Georgia Janetzki completed her Master of Arts at the Arts Academy, School of Arts in 2020 and was supervised by Associate Professor Carole Wilson and Dr Loris Button. Georgia’s research was titled Traces of the female self: Exploring self-portraiture and the documentation of women’s art through traces, impressions and residues via contemporary art practice.

Through a studio-based investigation, Georgia explored experimental methods of making self-portraits. The artwork was created through weaving, printmaking and photography. With an emphasis on textiles as a substrate, materiality was informed by a theoretical investigation from a feminist perspective. This research project considered the personal, examining representation of the self as an ontological enquiry into the roles of making and being. As a practice-led study, this line of enquiry was pursued as a means for exploring current structures of power, through a new body of work aimed at further informing Australian women’s art practice and its history.

Anna Farago completed her Master of Arts at the Arts Academy, School of Arts in 2019 and was supervised by Associate Professor Carole Wilson and Dr Jill Orr. Anna’s research titled The making and placing of a personal view: questions of place used various making methods to explore both the artist’s and others personal connection to place.

The research investigated the intersection of memory, identity, and place. Memory informs personal history and collective environmental futures. Identity, for the artist is as mother, wife, friend, crafter, artist, woman and now widow. For others involved in the research, it is as Indigenous elders, rangers and locals connected to specific sites. Place is that which grounds and locates memories and landscapes that preoccupy the creative works.

Memory and identity is explored materially through making, connecting art to place using craft’s historical connection with domestic and natural environments. Using the postmodern feminist geography of Doreen Massey, place is a site of flow and routes, of passage, rather than origins and roots. The relation between art and Massey’s notion of place is investigated as sympathetic to craft as a feminine epistemology.

The inimitable Mr Meek: Re-discovering a lost art
Joan Luxemburg undertook a research project about James McKain Archibald Job Meek (1815-1899), who was an early Victorian pioneer and graphic artist. Jointly supervised by Associate Professor Jennifer Jones-O’Neill, Arts Academy, and Gordon Morrison, Director of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, the project was threefold: the re-discovery of Meek's body of art work for an exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in June 2015; the preparation of a catalogue of essays and images to accompany the exhibition; and the completion of an exegesis.

James McKain Archibald Job Meek (1815-1899) was an early Victorian pioneer and graphic artist. Meek arrived on the Ballarat goldfields in December 1851 and stayed long enough to make his fortune. After a boom and bust career around Victoria and in New Zealand, he returned to Ballarat for the last decade of his life in the 1890s. Meek was a colourful and versatile character, a mariner, miner, explorer, entrepreneur, writer, graphic artist and miniature calligrapher. Meek's diaries and works yield fascinating information on the early years of the colonies and, in particular, offer another insight into 19th century Ballarat.

Discover more about Joan’s project and hear the story on YouTube

Georgia Snowball completed her PhD candidature at the Arts Academy, School of Arts, Federation University in 2017.  Her research titled, Ecological Practice: Performance Making in the Age of the Anthropocene, addressed performance and approaches to performance making in response to the profound challenges the age of the Anthropocene heralds. Artist-scholars in the emerging field of Performance and Ecology frame this paradigm through varying artistic and scholarly practices that put into question our spatiotemporal relationships with all things.

Supervised by Dr Jill Orr and Dr Angela Campbell, this enabled expertise across performance art, art practice and theatre practice and associated theoretical guidance around place and eco performance.

Georgia completed several works including Promenade Locale#3, 2016 realised for the Castlemaine Festival. Audiences were guided through the town, stopping at specific sites where historical events, large and small, were revealed. The audience was tasked with humorous group actions as a means to experience multi-layered histories embedded in place.

This project considered Jay Appleton’s principles as they apply beyond a simple notion of landscape. It tests the resilience and relevance of prospect-refuge theory within a specific setting in the suburb of Sunshine, in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Two spaces within this setting are considered in particular: the archetypal spaces of suburban home and suburban nature strip. The medium of photography was employed as a tool to create aesthetic responses to these spaces. The theory becomes the impetus for a series of images that consider, respond to, and question the relevance of prospect-refuge theory within contemporary arts practice.