RMIT School of Art Highlights 2025

• Awards and prizes
• Acquisitions, commissions, and grants
• Global intensives
• Graduate exhibitions
• Exhibitions — solo
• Exhibitions — group
• Exhibitions — partnered
• Exhibitions — curated
• Research groups
• Publications
• Conferences and Symposiums
• International partnerships
• Other

_{Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) Graduate Exhibition 2025 opening night and BA Photography, Photography & Art Honours, and Masters Graduate Exhibition 2025 opening night
Photos: Keelan O’Hehir}

<sub>Associate Professor Shane Hulbert, Dr Nicholas Bastin, Professor Daniel Palmer, Dr Raphaela Rosella, Associate Professor Marnie Badham, Dr Isabella Capezio, Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith, Dr Alice Duncan, Dr Robyn Phelan, Dr Sucheta Varuni Kanagasundaram, Dr Fleur Summers at the 2026 Doctoral Degrees Graduation Ceremony at RMIT Storey Hall.

Photo: Reed Events</sub>

Congratulations to our recent School of Art PhD graduates

• Congratulations to our School of Art PhD candidates on their confirmation at the graduation ceremonies at RMIT Storey Hall on Wednesday May 14 and at Marvel Stadium on Wednesday 17 December, and our PhD and MFA Research graduates who graduated last year and this year and in absentia.

It is an incredible achievement for our HDR candidates to graduate after the tremendous work they put into their significant and innovative research projects.

Congratulations also to the supervisorial teams for their excellence and commitment in mentoring and guiding the graduates during their candidature.

Dr Jesse Boylan
Dr Alice Duncan
Dr Liss Fenwick
Dr Jody Haines
Dr Sucheta Varuni Kanagasundaram
Dr Ye Liu
Dr Christine McFetridge
Dr Robyn Phelan
Dr Justas Pipinis
Dr Raphaela Rosella
Dr Damien Rudd
Dr Hui Yang
Dr Jude Worters
Alison Eggleton, MFA research
Gina Gascoigne, MFA research

Congratulations also to School of Art Lecturer Dr Isabella Capezio who graduated from the School of Media and Communication.

_{Courtesy of ARC}

School of Art colleagues have contributed to the success of three ARC Discovery Projects

• We are delighted to announce the successful outcomes of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grants scheme this year. 
  
  School of Art colleagues have contributed to the success of three ARC Discovery Projects. Please join us in congratulating Associate Professor Marnie Badham, Dr Fiona Hillary, Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith, and Professor Kit Wise.

Full details of the projects below:

DP26103284 Creative Currents: art, marine science & narratives in ocean climate action
$546,360.00
Dr Fiona Hillary (CI); Dr Prue Francis (CI); Dr Rebecca Olive (CI); Prof Kit Wise (CI); Prof Wendy Steele (CI); Prof Rosi Braidotti (PI)

DP260100732 Strengthening Solidarity: Asia Pacific artists & ethical cultural exchange
$463,655.00 
A/Prof Marnie Badham (CI); Dr Vicki Couzens (CI); Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith (CI); A/Prof Xin Gu (CI); Dr Teuku Ferdiansyah Thajib (PI); Mr Diwas Kc (PI); Ms NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati (PI); Ms Gatari Kusuma (PI) 

DP260104284 Making histories: Young people as visual historians of changing cities
$572,916.00
Dr David Rousell (CI); Dr Eve Mayes (CI); Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith (CI); Prof Julianne Moss (CI); Dr Gideon Boadu (CI); Dr Merinda Kelly (CI)

_{Emeritus Professor Robert Baines, AOM with Professor the Honourable Margaret Gardner AC, Governor of Victoria}

Emeritus Professor Robert Baines, OAM

• Congratulations to Emeritus Professor Robert Baines for his Medal of Australia (OAM) in the General Division in the 2025 Kings Birthday Honours List. Robert was honoured for his service to the creative arts, particularly as a jeweller, and to education.

The Arts
Jeweller and Artist Goldsmith, over 50 years.
Researcher, archaeometallurgy and Bronze Age gold works.
Exhibitions include Fake News and True Love: Fourteen Stories by Robert Baines, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, 2019.
Exhibitor, since 1977.
RMIT University, School of Art
Emeritus Professor, Design and Social Context, current.
Former Professor, Art, Gold and Silversmithing.
Awards and Recognition include:
Four senior research Fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY
1996  Received a Senior Fulbright Award to conduct a research project at the Sherman Fairchild Center for Object Conservation in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1999  Andrew Mellon Received an Andrew Mellon Conservation Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
2002  Received an Andrew Mellon Conservation Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
2007  Received research scholarship in The Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
2020  Designated Klassiker der Moderne (Modern Classic, Schmuck, Munich Jewellery Week,
2012  Herbert Hofmann Preis, Munich Germany
2010  Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft, Australian Design Centre.
2008  Friedrich Becker Prize, Düsseldorf Germany.
2005  Bayerischer State Prize, Munich, Germany.
1998  Winner; The Seppelt Contemporary Art Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
1997  Cicely and Colin Rigg Craft Award, National Gallery of Victoria.
1979  Churchill Fellowship Study.

_{Museum of Australian Photography William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize
Isabella Capezio, Upside-down Country}

Dr Isabella Capezio

• Lecturer Dr Isabella Capezio was shortlisted for the following prizes:

Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize — Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery 
Museum of Australian Photography  William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize

_{Making Room for Colours and Light (detail 1) Detail of installation @ Robert Schuman Art Prize, 2025 (Metz) LED, aluminium, acrylic glass, vinyl, cable
Photo: Dr Christoph Dahlhausen}

Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow Dr Christoph Dahlhausen

• Dr Christoph Dalhausen was a finalist in the European Robert Schuman Art Prize
• Metz (FR), School Upper Art De Lorraine – Ésal

Artistelist — Prix d’Art Kunstpreis Robert Schuman 2025
Nominierte für den Robert Schuman Kunstpreis stehen fest, Stadtmuseum Simeonstift Trier, 2025

_{Dr Jody Haines self portrait, 2025}

Dr Jody Haines

• Each year, the RMIT Awards for Excellence provide an opportunity to recognise RMIT staff at any level, in any role, who have demonstrated outstanding leadership or have made a significant contribution to our community. This is RMIT’s highest form of recognition, celebrating individuals and teams who lead with purpose, live our values and make a meaningful difference across our global community.

Nominated by staff, they highlight your colleagues, teams or leaders who have inspired others and helped shape a culture we all want to be a part of. This year, the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Research Excellence – Higher Degree by Research was awarded to Dr Jody Haines.

Jody is an acclaimed Palawa artist and researcher whose groundbreaking PhD has redefined the role of photography in advancing Indigenous sovereignty and social justice. Her project ‘A Cuppa and a Yarn’ merges critical Indigenous theory, feminist methodology, and community-led creative practice to challenge colonial narratives through art and collaboration. And her research and public art commissions demonstrate how creative practice can foster dialogue, healing, and cultural transformation.

Jody is currently on a 2 year secondment from the School of Art as Research Fellow – Self Determination & Sovereignty, in YOONGGAMA MA NGA, First Nations Knowledge Creation Transdisciplinary Research Cohort.

Our sincere congratulations to Jody on this outstanding achievement.

_{Steven Rendall, Myriad reflector, 2025}

Dr Steven Rendall: joint winner of the 2025 Bayside Painting Prize

• Congratulations to Joint Studio Lead in Painting Dr Steven Rendall, joint winner of the 2025 Bayside Painting Prize, for his work Myriad reflector (2025). Judges commented, ‘Rendall’s painting gives symbolic form to his long-standing conceptual project which analyses the construction and reception of image-based culture. In Rendall’s hands, the disco ball motif becomes a multifaceted universe of references, reflecting both the present and past in a playful and iconic form’.

Steven Rendall is an artist and teacher who works across painting, sculpture and video. He’s interested in the strange resonances between painting as a method and other ways of making images (and why people choose what method to use to make an image). His practice is littered with references to technology, art history, horror movies, fiction and pop music, and his work engages in an intellectual and material analysis of our increasingly image-based culture.

Steven’s work is represented by Niagara Galleries.

Congratulations to the other joint winner Ella Dunn.

_{Portrait of Raphaela (Rosie) Rosella
Photo: Joe Rucklisa}

PhD graduate Dr Raphaela Rosella

• Congratulations to RMIT University School of Art PhD graduate Dr Raphaela Rosella on winning the Distinguished Creative Arts Doctoral Student Award at the 2025 Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA) Awards.

The DDCA Awards celebrate excellence in creative arts, promote best practice, and champion the next generation of creative arts leaders in research and education. They recognise contributions across all career stages and highlight First Nations creatives and diverse voices in the tertiary sector.

The judging panel praised Raphaela’s doctoral project — ‘You’ll Know It When You Feel It’ — as “an exemplary creative work, enabling strong community agency underpinned by a powerful commitment to personal truth-telling and a social justice ethos. The research project demonstrates an undeniable maturity that goes beyond academic structures and exceeds the expectations of a doctoral study.”

2025 DDCA Awards Winner: Raphaela Rosella

_{The BOOreaucrats
Photo: Darren James Photography}

Dr Benjamin Sheppard and Dr Peter Burke: Sunshine Coast National Art Prize

• Lecturer Dr Benjamin Sheppard and Alumnus Dr Peter Burke were recognised for their collaborative performance practice asThe BOOreaucrats in the Sunshine Coast National Art Prize.

In their work, Signs of Agreement, a physically awkward task normalises the difficulties of conforming to established processes while literally standing on each other’s toes. Frustration gives way to acts of care as these dedicated administrators perform their work blind to their ridiculousness.

An independent satellite project of The Bureau for the Organisation of Origins, The Bureaucrat’s fieldworks investigate the investigators, examine the examiners, and perform purposeful profundity through gestures that result in performative gestures documented in photo and film, bureaucratic documents, administrative ephemera and more red tape!

_{Courtesy of Dr Nur Shkembi, OAM}

Dr Nur Shkembi, OAM

• Congratulations to Dr Nur Shkembi for her Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the General Division in the 2025 Kings Birthday Honours List.

Nur was honoured for her service to the visual arts.

Nur Shkembi is currently a lecturer in the Master of Arts (Arts Management) program where she teaches Gallery and Museum Management.

Nur is an award-winning Melbourne (Naarm) based curator, writer and art historian specialising in Islamic art history (global and contemporary art), Australian art history, and postcolonial theory. Nur has produced and curated over 150 events, exhibitions and community engagement projects and was part of the core team which established the Islamic Museum of Australia, serving as the museum’s inaugural Art Director, Exhibitions Manager and foundation Curator.

_{Kylie Stillman, Trunks and Branches, 2024, 200 sheets of hand-cut envirocare 100% recycled paper, 880 x 640 x 60 mm}

Kylie Stillman: WAMA Art Prize 2025

• Sessional lecturer Kylie Stillman’s Trunks and Branches has been named a finalist in the 2025 WAMA Art Prize, Australia’s leading award for environmental art.

Trunks and Branches continues Kylie Stillman’s bird poster series commenced in 2007. These framed works consist of 200 sheets of commercial printing paper (the standard bulk package), hand-cut in contour to reveal the impressions of avian forms, freeze-framed in various positions of life-like movement.

Well known for her carved book and timber sculptures, Stillman likens the concepts behind her making to intaglio printmaking processes, in which the forms that are etched into a metal plate hold the ink from which a printed image is pulled. As she carves into the individual sheets, hollowed recesses and shadows are revealed to provide the tonality and form that allude to a vanished body.

Challenging the usual notion of a free-floating framed work on paper, Trunks and Branches draws a quiet parallel between source imagery (the birdwatcher or ornithological artist) and source material (the organic matter from which paper and print products are derived).

6 December 2025 to 9 March 2026
WAMA Foundation, Halls Gap Victoria

_{Lou Wheeler}

Lou Wheeler: recipient of the Museums Victoria Gold Jewellery Acquisitive Emerging Prize

• Congratulations to 3rd year BA (Fine Art) — Gold and Silversmithing student Lou Wheeler, recipient of the Museums Victoria Gold Jewellery Acquisitive Emerging Prize which celebrates design excellence and craftsmanship in developing a unique jewellery concept that responds to the history and ongoing impact of gold in Victoria.

Lou was awarded the prize for their proposed piece ‘The Safest Investment’. With their design proposal, Lou explores the archetypes of power, wisdom, and economic security symbolised by gold.

Congratulations to the other winners Laura Deakin (Major Prize) and Simone Thomson (First Peoples Prize). Laura has taught as a sessional in the BA (Fine Art) program and was mentor to the Blak Design participants in the gold and silversmithing studios. Both Laura and Simone are the first female artists and craftspeople to be represented in the collection.

This prize supports each winner to bring their concept to life as a finished jewellery piece, which will be acquired into the State of Victoria Gold Jewellery Collection, one of the most significant public collections of Victorian goldfields jewellery.

The winners were selected by an expert judging panel:
Kimberley Moulton – Adjunct Curator Indigenous Art, Tate Modern; Senior Curator Exhibitions, RISING; Emeritus Curator, First Peoples, Museums Victoria
Mark Edgoose – Artist, craftsperson, educator, and Senior Lecturer in Gold and Silversmithing, RMIT University
Rory Hyde – Associate Professor in Architecture, University of Melbourne, and member of Museums Victoria’s research committee

_{Dr Jude Waters Pin up, plywood, photography, transparency, 10 x 14 cm and Seeking, plywood, photography, transparency, 17 x 20 cm.
Prize donated by Chapman & Bailey.}

Dr Jude Worters: Small

• Congratulations to PhD alumnus Dr Jude Worters who exhibited two works in Small, fortyfivedownstairs end of year show, winning the prize for best mixed media work.

She was also a finalist in the Wilcox & Hall Emerging Artist Art Prize, exhibiting eight self-portrait works during Oct/Nov in their city office and gallery.

_{RMIT staff visit LASALLE, Singapore}

KWAsia Creative Higher Education Futures Initiative

• RMIT School of Art International Lead, Associate Professor Drew Pettifer, recently secured a significant grant for four staff members to visit 11 of the School’s partner institutions across Asia.

Visits to Hong Kong (Hong Kong Art School), Indonesia (ITB, BINUS), Mainland China (ECNU, SAFA), Singapore (LASALLE, NAFA), Vietnam (RMIT Hanoi, RMIT Saigon South), and India (Op Jindal, Akosha) provided a crucial opportunity to engage with many our partners in person for the first time in several years. These engagements have resulted in a range of opportunities for the School, across teaching, research, engagement, student mobility, and creative outputs, which will be developed further in 2026.

_{Courtesy of Bronisław Kózka}

Bronisław Kózka: West Bund Art & Design 2025

• In November 2025, Lecturer Bronisław Kózka exhibited at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai with Melbourne gallery ACAE, marking a significant milestone in his practice. The exhibition featured two major works from his Garden series — To Be Held by the Garden and To Wander in the Garden — both unique 60 × 200 cm heat-formed acrylic photo-sculptures created during his Swatch Art Peace Hotel residency.

Photographed in Shanghai’s inner-urban parks and hand-shaped in his Beijing studio, these works represent a breakthrough in sculptural photography. Each piece is UV-printed on clear acrylic then carefully hand-formed using controlled heat, creating undulating surfaces that respond to the image’s natural contours. The meditative process requires complete presence, transforming the photographic image from window to physical presence.

Both works were acquired by a Shanghai collector, affirming the international resonance of Kózka’s innovative approach to materiality, photography, and embodied making.

_{Courtesy of Ruth O’Leary}

Ruth O’Leary: MOTHER: Stories from the NGV collection

• Sessional lecturer Ruth O’Leary’s photograph Flinders Street, 2017 has been acquired by the NGV and is to be included in the exhibition MOTHER: Stories from the NGV collection opening next year in March.

The depiction of mother and child is one of the oldest and most enduring themes in art history. From ancient cave paintings and Egyptian tombs to Renaissance frescos and contemporary depictions, artists have long engaged with the complex experiences of motherhood. 

Bringing together more than 200 works, the exhibition features artists including Davida Allen, Hannah Brontë, Tui Emma Gillies and Sulieti Fieme’a Burrows, Sophie Calle, Karla Dickens, Tracey Emin, Christine Godden, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Katherine Hattam, Camille Henrot, David Hockney, Kate Just, Iluwanti Ken, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Tala Madani, Hayley Millar Baker, Tracey Moffat, Ann Newmarch, Ruth O’Leary, Patricia Piccinini, Faye Toogood, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu.

_{Courtesy of Dr Kerrie Poliness}

Dr Kerrie Poliness commissioned by Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) for the Furphy wall

• Swamp Drawing by sessional lecturer Dr Kerrie Poliness commissioned by Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) for the Furphy wall.

Melbourne-based contemporary artist Kerrie Poliness brings her abstract geometric practice to the SAM Furphy Family Art Wall for a site-specific installation. Combining two styles used repeatedly throughout Poliness’ dynamic forty-year creative practice, Swamp Drawing consists of two layers, with 36 coloured diamond-shaped transfers on the glass windows and balcony, and a linear wall drawing made with silver reflective film.

Visible from both inside and outside, the reflective elements of the wall drawing respond with the movement of people, light, birds, and trees in the wind. The wall drawing work continues Poliness’ longstanding instructional geometric wall works, with the shimmer of the lines activating as you move through the space and change in colour depending on where you stand. The diamonds on the glass and the reflective elements of the wall drawing are visible to birds flying by, alerting them to the physical presence of the large glass windows. 

On Saturday 5 April, participants  joined Poliness at SAM to create a new temporary artwork on SAM’s Orchard Hill. They worked alongside Poliness to extend one of her geometric designs from up on Orchard Hill down into the Amphitheatre using chalk. 

_{RMIT 2025 School of Art London Global Intensive}

RMIT 2025 School of Art London Global Intensive

• From 24 November to 5 December 29 undergraduate and postgraduate students mainly from the School of Art joined Associate Lecturer Jennifer Conroy-Smith and Professor David Forrest on the Art Global Intensive in London.

The students were encouraged to fly to London via a stopover and return with some additional stops. Over the two weeks we experienced some of the main institutions, exhibitions and performances including the Tate Modern, the V&A , the V&A Open Store, and the Royal Albert Hall, as well as talks and discussions with artists and practitioners working in and around London.

The students took advantage of opportunities to attend performances and productions, as well as exploring galleries, and venues. During the time the  students had the choice of an excursion out of London. Some travelled to Oxford for the day while others enjoyed the experiences of Brighton. The Global Intensive was a great opportunity for us all to explore London and it was intensive.

_{Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) Graduate Exhibition 2025 opening night and BA Photography, Photography & Art Honours, and Masters Graduate Exhibition 2025 opening night
Photos: Keelan O’Hehir}

Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) Graduate Exhibition 2025

BA Photography, Photography & Art Honours, and Masters Graduate Exhibition 2025

• With projects by hundreds of emerging artists and photographers, our recent 2025 Graduate Exhibitions celebrated the innovation and creative expertise of students across all art and photography programs.

The accompanying Graduate Profiles website documents the making and thinking behind their work. Congratulations to our graduates and staff involved. They were stunning exhibitions with ambitious and strong installations across our Art and Photography programs.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our donors for their generous support and the prizes you have provided for our graduating students.

_{Courtesy of Emeritus Professor Robert Baines}

Emeritus Professor Robert Baines: BAINZ JEWLZ

• The exhibition BAINZ JEWLZ  by Emeritus Professor Robert Baines, OAM ran from 18 September to 22 November 2025. This solo retrospective at RMIT Gallery highlighted his studio artmaking and archaeometallurgy research from 1968 to 2025.

The exhibition presented a comprehensive collection of significant works and research that showcased the diversity, depth and daring of his ground-breaking practice.

_{Work by Dr Isabella Capezio in Bodies Beyond the Skin
Photo courtesy of the artist}

Dr Isabella Capezio: Bodies Beyond the Skin

• Bodies Beyond the Skin, Platform Gallery, Canberra, April – May 2025 
  

Photography has historically assisted the colonial project through the capture, categorisation, and narrativisation of ecologies as ‘space.’ Bodies Beyond the Skin investigates how landscape photography has privileged hierarchical masculinist assumptions and seeks to problematise this schema by using ‘queer’ and camp methodologies to unsettle existing narratives of Australian landscape via photography.

_{Associate Professor Michael Graeve, Lines Along Signals of Crossings, 2003–2024, Oil on linen, 610x610mm
Photo: Lorena Carrington}

Associate Professor Michael Graeve: Lines Along Signals of Crossings

• Lines Along Signals of Crossings, Civic Art Bureau, Canberra

These paintings chart an accumulation of activations. Arcs of energy, traced from point to point. Spikes of movement, energised sensation.

These paintings recall the interference of touch. Signal to echo, bridging surface and ground. Colours moving in and out of reach.

These paintings foreground manoeuvres of sight. Darting for the new, bounced within boundaries. Recollecting previous patterns, testing uncertain edges.

These paintings connect a span of time. A 2003 ensemble responds to the bold directionality of an abandoned dodgem rink. 2024 complications speak partially to Dominic Redfern’s glitched media screens.

These paintings trace attention. A repose of flatness, followed by interruptions of marks. The calm decision of a hardened edge, the speed of a blur.

Perceptions performed, as lines along signals of crossings.

_{Courtesy of Associate Professor Shane Hulbert}

Associate Professor Shane Hulbert: A Quiet Unease

• Associate Professor Shane Hulbert’s photographic series, “A Quiet Unease,” was exhibited as a featured international exhibition at the 2025 Pingyao International Photography Festival in China.

This new body of work examines the profound impact of artificial intelligence on our perceptions of reality, positioning AI as both a creative tool and a conceptual subject. In a deliberately ironic gesture, Hulbert uses AI to generate portraits of people who do not exist — yet these imagined individuals are portrayed as experiencing the same anxieties and uncertainties about the future that AI itself is provoking in real communities. By situating these synthetic figures within familiar suburban and domestic settings, the work highlights the tension between outward normalcy and internal unease, prompting viewers to reflect on how technology blurs the boundaries between authenticity and artifice.

A Quiet Unease invites audiences to question where authorship and identity reside in an era defined by machine vision and algorithmic influence. The project’s selection for Pingyao, China’s most prominent photography festival, underscores the timely relevance of Hulbert’s exploration into how technology shapes not only the images we see, but also the emotional landscapes we inhabit.

_{Quanzhou International Image Biennial — Selenge: Threshold and Breath}

Bronisław Kózka: Quanzhou International Image Biennial — Selenge: Threshold and Breath

• Lecturer Bronisław Kózka presented Selenge: Threshold and Breath at the 3rd Quanzhou (Huaguang) International Image Biennial, held at Fujian Huaguang Photographic Art Museum (December 2025 – January 2026). This marked the first exhibition of work created in Selenge Province, Mongolia, during 2025.

Building on his co-curation of Steppes to Street: Mongolia in Focus (Melbourne, 2024), Kózka deepened cultural exchange with the Mongolian photography community through this new body of work. Created using his Origin Image methodology — photographs completed at the point of capture without AI collaboration or digital manipulation — the series focuses on pure photographic presence and embodied connection with landscape.

The work captures threshold moments where perception shifts between physical and contemplative states, where breath and vast horizons merge into singular rhythm. The meditative quality of Mongolia’s shifting light and earth-sky thresholds reflects Kózka’s ongoing exploration of landscape as lived experience rather than observed subject.

_{Brent Leideritz, Anarchy in the AI polaroid IX, 2024}

Brent Leideritz: Anarchy in the AI

• PhD candidate Brent Leideritz’s exhibition In Anarchy in the AI in First Site Gallery interrogated identity, nostalgia, and memory, producing works that raised questions about how identity is formed and expressed.

Brent Leideritz is an Adelaide based artist working in the expanded space of photography. Leideritz practice, founded in self-taught and experimental film-based photography during the 90s and 00s, incorporates digital mediums, utilising digital post-production and in this exhibition exploring ai-generated promptographic resolutions. 

_{Brent Leideritz, Divergent archetypes for old ideas installation view, 2025
Photo: George Jefford}

Brent Leideritz: Divergent archetypes for old ideas

• PhD candidate Brent Leidertitz held a solo exhibition Divergent archetypes for old ideas at fortyfivedownstairs.

Divergent archetypes for old ideas is a collection of photographic and promptographic portraits, displayed as individual prints, that when seen in sequence, propose new ways of being, where queer and alternative performances of self stand against notions of shame and judgement. With research as photographer, and subject, and in collaboration with my queer and ‘othered’ community they actively queer and playfully weaponise: creative space for oppositional action; communal play; individual agency; self-expression; gender performativity; and the erotic. In deconstructing, rearranging, recontextualising and appropriating binary archetypes and narratives, this collection enables the empowerment of individuals and communities alike, and in doing so, inspires those who have felt shame, to make a stand, for themselves, and those they love. 

_{Dr Michaela Pegum, Familiars, 2025, Install Transfiguration II
Photo: Matthew Stanton}

Dr Michaela Pegum: Familiars

• Sessional lecturer Dr Michaela Pegum received a grant from Creative Victoria for the development and presentation of a new body of work titled Familiars.

Installed in a private residence, the work explored interior domestic space as an architecture of the psyche, and how the personal objects we keep with us in the stillness of this place, might become animistic channels to the ‘outside’, or the ‘wild’.

Considering the presence of both ephemeral and material forms as instruments of deepening, and sites of transformation, Michaela took significant objects and motifs from within her own personal space and explored them as meshings of spirit and material, whilst re-situating them in another person’s home.

Through the choreography of evocative sculptural forms and sound (by Ian Moorhead), this installation of work explored the gentle practices we cultivate that permeate the imaginative boundaries between self and ‘other’, and the provocative power of the spaces and objects we keep intimate relationships with.

_{Associate Professor Drew Pettifer, Homospectres, installation view
Photo courtesy of the artist}

Associate Professor Drew Pettifer: Homospectres

• A recent solo exhibition by Associate Professor Drew Pettifer at Temperance Hall, Homospectres, explored themes of queer horror and included a major new collaborative work with members of The Australian Ballet.

Across textiles, neon, sound, video, performance, and installation, Homospectres interrogated the historical associations between fear and queerness. The centring of the body in horror conventions has leant itself to critical responses from queer and gender theorists. This exhibition included challenges to expectations of masculinity in horror and a reflection on the tensions between fear and fantasy. A collaborative dance piece, conceived with and choreographed by Maxim Zenin, extended those themes through embodied movement in a performance with Maxim and four other members of The Australian Ballet. Drawing on the long histories of villains in horror movies being queer coded, this new body of work questions the gender and sexual expectations often seen in horror films.

_{Courtesy of Dr Justas Pipinis}

Dr Justas Pipinis: Now Flow Fast Slow

• A video work by Dr Justas Pipinis was showing at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture gallery from 31 October – 30 November 2025.

Now Flow Fast Slow is a video collage by conceptual artist Justas Pipinis interweaving still video portraits of past Bogong Village residents, guests and workers filmed in 2020–2021 with a time-lapse video of the road trip from Melbourne to Bogong during the same period.

He recently completed a creative practice-based PhD at RMIT University School of Art. 

Now Flow Fast Slow, Bogong Centre for Sound Culture

_{Dr Sarah Tomasetti, Sediments and Atmospheres installation view
Photo: Emma Byrnes
Courtesy of Dr Sarah Tomasetti}

Dr Sarah Tomasetti: Sediments and Atmospheres 

• Australian Galleries Stockrooms, August 2025
  Dr Sarah Tomasetti is a lecturer in Fine Art at RMIT University and currently Co-lead of Painting.

This body of work drew on material gathered in 2024 on the lands of the Ngāi Tahu people on the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Engaging with the conception of void, or Te Kore in the writing of Māori academic Professor Carl Mika, the works explore how working with the geological matter-energy of slaked lime and various grits and pigments can activate a reciprocal exchange between matter and what is unseen. Ephemeral way-finders laid on the ground and beneath snow navigate flow, aggregation and instability in the landscape as metaphor for wayfinding in contemporary ecological conditions.

Sediments and Atmospheres

_{Dr Jude Worters, installation, In the Pink, 2025, SITE EIGHT Gallery}

Dr Jude Worters: Trauma Creativity and repair: Reclaiming the Self Through Creative Practice

• Dr Jude Worters completed her PhD research project Trauma Creativity and repair: Reclaiming the Self Through Creative Practice in July 2025.

The outcome of this project is costume work and photographic self-portraits that explore memory, self-image, identity and the transformation of self through a creative process of performative enactment.

Since finishing her research project Dr Jude Worters has exhibited the costume work In the pink (2025) in the Naarm Textile Biennale at fortyfivedownstairs.

_{ALL STARS, SITE EIGHT Gallery, installation view
Photo: Michael Quinlan}

ALL STARS

• Over the years, a number of staff exhibitions have been held that celebrate the remarkable practices of our School of Art community.

Recent conversations within the School suggested we hold events that bring us together and publicly acknowledge the creative talents across the entire School, whether administrative, technical or academic. The ‘all stars’ show was born.

The exhibition in SITE EIGHT Gallery encompassed new and in progress works; some greatest hits, some bedroom recordings; some improvised, some in collaboration and some in homage. Not a formal gallery hang; rather, a blossoming as we turned the halfway point in the year. A survey and spotlight on the many creative identities that make us what we are.

Artists
Sofi Basseghi, Ciaran Begley, Chris Bowes, D A Calf, Ali Choudhry, Simon Crosbie, Mig Dann & Oliver Hill, Carly Fischer, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Paddy Hay, Katrin Koenning, Elyss McCleary, Lindy McSwan, Christopher Earl Milbourne, Ruth O’Leary, Tinieka Page, Robyn Phelan, Kerrie Poliness, Clare Rae, Carmen Reid, Faiza Rezai, Stuart Ringholt, Antonia Sellbach, Kylie Stillman, Ingrid Tseng, Sarah Walker, Deborah Williams.

_{D A Calf, Eight hands two feet apart, 2025, BLINDSIDE
Photo: Teagan Ramsay}

A Minefield about which few maps agree

• PhD candidate D A Calf exhibited Eight hands two feet apart, a large-scale sculptural sound piece at BLINDSIDE (Naarm, June-July), as part of Liquid Architecture’s Sound Series.

The work, an eight-metre long line sculpture, documents the changing terrain and social contexts between two monument sites on either side of the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica/Mitrovicë in Kosovo. Developed from a series of soundwalks undertaken in 2024, the sounds of the walk emanate from the sculpture by means of embedded audio transducers. The topography of the walk is represented in the curvature of the sculpture and fashioned from zinc alloy, reflecting both the mixed history of the city and its material heritage as the location of Europe’s largest zinc reserves which resulted in Nazi occupation during WWII.

The work was exhibited as part of A Minefield about which few maps agree together with the Bosnian artist Maja Zećo, at BLINDSIDE, Naarm/Melbourne, June 18–July 12 2025.

_{D A Calf, The Smooth and the Striated}

Artist’s Books for Listening

• PhD candidate D A Calf’s artist book The Smooth and the Striated, was exhibited as part of the BLADR/Bureau for Listening’s exhibition Artist’s Books for Listening (Copenhagen, DK, September 2025). The work is now part of the permanent collection of The Library for Listening in Copenhagen.

A rumination on fieldwork, landscape and listening, the work was developed in residence at the Footnote Centre for Image and Text (Belgrade, Serbia) in 2022 after fieldwork in central Bosnia and Herzegovina.

_{Work by Dr Isabella Capezio in counter sites
Photo courtesy of the artist}

counter sites 

• counter sites curated by Karl Halliday and Madeleine Sherburn, group exhibition, PhotoAccess, March – April 2025

counter sites was an exhibition program bringing together the work of seven artists whose lens-based practices dismantle, dissect and destabilise the complex relationship between photography and place. Looking inward to the properties of the medium itself, and outward to the politics of vision in the post-colonial, post-digital moment, counter-sites uproots dominant notions of situation, settlement and landscape through the critical, archival and expanded approaches to photography.

Artists included RMIT School of Art Lecturer Dr Isabella Capezio, alumni; Aaron Claringbold, Rebecca McCauley, Nicholas Mahady, Christine McFetridge, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis alongside Matt Dunne.

_{(Left to right) Michael Graeve, Martin Gerwers, and Jovanovics Tamás
Photo: Vasarely Museum}

Image Music

• The exhibition Image Music in Vasarely Museum in Budapest Hungary included work by Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow Dr Christoph Dahlhausen, Associate Professor Michael Graeve alongside Barna Benedek, Rita Ernst, Martin Gewers, Dora Maurer, Klaus J. Schoen et al.

The exhibition presented various possibilities for overlaps, transitions, and connections between images and sounds. These possibilities partly emerged in concrete art and partly – due to the nature of the theme – in works that transcend genre boundaries or in interdisciplinary experiments completely independent of these boundaries.

The aim of the exhibition was not only to highlight connections between different artistic fields but also to share the joy of discovery, explore the laws governing the artworks, and ultimately bring art closer to people.

_{Michelle Stewart, Susan Buchanan, and Deborah Fisher
Photo: Chris Bowese}

of here

• of here exhibition presented by PhD candidates Michelle Stewart, Susan Buchanan, Deborah Fisher
  21 May – 6 June 2025
  RMIT First Site Gallery
  Included in Melbourne Design Week

Three makers explored what it means to understand the place they find themselves in through the jewellery object. Coming together in an exhibition at RMIT University’s First Site Gallery they shared experiences of place-based making that arose from strong personal links to their three different locations of focus.

The exhibition invited the viewer to pause and reflect on their own connections to place, both on a personal and global scale, through a quiet offering of thoughts and embodied objects that presented a contemplative interaction and by bringing big ideas into the intimate space of the body. Objects appended to the body invited closer scrutiny and an opportunity to engage with their genesis.

The exhibition space was defined into the three distinct areas of investigation, the forest, the river and the urban environment. Each artist shared work that reflected an emotional connection to these places. Through acts of care and reparation, discarded materials were collected from these sites. The material was transformed and embodied with stories of perceived value, environment and visibility

_{Human Contagion (Psychopomp) various prints, 2025
Courtesy of Dr Ian Haig}

PSYCHOPOMP! 

• Senior Lecturer Dr Ian Haig’s work was included in PSYCHOPOMP! at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, Johannesburg, South Africa, curated by Boris Eldagsen, 3 September to 19 October 2025.

The artists in PSYCHOPOMP! don’t ask AI for answers. They use it to interrogate their fears, their shame, their psychic leftovers. What you see is what the machine sees in them—and, maybe, in you too.
— Boris Eldagsen, Curator

_{Opening night photo by Suzanee Phoenix}

Rest In Power: A Tribute to A Tribute

• Following the deaths of 85* women, including Isla Bell in 2024, a group of courageous RMIT students transformed their graduate show into an act of protest — a vivid, and unified stand against gendered violence and the silencing of survivors.

Rest In Power: A Tribute to A Tribute was an exhibition honouring the 2024 RMIT student protests and women lost to gendered violence since at Queen Victoria Women’s Centre.

The exhibition coincided with 16 Days of Activism and invited personal and collective action.

*Source, The Red Heart Campaign and Femicide Watch 

_{Photo: Dr Justas Pipinis}

small talk

• PhD alumni Dr Justas Pipinis and Dr Eamon Sprod undertook a month-long non-verbal conversation through daily changes to the installation in a gallery room.

small talk 
GalleryGalleryINC
24 April – 24 May 2025 

A follow-up publication is forthcoming from the Aimless Research Institute.

_{Photograph of Dr Kerrie Poliness’ painting in the background taken during a talk as part of Geelong Design Week.}

The Sweet Spot — Between Art & Design

• Work by sessional lecturer Dr Kerrie Poliness was included in the exhibition The Sweet Spot—Between Art & Design at Geelong Gallery.

This diverse selection of works comprising recent acquisitions to Geelong Gallery’s collection test the nexus between art and design and reflect the Gallery’s evolving strategy and growing commitment to exhibit and collect the works of key practitioners working at the tantalising and experimental intersection of art and design. 

From crafted wood and woven grasses, to forged metal and pinned textiles, these objects transcend their materiality and the process of making to become works of art.

_{Courtesy of Dr Kerrie Poliness}

The Intelligence of Painting 

• Work by Dr Kerrie Poliness was included in the Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition The Intelligence of Painting.

The Intelligence of Painting threw a spotlight on the energy of contemporary painting in Australia today through the work of 14 Australian women artists.

_{Courtesy of Dr Kerrie Poliness}

The Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2025

• The Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2025 commissioned 16 established and emerging artists to explore how contemporary art can respond to, articulate, and augment our experience of place.

Artists included sessional lecturers Dr Kerrie Poliness and Carly Fischer, alumni James Geurts and Natasha Johns-Messenger. 

Titled STRATA, the artistic vision derives from the iconic geology of Gadubanud Country — the stratified landscape of the Great Ocean Road serves as an analogy for the fact that one place is many places, layered both physically and experientially through time, culture, and species.

Across 16 precincts from 1 – 30 March 2025, the outdoor exhibition presented site-responsive sculpture and spatial installation more broadly, encompassing live, sonic, and light-based art, ephemeral installations and architectural interventions, all uniquely capable of enabling complex and affective experiences of place.

Throughout the Biennale, a suite of public programs, performances, and presentations established meaningful exchange and connection between artists, audiences, and communities.

_{Country Speaks: Contemporary Indigenous Photography}

Country Speaks: Michael Jalaru Torres at Fujian Huaguang Photographic Art Museum

• Lecturer Bronisław Kózka curated Country Speaks: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, featuring the work of Djugun-Yawuru artist Michael Jalaru Torres at Fujian Huaguang Photographic Art Museum, Quanzhou, China (23 December 2025 – 31 January 2026). This marks the first Indigenous Australian photography exhibition presented at the museum.

Torres, founder of Blak Lens — Australia’s premier Indigenous photography collective — bridges traditional Aboriginal storytelling with contemporary photographic practice. His innovative work combines portraiture, landscape, and mixed-media techniques, incorporating etching, drawing, and digital manipulation to explore identity, place, and cultural resilience in the Kimberley region.

The exhibition facilitates significant cross-cultural dialogue, introducing Chinese and international audiences to contemporary Indigenous Australian perspectives on Country, cultural identity, and environmental connection. Kózka’s curatorial framework emphasises ethical engagement with Indigenous artists whilst supporting cultural self-determination and meaningful international artistic exchange.

_{Christoph Dahlhausen et des amis I + II — curated by Christoph Dahlhausen
Left to right: Katharina Schaerer, David Thomas, Jan Willem van Welzenis, Dr Christoph Dahlhausen
Front: Gereon Krebber
Photo: Dr Christoph Dahlhausen}

Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow Dr Christoph Dahlhausen

• Exhibitions curated by Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow Dr Christoph Dahlhausen:

Eisbär mit Farbe! (Polarbear with Colour) — curated by Christoph Dahlhausen
Hohenems (AT), Museum Arche Noah
With Associate Professor Michael Graeve, Emeritus Professor David Thomas, Aljoscha, Agathe de Bailliencourt, Tom Früchtl, Katharina Grosse, Marcia Hafif, Raimer Jochims, Jus Juchtmans, Imi Knoebl, Alfons Lachauer, John Nixon, Cedric Tessiere, John Zinsser et al.

WestFarbe VI – Paint vs. Colour / Process and Appearance — curated by Christoph Dahlhausen
Soest (DE), Raum Schroth @ Wilhem Morgner Museum
With Helen Calder (NZ), Margit Calegari (NA, Rudolf de Crignis (US), Christoph Dahlhausen (DE), Andreas Exner (DE),  , Katharina Grosse (DE), Marcia Hafif (US), Callum Innes (GB), Jus Juchtmans (BE), Joseph Marioni (US), Ingo Meller (DE), John Nixon (AU), Winston Roeth (US) et al.

Form & Farbe — Unikate und Editionen — curated by Christoph Dahlhausen
Gelsenkirchen (DE), KV im Museum
With Associate Professor Michael Graeve, Helen Calder, Christoph Dahlhausen,  Ditty Ketting, Robert Schaberl, Dario Perez-Flores, Jan van Munster, Vera Molnar et al.

Christoph Dahlhausen et des amis I + II — curated by Christoph Dahlhausen
Trier (DE), Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst e.V. 
With Associate Professor Michael Graeve, Emeritus Professor David Thomas, Aljoscha, Reinhard Brunner, Philippe Chitarinni, Christoph Dahlhausen, Jachym Fleig,, Albert Hettinger, Siegfried Kreitner, Vera Molnar, Jan v.Munster,  Alfonso Hüppi, Robert Schaberl, Jan Willem van Welzenis et al.

_SISSY

SISSY curated by Dr Nikos Pantazopoulos

• The group exhibition SISSY was recently on display at the Greek Community of Melbourne.
  Greek Community of Melbourne
• 272 Russell Street, Melbourne

The proposition to the exhibition is about Patriotism, Nationalism and Patriarchy and its entanglements; and how these forms of identity inform an [unauthorised] body, what cultures we inherit, resist, neglect and have stolen from and what histories we parasitically engage as our own.

The project seeks to critique the cosmopolitan nature of identifying through the acknowledgment and méconnaissance of self that connects and divides individuals and how this misrecognition informs how we live with and alongside others that frames the way we learn about and inhabit our relationships to place.

Dr Nikos Pantazopoulos invited academics from RMIT to explore notions of their real and imaginary through their oedipal relationships to place and how they identify through their work.

The exhibition antagonises social relations and puts pressure on identity that has emerged through the invitation that was made to me as a Gay Greek-Australian to curate a project at The Greek Community Centre in Melbourne.

Dr Nikos Pantazopoulos’s foundational question is about his own Greekness and becoming. He found that it is in the way cosmopolitanism is [de] constructed that he finds himself at the centre of his own identity.

Participating academics:
Dr Pauline Anastasiou
Andreas Angelidakis
D&K (Dr Ricarda Bigolin & Chantal Kirby)
Deb Fisher
Dr Ian Haig
Dr Jody Haines
Dr Pia Johnson
Dr Daniel Marks
Dr Arlo Mountford
Eden Muster
Tina Stefanou

_{Looking Back, Looking Forward Research Symposium
Photo: Dr Pia Johnson}

CAST: Looking Back, Looking Forward Research Symposium

• Looking Back, Looking Forward Research Symposium
  Presented by CAST Migration + Mobility + Art
  Friday 12 September, 2025

Looking Back, Looking Forward was a research symposium that brought together presentations by academic scholars, artists, and cultural practitioners to examine the critical intersections between migration, mobility and artistic production. The symposium positioned art practice as both archives and prophecy — documenting past movements while also imagining speculative futures. Our approach frames migration and mobilities not as exception but as fundamental to human and more-than-human experiences, with art serving as witness and catalyst and having transformative potential. Keynote presentation was by Dr Kirsten Garner Lyttle, and panellists included researchers Ming Liew, Mita Chowdhury, Dr Jody Haines, Dr Emily Parsons-Lord, Heather Hesterman and Hootan Heydari.

This was produced and presented by the MMA team: Dr Tammy Wong Hulbert, Dr Pia Johnson, Dr Clare McCracken and Gemma Tseng.

_{Material Assembly (MatA) group exhibition at Site Eight Gallery, September 2025
Photo: Jess Curry}

MaTA: Drs Vittoria di Stefano and Sarah Tomasetti presented at the AAANZ conference Unruly Objects

• Drs Vittoria di Stefano and Sarah Tomasetti presented at the AAANZ conference Unruly Objects at the University of Western Australia in December on behalf of the Material Assembly (MatA) Research Group.

The session entitled Out of Order; Practices of Matter and Material Agencybrought two artists from the RMIT MatA group into conversation with two artists based in Western Australia to explore how unstable terrain and unruly emergence can manifest through both fieldwork and material practice.  A publication co-authored by the participants and a further three members of the group is to follow.

_{Courtesy of Associate Professor Esther Anatolitis}

Honorary Associate Professor Esther Anatolitis: When Australia Became a Republic

• In When Australia Became a Republic, Honorary Associate Professor Esther Anatolitis examines the key moments in our emergence as a republic, and maps out new paths to securing legitimate independence for a more honest society.

These include ambitiously neutralising the toxicity that dominates our national conversation; venturous civics education for a new era of empowered citizenship; and of course, constitutional change — because monarchy and democracy are irreconcilable.

_{Courtesy of Dr Justas Pipinis}

Conjuring Serendipity

• The Aimless Research Institute — the spin-off of Dr Justas Pipinis’s PhD project — has published Conjuring Serendipity, a collection of essays discussing artistic strategies that prioritise spontaneity, improvisation, and open-ended exploration over expressive goals and visions.

Among the contributors are several RMIT staff and faculty members, students and alumni: Martin George, Dr Ian Haig, Alexandra Harrison, Jason Lehane, Gabriel Nilsen, Dr Justas Pipinis, Professor Philip Samartzis, and Josh Wilson.

Conjuring Serendipity

_{D A Calf, ‘The Smooth and the Striated: An exercise in micro-publishing writings on listenings’}

D A Calf ‘The Smooth and the Striated: An exercise in micro-publishing writings on listenings’

• Book 2.0, 2025, Vol.14 (1–2), p.151–167

PhD candidate D A Calf’s article in Book 2.0 is a rumination on fieldwork, landscape and listening via a discussion of the artist book, Smooth and the Striated, published whilst in residence at Footnote Centre for Image and Text in Belgrade, Serbia in 2022.

Book 2.0 is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles and reviews about historical, modern and contemporary book creation, design, illustration and production.

_{Associate Professor Drew Pettifer, I know a place, M.33, 2025}

Associate Professor Drew Pettifer: I know a place

• Associate Professor Drew Pettifer’s new photo book with M.33, I know a place, was launched by Professor Mikala Dwyer and Professor Patricia Piccinini in November.

I know a place is a photographic monograph that brings together a series of image that reflect on place, belonging, sexuality, and masculinity. Through intimate photographic works grounded in collaboration, this book traces how relationships and memory inscribe themselves onto landscapes and interiors. Shifting between the personal and the social, the images hold vulnerability alongside acts of queer solidarity and repair.

For this book, Pettifer invited curator and art historian Michael Gentle to co-edit the book and to contribute an essay, in which he notes that “[r]ather than offering the queer body as icon or emblem, [Pettifer’s] images open it as a porous site where intimacy, memory, and desire fold into one another.”

_{Courtesy of Professor Grace McQuilten}

Visual Arts Work: Careers, Perspectives and Practices in an Australian Context

• Editors Grace McQuilten, Chloë Powell, Marnie Badham, Kate MacNeill and Jenny Lye. With contributions from Esther Anatolitis, Penelope Benton, Channon Goodwin, Sarah Gorey, Genevieve Grieves, Jenny Hickinbotham, Joe Hirschberg, Eugenia Lim, Bev Munro, Rafaela Pandolfini, Steven Rhall, Katie Russell, Madeleine Thornton-Smith and Catherine Truman.

This book provides the most comprehensive picture to date of work in the visual arts ecosystem in Australia. In a context where artists’ incomes are consistently low and falling, commercial galleries are financially vulnerable, and public galleries face program funding challenges ― this book explores barriers to the economic health of the sector, the challenge of improving artists’ and arts workers’ working conditions, and the realities of being a creative in the twenty-first century.

The book combines an analysis of art world economic value chains alongside alternative and emergent cultural, social and political economies with new quantitative and qualitative insights from artists and arts workers. With interdisciplinary methodologies and industry engagement, it examines multiple and hybrid systems of value and includes the perspectives of visual artists, craft artists and arts workers with diverse lived experiences. Our research offers greater insight into the social, cultural, and political forces that underly the mediation of art to the public including an urgent emphasis on gender, cultural safety and care work including the concerns of First Nations artists, culturally and linguistic diverse artists, and artists with disability. Our approach unpacks the diversity and hybridity of art ‘work’ to include practices realised through digitisation, internationalisation, community engagement and intersectoral partnerships.

_{Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize — Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery
Dr Isabella Capezio, Decoy, 2024}

Dr Isabella Capezio

• Lecturer Dr Isabella Capezio delivered a paper ‘Photography and Environment: a Classroom (and Beyond) Workbook’ at the Sustainable Photography? Conference, University of Falmouth in July 2025.

This paper introduced a teaching framework that positions photography as a tool for environmental engagement and critique within tertiary education. Through a practice-based approach, the paper explored how photography education can address climate change while also reflecting on the environmental impacts of the medium itself.

_{Worm Pornography, video 24 mins, 2024
Courtesy Dr Ian Haig}

Dr Ian Haig

• Senior Lecturer Dr Ian Haig’s video work Worm Pornography screened as part of the ‘Taboo, Transgression & Transcendence in Art & Science’ conference at Kino Siska, in Ljublijana, Slovenia, 9–13 September.

Dr Ian Haig also delivered a paper ‘EXTREME AI’ at the conference.

_{Elsewhere Project in progress where corresponding times and places generated a range of material potentials. Drawings and clay form by Dr Robyn Phelan, poetry by Sarah Christie.
Photo: Dr Robyn Phelan}

Dr Robyn Phelan

• Sessional lecturer Dr Robyn Phelan featured in two sessions at the Australian Ceramics Triennial Conference WEDGE in Walyalup (Fremantle). ‘The Sensual Sheen: the why and how of terra sigillata’ was a ½ day workshop on the conceptual, technical and historical potential of this material.

Robyn also presented a critical methodology alongside her Central Saint Martins London-based colleague, Sarah Christie.The ‘Elsewhere Project’ began in early 2025 and is an ongoing dialogue into material correspondence framed by working long-distance and originating from a shared sensory and embodied approach to clay. 

_{Courtesy of Oral History Australia}

Dr Kerrie Poliness

• Sessional lecturer Dr Kerrie Poliness was a panel speaker at the recent symposium ‘Sharing complex oral histories with broad audiences: navigating the opportunities and challenges’ at COASIT/Museo Italiano.

Kerrie is the President of the Living Museum of the West.

This Symposium brought together a dynamic panel of speakers talking about how they’ve presented complex oral histories in radio podcasts and programs, digital web-based histories, exhibitions and public installations.

_{Courtesy of Dr Sarah Tomasetti}

Dr Sarah Tomasetti and Dr Yu-Fang Chi

• Dr Sarah Tomasetti is a visiting lecturer with Dr Yu-Fang Chi at the School of Art, National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu Taiwan.

Sarah and Yu-Fang are interested in cross cultural exchange as a means to explore new material practices as well as diverse modes of delivery and critique with students from first year to Masters level. Dr Yu-Fang Chi is a sessional lecturer at RMIT University and an Assistant Professor in the Hsinchu School of Art.

This inaugural visit initiates a partnership between the two institutions.

_{Dr Laresa Kosloff, The Bleaching, CORAL FUTURES, Linden New Art gallery, 2025
Photo: Simon Strong}

Dr Laresa Kosloff

• Dr Laresa Kosloff’s critical short film The Bleaching is currently on display at Linden Gallery, in an exhibition titled CORAL FUTURES curated by Hamish Sawyer.

Earlier this year, two of Laresa’s short films were included in Protest is a creative act, curated by Kelly Gellatly and Angela Connor for Museum of Australian Photography (MAPH), Melbourne.

Laresa’s film The Bleaching was awarded an Honourable mention in the 2025 Ravenswood Women’s Art prize.

She was also a finalist in the MAC Yapang Art Prize at the Museum of Art & Culture, Lake Macquarie, NSW.