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(2007)Conference PaperThis paper discusses a studio-based lighting design project developed for second year undergraduate students in a four year design degree. The project is intended to develop student understanding of the technological and manufacturing requirements of the professional design process and has been repeated each year over a three year period during which time student responses have been gathered and changes made in response to student feedback. This paper highlights the benefits of real world experiences in the early stage of design education by extending the traditions of hypothetically and conceptually rich briefs, which impacts on the student’s future design process. The lighting project is based on a client brief/s that range from architectural lighting for commercial applications to lighting systems for emergency services. The project includes lighting workshops that explore the technical and ephemeral qualities of light and provides students with hands-on experience of industrial/manufacturing processes. It also extends understanding on the role of collaboration in obtaining a professional outcome, i.e. (producing working prototypes for exhibition). Students are required to source quotations from industry thus affording a tangible outcome and an understanding of the financial implications of their design outputs. Final working prototypes are presented in a public exhibition space, designed and co-ordinated by the student group. The educational benefits of ‘real world’ experiences gained by the students and its impact on their design process is analysed. Student evaluations are discussed in response to the project brief, including their response to working with industry. In addition, how the results have enabled a refinement to the project over time. By embedding opportunities for students to engage in industrial processes outside of the university they are more likely to assume a professional focus, share knowledge and engage in each other’s experiences rather than focus on individual achievements and grades.
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(2007)Conference PaperTo develop effective design solutions for end users whose life experiences, health, mobility, and cognitive functions are significantly different to our own, we must recognize and challenge our assumptions about those users. When we set out to inspire novice designers to practice in a field widely considered as he height of ‘uncool’, we also challenge beliefs about the nature of design itself. Introducing young novice designers to ‘Elder Design, (ED) i.e. design responses to the needs of people over the age of 65, achieves both these goals. It also meets a rapidly ageing society’s requirement for designers with an understanding of this user group. This paper presents an analysis of a graduating student’s design for a chair intended for residents’ use in a residential aged care facility (RACF) in south-western Sydney). Effective design solutions in this area require a multidisciplinary approach involving an understanding of environment-behaviour relationships, the ageing process, dementia, nursing practices, operations research, and ergonomic design for user groups with highly specific (but varied) needs. In addition to the end users, ED introduces students to clients such as RACF operators, who are themselves experiencing rapid change in the types of the services they provide and the care models which inform them. In this context, effective problemsolving begins with problem identification -- for all parties. Evaluated via interview and the analysis of design outcomes, the project provides an insight into possible approaches to developing education for user-centred design solutions across many fields.
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(2004)Conference PaperStrategies used in interdisciplinary needlework-textiles in public installation-performance are outlined. My paper discusses the particulars of my Irish Linen Memorial, begun in 2001, Justine Merritt's Ribbon around the Pentagon, 1982-85, and Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt, 1987. I discuss the sculptural use of textiles in public space and ritual, such as their historically political use as banners, as well as creations symbolic of the interconnectedness of life. More currently, textiles metaphorically illustrate violence and trauma inflicted upon the body, loss of life and the rupture of the fabric of social order which war involves. Cloth can be used as a reminder of displaced persons, the migrant identity and the plea for global stability. My collaboration with choreographer-dancer, Elizabeth Cameron-Dalman, OAM, is an example of international collaboration between Australia and Canada, on the issue of Northern Ireland's sectarian violence, 1969-2000.
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(2007)Journal ArticleThis brief article explains the non-hierarchical listing of all 'Troubles' deaths in the inclusive Irish Linen Memorial (renamed The Linen Memorial in 2007) - killings for which various persons/groups on either side of the political divide, as well as the security forces, were responsible. The artwork-memorial can be read as an anti-monument. The Linen Memorial (hereafter LM) acts as a 'modest witness' in reordering relationships and engaging a parity of esteem between Nationalist/Republican ('Catholic') and Loyalist/Unionist ('Protestant') communities during the post-1998 period when Northern Ireland is emerging from conflict. The use of the linen handkerchief as symbolic for heartfelt grief was what inspired me to use it, as a building block, to create a non-traditional and mobile memorial to those killed in the sectarian violence, commonly called The Troubles, in Northern Ireland.
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(2009)Journal ArticleHow we perceive and contemplate the land affects how we treat the land, and ultimately how we live within it. Thus, is it possible for the artist to change how we perceive the environment to the extent that people change the way they respond and inhabit it? Encounters with venerated and Sacred Trees on field trips to India lead me to consider that respect for the environment is strengthened by the symbolic nature of images. Beyond the economic or conservationist perspective, there is an aesthetic rationale for preserving trees in India, where the tree is perceived aesthetically in its natural environment as an object adorned, and subsequently adored. The historic and contemporary practice of venerating the tree through decoration has, over time, effected cultural change in India. The tree is perceived differently, it is seen as a form that houses the sacred, and thus is protected. Louise Fowler-Smith is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Imaging the Land International Research Institute (ILIRI) at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW in Sydney, Australia. ILIRI aims to promote new ways of perceiving the land in the 21st century, while opening a dialogue across a wide spectrum of contemporary approaches to imaging the land, from indigenous and non-indigenous, local and international perspectives. ILIRI has established a residential Art Centre at the UNSW Fowlers Gap Research station north of Broken Hill. As a member of RESARTIS, (the international association of Artists’ Residencies), ILIRI attracts national and international artists to reside and work at this unique centre on the edge of the Australian Desert.
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(2003)Creative Work (non-textual)Solo exhibition 'Here' at Yuill Crowley Gallery, curated by Kerry Crowley.
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(2008)Curatorial Output1) Elysian Fields, Tartarus, Asphodel Meadows and Charon the ferry man (Death Bird): A series of 4 paintings based on The Colonial Ghost story of Greenmans Inn This is the story of an Inn built on the Hawkesbury that turned into a violent place of murder and notorious act of cruelty. It was said the barmaids were kidnapped. Men were often tied down to rocks and drowned by the incoming tide or weighed down with rocks and feed to the sharks. The ghost of woman with a small baby now haunts the area, presuming both her and child died some horrible death. She is seen in broad daylight with a child in her arms. The paintings for this series focus on the ideas of settlement and civilization and the worlds and underworlds that souls inhabit. The painting Charon the ferryman (death bird) 172 cm x 160cm oil on canvas, ferries on a raft men up the river and into the adventure. This painting also uses bits of another story “The death bird” where strange screeching from a bird precedes a death. Elysian Fields 172 cm x 160cm oil on canvas shows the utopian existence of industry, like Prometheus or Vulcan a new civilization with laws and ideals, to taming the wild. Tartarus 172 cm x 160cm oil on canvas shows us what happens when the human condition turns for the worst. Lower than Hades, it is the place of monsters, the walls of the Inns cannon are like the tree layers of night that encompass Tartarus. In the painting the Asphodel meadows 172 cm x 160cm oil on canvas, it is the land of indifference, the in-between world of the soul, it shows a rowboat on a beautiful river, in it, a young woman, a small girl, and a mother breastfeeding her baby. 2) Convicts Bride and A Convicts Ghost: A series of two paintings based on the colonial ghost story of a convict and his bride A convict who protested his innocence was sent from England, and assigned to a landowner in Windsor, his wife followed and became a servant in the landowner’s house. The convict and his bride escaped with a boat down river. They were soon found and he was shot through the heart. His ghost is seen hovering over Cowan creek. The painting Convicts Bride shows the moment of capture. A young woman sits alone in a creek bed besides her in shallow pool lies a deer, shot through the heart, both strangers in their surroundings. A doe looks on while sulphur crested cockatoos fly away. The painting A Convicts Ghost tells of a woman who remains tied to a single point on the Hawkesbury River above floats the ghost of her husband. These works are attempts to use the language of mythology to help create history. A convict ghost is based on the work “The lady of Shallot” by Waterhouse a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The Pre-Raphaelites were anxious to create a mythology for England. The interpretations of history are as various as the individuals who report them. Sometimes the establishment of simple tales into historically important events are urged on by the need to have a history, any history. This history eventually becomes part of a culture. The lack of familiar local stories for the first settlers, I believe helped in the recording of so many ghost stories in Sydney and the Hawkesbury. Some Ghosts become famous such as Fischer’s Ghost, where an areas whole Identity can become associated with the tale. History Painting in general records events, its need is not as necessary now as before the industrial revolution. But History painting like photography or the documentation or any historical event can only tell a small version of that event, from a particular point of view and is usually politically loaded. History painting at present has the greatest scope it has been able to enjoy for some time, it’s no longer bound by the truth, or more, has to have the pretence of being so. Within the expanded field of Art I believe that history painting in particular exists on a plane bound on its edges by History, politics, fantasy, and documentary. 3) The subtle Serpents bite 1804, a Young boy is bitten by a snake, and is helped home by a stockman and his younger. The young boy dies. His grieving mother one day just disappears and is thought to have drowned. His Father is also drowned while trying to save some of his flock. The remaining son was moved to an uncle who dropped dead. The tombstone of the boy and place became known as haunted hill and school children often visited the site. The fascinating thing about this story is the imagery and the symbols, in the main painting, the subtle Serpents bite, the artifacts of the story, serpents, shepherds, flock etc, become the elements of a more familiar story of western civilization. It is as though the young colony can establish a history of tales that have the same structure and underlying moral as those from the lands the colonials left.
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(2007)Conference PaperIn the last few years especially, the notion of Graduate Attributes, and the expectation that they will be mapped through university curricula, has become increasingly standardised in the Australian university sector. Universities more and more articulate their role and purpose through a description of the qualities of their graduates (Clanchy & Ballard 199)], while these qualities are at the same time becoming increasingly generic and non-specific. The aim of this paper is to address the impact of that these approaches to curriculum development and management are likely to have in the Fine Arts and Design teritary education sectors, and on the lessons to be learnt from a recently undertaken curriculum mapping process at the College of Fine Arts UNSW.
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(2007)Conference PaperThis research takes the stance that identifying a previously unseen design example is a problem-solving activity that novice learners, particularly those who lack visual literacy skills, find extremely difficult. Learning in design history often involves presenting students, after they have been given a lecture, with appreciation activities of design examples. Such activities often do not take into account the limited capacity of working memory in that multiple examples of previously unseen material is shown and students are required to answer open-ended questions on a design’s visual characteristics without any teacher instruction until students provide an appropriate answer. According to Schnotz (2002), semantic processing is required in order for the viewer to comprehend a picture as opposed to merely perceiving it. Koroscik, Short, Stavropoulos and Fortin (1992) recommended that educators should not expect students to discover meaningful or accurate ideas about an artwork without teacher direction and input. These conclusions can also be applied to the teaching of design history. This research discusses the application of cognitive load theory, a theory usually applied to the teaching of maths and science, and theories of visual literacy to provide a theoretical underpinning for supporting techniques to improve students’ ability to recognise designers’ styles in higher education. Specifically it is suggested, that providing well-designed worked examples would be a more effective instructional method for promoting novice learning.