Critical Difference: Cultural Diversity and Regionality

Professor Kay Lawrence AM

Kay Lawrence, previously Head of the South Australian School of Art, maintains a visual art and writing practice engaged with textile processes and their meanings. She has exhibited internationally, received national commissions and published widely. Of Welsh descent and brought up in Papua New Guinea, her research engages with the colonial history of settler groups with particular emphasis upon material culture. She is concerned with negotiating the 'uneasy spaces' between cultures and the relationship of communities to place. Her most recent work explores the use and meanings of pearl shell from northwest Western Australia, and was shown in the exhibition This Everything Water at the SASA Gallery during the 2008 Adelaide Festival.

Dr Kathleen Connellan

Kathleen Connellan, originally from South Africa and of Irish descent, lectures in Theory Spine. Between 2001 and 2002 she undertook research that mapped the history and theory of design curriculum in Australian universities. Her findings were presented to the discipline through a series of national seminars and the online publication 'Opening Pandora's Paintbox'. Her areas of specialisation also include colour theory and critical race theory. She has presented papers and written articles on whiteness and hierarchies in design and craft in Australia and overseas. She co-convened the 2007 ACRAWSA conference with the theme 'Transforming bodies, nations, knowledges'. Her research focuses on investigating displacement, gender/race/class boundaries and how these are entwined in aspects of domesticity and fixations about cleanliness.

Dr Pamela Zeplin

Senior Lecturer in Theory Spine, Pamela Zeplin is a writer, curator and artist whose writing on contemporary visual craft and art is published widely. Born in Australia of English descent, her research focuses on cultural diversity, crosscultural exchanges and issues around regionality and artist-run initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region and the wider southern hemisphere. She has embedded her research in the undergraduate program through the development of innovative courses, including Aboriginal Art and Visual Culture, Cross-Cultural Studies, Asia-Pacific Art, and Race, Place and Art History. Pamela has been invited to The South Project gatherings in Melbourne, Wellington and Santiago. She is concerned with issues of marginalised and potentially transformative spaces and places, including the often overlooked space of bathrooms.

Nici Cumpston

Nici Cumpston, previously a joint lecturer in the David Uniapon College of Indigenous Education and Research (DUCIER) and SASA, is a practising photographer and emerging researcher of Aboriginal and Afghan/Irish descent. Her work is widely exhibited and commissioned throughout Australia and focuses upon relationships between place, country and family. Her research interest focuses on the environmental impact of managed water flow on the Murray River and its surrounding trees. She researched Lake Bonney in the Riverland, creating work for the exhibition Power and Beauty 17 November 2007 - 10 March 2008, curated by Judith Ryan and Zara Stanhope for the Heidi Museum of Modern Art.

top^

Research activities

Each research group member has undertaken collaborative research, but the Critical Difference: Cultural Diversity and Regionality research cluster enables them to work together with research degree students to develop cultural diversity and regionality as an area of research strength in the School of Art, Architecture and Design.

As researchers, they share a number of common and overlapping interests that address diversities and disparities within the representation and interpretation of visual and material cultures. Their work embraces a range of methodologies, from postcolonialism to intercultural-cultural, art historical and grounded theory approaches.

In examining issues of intercultural exchange and diversity amongst craft, design and art practitioners, this research cluster enables members to build upon relationships established with previous educational and professional partners across Australia.

top^

Projects

Prior collaborative research includes the following projects.

Weaving the Murray

In 2001 Kay Lawrence and Nici Cumpston worked with five other Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to create the Centenary of Federation project Weaving the Murray that explored the meaning of the Murray River for communities from Corryong to Goolwa. The final installation was shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia in January 2002 and toured to regional River communities before being accessioned into the collection of the South Australian Museum. Their joint paper on this project 'A story is like a river' was published in Fresh water: new perspectives on water in Australia by Melbourne University Press in August 2007.

Art in the Asia Pacific region

In 2007 Pamela Zeplin curated a major project with renowned Indonesian artist, Heri Dono, the culmination of a series of seminars on art in the Asia Pacific region developed in partnership with Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre. The project included an artist's residency (co-convened with Olga Sankey) at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, and the exhibition The Dream Republic at the SASA Gallery, a collaborative program involving three art schools and thirty artists.

Water

In 2007 the emerging focus of the cluster was 'water', in both symbolic and literal form. 'Water' was the subject of a panel discussion incorporating visual art, writing and performance by the researchers at the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness (ACRAWSA) conference in Adelaide in December 2007.