2009 Visiting Research Fellows

Associate Professor Kim Dickey

Kim Dickey is a US based artist. Her current work involves the reinterpretation of the ceramic tradition of Bocage. She combines the excessive delicacy of porcelaineous flora with the austere and monumentality of a modernist aesthetic. She has shown at Garth Clark gallery in New York as well as Mass. MOCA, the Everson Museum (Syracuse) and the American Craft Museum. She is currently Associate Professor of Ceramics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Dickey was awarded a BFA in 1986 from Rhode Island School of Design, followed by an MFA from Alfred University in 1988. Her teaching and research interests include Ceramics, Sculpture, Painting, Performance art, mixed media and post-medium theory, Installation art, film and video, culinary and food history, wunderkammern, botany. For more go here.

During the Fellowship, that was hosted by the Ceramics studio, Kim presented the keynote address on Monday 20 July 2009 at the Australian Ceramics Triennale 09, titled ‘The Earth and the Earthly’.

From 17 July – 8 August 2009 Dickey exhibited at Tin Sheds gallery as part of the group show Earth to Form: sculpture in clay and mixed media.

Dr Damian Skinner

Dr Skinner’s current focus is completing, with Dr Kevin Murray, a significant publication concerned with contemporary jewellery in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The aim of the book is to both provide an archive of information about therecent history of contemporary jewellery in facts and images, and engage jewellery in a broader argument about sense of place.

The Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) Visiting Research Fellowship enabled Dr Skinner to undertake sustained research into the history and stories of Australian contemporary jewellery.

Dr Skinner undertook the Fellowship in the Jewellery & Object Design studio. Dr Skinner's curatorial work, Lisa Walker: Unwearable, a survey exhibition of New Zealander Lisa Walker’s work from the last 15 years, was on view at SCA Galleries in conjunction with Sydney Design 2009.

Walker is one of Aotearoa’s most respected and successful jewellers. Living in Munich, Germany, for the last nine years, she has established a critical reputation within the European contemporary jewellery world. Having graduated from the Munich Academy under the guidance of Otto Künzli, Walker represents one of the more interesting jewellers working today and this exhibition will be the first opportunity for Australian audiences to view her work in such a concentrated way.

In 2006 Dr Skinner was awarded a PhD in Art History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and in 2008 Dr Skinner completed a Masters of Indigenous Studies with distinction at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

A writer and curator, Dr Skinner’s recent curatorial projects include 1839 Exchanges: Jewellery by Jason Hall, Craft Victoria, Melbourne; Metaphysical Heart: Jewellery by Peter McKay, CoCA, Christchurch; and Given: Jewellery by Warwick Freeman, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.

2008 Visiting Research Fellow Tim Kellner

In 2008 Tim Kellner was the inaugural visiting research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts. During his time at SCA Kellner was hosted by the Photomedia studio and curated the exhibition Refusal of Reality. The exhibition was supported by the Goethe Institut and Exhibition Enterprise.

With this exhibition series and the corresponding catalogue, nine photographers (Katrin Amft; Marc Grummert; Tim Kellner; Thanh Long; Knut W. Maron; Janet Riedel; Heidi Schneekloth; Michael Strauss and; Janet Zeugner) develop a contemporary discourse about their media. Since 2005 several group exhibitions and linked solo shows throughout Germany and abroad refer to a dynamic and vivid photography art scene in Germany.

The project created a bridge from the beginnings of radical positions in the context of European contemporary art in the 1920's, via the attitudes of the particular German issue of "subjective photography" in the 1950s, to today.

The ensuing discussion is part of the current European discourse surrounding the photographic medium - it opposes the documentary and realistic representation with a more metaphorical, visionary, poetic and subjective approach to contemporary photography.

Located in close relation to the basic idea of "subjective photography", the work itself both enriches and extends this original concept by technical innovations, such as colour and digital technology, and thus broadens the fusion of different concepts of both painting and photography.

Refusal of Reality opened at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery on Tuesday 9 September 2008 and closed Saturday 4 October 2008.


Image: Tim Kellner, Self Portrait