her to her students, colleagues and community. Taylah will share her culture and give insight into how the wider community can learn and continue to embrace and share First Nation’s culture in accordance with cultural lore and customs.
Taylah Aimee Eid is a First Nations Artist from Naarm (Melbourne). Taylah studied a BA in Textile Design (RMIT) and majored in knitting and also made creations using traditional basket weaving. Taylah also has a Master of Teaching where she refined her art practice and found her love of sharing her culture and passion for art. Taylah has spoken at the NGV in the As She Appears series in 2019 and conducted workshops during the 2020 lockdown for NGV Art Club for kids. Taylah currently works as an Art Educator at an Islamic School in Melbourne’s South-East. Taylah enjoys embedding her art practice within her classroom and outside in workshops. Taylah has a strong focus on ‘slow design and her passions are her cultural practices, watercolour paintings and incorporating images of native flora and fauna in her work. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Ceramics – Form, Slip and Surface
Jennifer Conroy Smith – Artist
In this workshop you will explore sculptural approaches to hand-building with clay. Working with a range of clay bodies, to learn their working properties and benefits, you will explore techniques including extruding, casting with liquid slip, and hand-building. Demonstrations and workshop time will encourage you to experiment, explore, and investigate material properties, with a focus on practice and enquiry. Throwing techniques and an open Q&A with a current RMIT undergraduate will also provide an opportunity for advancing skills on the wheel.
Jennifer Conroy Smith is a Melbourne-based, British artist specialising inporcelain, predominantly creating site specific suspended installations and sculpture. Drawn to porcelain for its purity and its ability to transmit luminance,investigations explore light, shadow and movement through technicallychallenging attenuated tactile forms. Exploring the dichotomy of the porcelain’s strength with its gentle aesthetic, space and mass are treated equally, with anintegral interplay of voids encased within hand sculpted porcelain. Jennifer’s work has been acquired for both public and private art collections, and she divides her time between working to commission for National and International clients, and lecturing at RMIT University. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Water-Based Painting and Personal Rhythms
Adam Lee – Artist
Join artist Adam Lee as he hosts a workshop demonstration on water-based painting materials and techniques, including various approaches to using acrylic, ink and watercolour. Adam will share insights into his own painting practice and daily studio disciplines, as well as ways of developing personal rhythms of creative making within daily life. He will demonstrate a variety of approaches and techniques to using painting materials, with an opportunity for participants to engage in making work during the session.
Adam Lee’s painting and drawing practice ties together narratives of memory, imagination and transcendence. Through his works on linen and paper, Lee builds worlds where allegory and atmosphere coalesce to suggest a highly personal outlook informed by collective folklore and legend. His work references a wide range of sources including historical and family photographs, spiritual narratives, natural history, and contemporary music, film and literature to investigate aspects of the human condition in relation to ideas of temporal and supernatural worlds. These explorations find their physical manifestation in Lee’s well-honed individual style, characterised by moody landscapes and a contemporary take on tenebrism. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Colour and Pattern with Natural Dyes
Emma Lynas and Verity Prideaux
Engage with our expert textile designers Emma Lynas and Verity Prideaux to explore natural dyeing with plant materials from the RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles dye garden. Bring along a piece of natural fabric/yarn to dye in our hot dye bath and/or develop a seamless pattern repeat and render using plant-based watercolours. Topics will include methods for natural dyeing, dyeing with plants, basic analogue pattern and repeat methods. Walk away with the basics of natural dyeing, basic mark making, motif and seamless pattern repeat methods, and use these larnings as a precursor to working with digital tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Emma Lynas has been teaching digital textile design and studio-based courses since 2006 with a focus on combining traditional media techniques with digital technologies. She is a graduate of the BA textile design program (RMIT), hold a Bachelor of Teaching (UTAS) and a PhD (RMIT) and has worked in the commercial textile design sector. Emma’s PhD explored repositioning textile design from a material practice for the marketplace towards being a ‘post-material making’ practice geared towards connection. The research revealed an expanded notion of textile intelligence focused on forming connections between people, materials and place. The findings provide insights for sustainable textile design practice.
Verity Prideaux has been a lecturer in textiles since 2003, teaching across studio courses and within the print workshop. Alongside this she has worked in bespoke printing studios and freelance as a commercial textile designer and illustrator; her main areas of interest are surface pattern design. An underlying issue of her creative practice is the preservation and dissemination of traditional printing processes, colouration and repeat systems and as a part of this, she works with artisan hand printing and dye techniques. She has a Masters of Arts in textiles design and is a representative for the School of Fashion and Textiles working on RMIT’s Ngulu and Belonging strategies, Brunswick campus Waa Weelum dye garden and Learning and Teaching Committee. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Projection and Surface
Martine Corompt – Artist
In this workshop we will explore creative projection techniques. Working with a range of different devices (hi and lo-tech) we will experiment with projecting your own images onto various surfaces and objects. We will explore scale (from the miniature to larger than life) how to creatively use distortion, incorporate shadow, and consider how to consider these elements within the framework of an Art Installation. Please bring your own camera phone or iPad for generating images and documenting your experiments.
Martine Corompt specialises in the intersections of fine art, public art, and moving image. Since 1995 Martine has exhibited widely in individual and group exhibitions, locally, nationally and internationally working predominantly with animation, projection and installation with a specific interest in aspects of reductive representation, and the subject audience relationship. Motifs such as the reductive representation of the natural and unnatural landscape contributed to the theme of her PhD research project titled: Cartoon and the Cult of Reductioncompleted at the VCA /University of Melbourne in 2017. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Studio Photography
Isabella Capezio and Bronek Kozka
Facilitated by RMIT’s leading photography academics, this hands-on studio photography workshop will take you inside a professional photographic workflow in our industry-standard photographic studios. You will experience the fun and excitement of working on set while also being introduced to low-tech alternative approaches to studio portraiture. An optional tour of our our post-production and printing facilities will be available for those who are interested.
Isabella Capezio is an artist, PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer at RMIT University. Isabella helps run the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive, and P.A.G.E (photobook archive group experiment). Isabella is also involved with the Asia Pacific Photobook Archive that promotes the photobook medium and its importance as a relevant and tangible form of visual art. Their interests and research include; landscape, queerness and different modes of process and publication.
Bronek Kozka lives and works in Melbourne Australia. Kozka has an ongoing involvement in arts education, he is a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (university). His ongoing investigation into the portrayal of remembered moments, through the tableau photograph, has lead to explorations of “real vs. fake”, the use of 3D scanning and much more fluid understanding of what we remember and why it’s important to us. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Precious or Not – Gold and Silversmithing
Mark Edgoose – Artist
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. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Drawing as Discovery
Elyss McCleary – Artist
The ‘Drawing as Discovery’ workshop will give attendees 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.
Elyss McCleary is is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose practice explores a synthesizing of body and space. Her process relies upon an intuitive feeling for colour, layering, and mark-making to generate images that shift between representation and abstraction. Elyss has exhibited broadly in solo and group exhibitions in commercial, institutional, community and artist-run spaces across Australia. She also has and continues to work with and extensive collaborative community of neuro diverse artists and teaches drawing at RMIT University on the unceded lands of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation (Naarm/Melbourne). ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop: Waste Not, Let’s Get Creative
Dani Scaramuzzino – Eckersley’s Art and Craft
In this hands-on workshop you will play and experient with various materials with a focus on how to get the best possible results that last the test on time.
The workshop will also focus on paint waste and what you can do to reduce this in the classroom and convert that paint waist into a relief/sculptural work of art. We explore repurposing paint waste – rethinking what we can do with it.
You will also explore the difference between your good, better, best quality materials from surfaces to paints. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Re-assemble Art Education Conference aspires to elevate your skills as Art Educators to inspire you,
connect you with peers and empower you in the art-room to enhance student learning.
