2024 Award Outcomes
Emily Rayside
‘A world of fern-trees’: Ferns, Gullies, and the Enchanted Settlers
Bachelor of Arts (with Honours): History | Faculty of Arts
Moss-covered gullies laced with crystalline creeks are enchanting places, now and in the past. During the nineteenth century, tree ferns and their gully homes captivated settler-colonists in Tasmania and Victoria. In response, they created art and literature that emphasised how ferns mediated their relationship with stolen land. Examples of this art are represented within theGrimwade Collection. This presentation examines these pieces, includingEugène von Guérard’s Ferntree Gully, Dandenong Ranges (Victoria) 1867and John Skinner Prout’s Fern Tree Valley, Van Diemen’s Land c.1847, unpicking how settler-colonists interacted with ferns as cultural objects in order to negotiate a sense of Australian exceptionalism and imperial unity.
Donna Ferdinando & Sophie Mama
‘Haunted by the Narrative’: Focalising Ogilvie’s Haunted Landscapes
Bachelor of Arts: English and Theatre Studies and Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (Ferdinando), Politics and International Studies and Media and Communications (Mama) | Faculty of Arts
Helen Ogilvie's homesteads are the focal points of her works. In depicting them Ogilvie makes relics of them, imbued with a sense of nostalgia for a disappearing colonial Australian frontier culture. Her landscapes in these works are, however, voids made uncanny through the lack of flora, typically characteristic of the ‘bush’. It is a gothic void, made so through the violent displacement, dispossession and spectralisation of Indigenous communities. Just as nostalgia for the colonial is ingrained in the homestead, so are the ghosts of the consequences of the colonial expansionist enterprise—particularly in the policies of terra nullius—tied to Australia's voided bush landscape. What does shifting our gaze from Ogilvie's homesteads to the surrounding landscapes mean for the colonial gothic narratives that have defined these works? What ghosts haunt Ogilvie's landscapes and what revenants?
Sebastian Moore
The Body and the Light: Rupert Bunny and the Grimwade Collection
Bachelor of Arts: Art History | Faculty of Arts
Rupert Bunny (1864-1947) was considered to be one of Australia's most complex and important artists of his time. Producing a vast number of paintings and drawings during his career, he has remained an enigmatic figure in the history of Australian art. When he returned home to Australia in 1932 after a successful career in France, he was forced to reassess the country he left behind. The two paintings in the Grimwade Collection, Sketch for a Scene in the Botanic Gardens (c.1933) and Mother and Child (1910), are emblematic of the subjects and themes that blossomed in his work in the latter half of Bunny’s career. They act as a vehicle to discuss questions of queerness in his life, as current research has not yet fully explored the relationships with men Bunny is alleged to have had. This presentation examines how Post-Impressionism, combined with contemporaneous social movements, allow for narratives of womanhood and Queer identity to be fashioned in Bunny’s Mother and Child. Studying these works using Queer theory and relevant biographical information, the hidden histories of these paintings will be revealed.
Gillian Duncan & Ilika Srivastava-Khan
Stitch-by-stitch: Embroidery, girlhood and embodied practice
Master of Arts and Cultural Management | Faculty of Arts
Alongside the prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings in the Grimwade Collection are three embroideries: a traditional sampler (1871), a map of the United Kingdom (1794) and an embroidered castle (unknown). These embroideries are records left by two young girls of their existence. Brought from the United Kingdom to the new colony of Australia, they tell a transnational story of girlhood, empire and tradition. While they are a material object steeped in the time in which they were made— some with dates stitched within them—they are also an object that represents becoming; an object that guides the transition from girlhood to womanhood.
By engaging in the rituals and methods of embroidery we can connect with the girls that came before us through this embodied practice.
Imogen Kerr
Lyrics to a Lyrebird
Master of Contemporary Art | Faculty of Fine Arts and Music
‘Lyrics to a Lyrebird’ is a tactile reimagining of Eugène von Guérard’s coloured lithograph, Ferntree Gully, Dandenong Ranges (Victoria) (1867). By deconstructing and then reassembling the lithograph’s colours, lines and textures, the project transforms the sublime landscape into a sculptural and textile expression. Just as the lyrebirds in von Guérard’s work mimic their surroundings with their song, this response reflects and reinterprets the landscape, creating a dialogue between past and present, tactile and textual.
Hannah Perkins
The Atmosphere as Raw Material: The Sky Above Melbourne and the Grimwade Collection
Master of Art Curatorship | Faculty of Arts
Russell Grimwade founded Australian Oxygen and Industrial Gases – one of the first companies to import industrial machinery to manufacture and distribute liquid oxygen in Australia. This essay explores how Grimwade’s art collection reflects this interest in the materiality of the atmosphere.What did colonial views of the sky above Melbourne mean in the 19th century when these lithographs and watercolours were made, what did they mean in the early 20th when Russell was collecting these prints and distilling the atmosphere into its constituent parts, and how might these things speak to us now in a time of climate change? How does this collection breathe?
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