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Research and supervisor interests

Exhibition, curation, display
Interiorities and interiorization
Process-based practices
Assemblage theory
Materialities
Ephemeralities, energies
Interdisciplinarity practices
Diagramming
Sculptural processes
Expanded painting and drawing 
Site responsiveness
Bodies, movement, choreographic processes

The following is a selection of projects I have developed and taught to undergraduate students in the Bachelor of Interior Design (Honours) program in the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University between 2008 - 2024.

How to encounter smudges, surfaces and the sublime. 
Semester 1, 2012
Co-taught with Rebekah Stuart (artist)

This studio explored how surface can be considered as a site for ephemeral, spatial, temporal conditions to emerge. It was informed by two art practices that share approaches to surface through painting, photography, film, sculpture, poetry and writing. The studio was situated in two sites - the Magdalen Laundry at the Abbotsford Convent and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy. The first site of the laundry informed and enabled site-responsiveness of the hidden historical narratives which then informed a process of being surfaced through re presentation in the second site of the gallery, as an exhibition. There was a strong emphasis on process-led approaches and material exploration that informed a final intervention which was a spatial intervention and affective encounter translated from site one and then reinterpreted for site two.

Keywords: site, materiality, material agency, history, medium, concrete poetry, process-led, feminsim


Studies in surfaces, sensation and sedimentation
Semester 2, 2012
Co-taught with Louisa King (landscape architect)

This studio asked students to explore surfaces in a range of sites with varying and unique conditions and contexts; to consider the psychological, imaginative and relational aspects of surfaces and the situations that are in becoming, in relation to durational forces - such as traces and sedimentation. As tutors, we were interested in ways material and durational forces effect and affect surfaces and their performative qualities. Weaving landscape and interior disciplinarity together to see how students could engage critically and creatively with these surface becomings. In the first part of the semester, students engaged with weekly tasks that generated a body of experimental and sensitive work in response to working in sites - such as the landscapes pf Sherbrook Forrest and Merri Creek. They gathered, collected, reproduced to frame, capture and document surfaces, materials, temporalities in relation to environmental conditions and forces. In the second part of the semester, students developed their own framework to develop a tableaux as a form of exhibition, situated at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy.

Keywords: landscape, exterior, interiority, framing, arrangement, tableaux, display, duration, surfacing


How to encounter surface and light
Semester 1, 2013
Co-taught with Joseph Norster (lighting designer)

The studio asked students to consider the way light can effect and affect spatial experiences and conditions. Students were encouraged to consider light as a material - to sculpt, curate, design. Students were asked to consider how experiences, perceptions, and relations to space are dependent on light and the way light is in a dynamic relationship to surface, time and place. Light became the lens through which students viewed the world and we encouraged students to consider observing both natural and manufactured lighting throughout their daily lives throughout the duration of the studio. The studio centred on a range of ideas and questions that emerged from two practices that shared ideas and techniques involved with light and lighting. The studio intended to explore both natural and artificial light through observational making and crafting techniques, modelling, and drawing.

Keywords: light, lighting, illumination, daylight, manufactured light, exterior, interior, framing, materiality


Setting the scene: encounters in painting and atmosphere
Semester 2, 2013
Taught with Dr Rosie Scott (interior designer and academic)

This studio explored how interior design practice might act as a way of setting a scene – a scene is an atmosphere, a narrative, and a situation that allows for something to be played out, performed. Techniques engaging in painting, colour theory and lighting were developed to explore ways of producing atmospheres and spatial narratives. Students worked with painting as a practice of being attentive through observation and explored painting in the expanded field, using light and photography. The final phase involved intervention in an abandoned site in Collingwood, where students intervened at 1:1 and explored their material and conceptual approaches to scene making in actual manifestations, allowing students to produce and experience their scenes in scale and in the actual.

Keywords: painting, colour, materiality, atmosphere, process-led, site responsive, scenography


How to encounter surface and structure
Semester 1, 2014
Taught with Millie Cattlin (These Are The Projects We Do Together)

This studio was interested in exploring the relationship between surface and structures for supporting, proposing and facilitating surface.. Students were based at Testing Grounds - a place behind the Arts Centre in Melbourne CBD, where each week they were asked to become sensitive to the existing surfaces and their behaviours through observation and documentation. Students were asked to explore materiality through studying the behaviour of surfaces and were asked to intervene into site with materials to animate and activate surfaces. Part of this intervention process was to develop techniques in supporting surfaces through, framing, propping and structuring surfaces. Students expanded from documentation to the making and production of surface encounters through active hands-on processes in site and through material engagement at 1:1. Students developed ways of intervening, exaggerating, activating and extruding what is hidden, unseen and fleeting, prolonging experience and bringing something to the foreground in relationship to site and surfaces in site. This was achieved through the production of support structures, frames, scaffolding, systems, contraptions, mechanisms at 1:1 in the site of Testing Grounds. Students were also asked to explore these physical support structures’ and their social and political implications - how they related to the site, the city context, occupants, and the environment. The outcome of these experiments, constructed and installed on the site for public exhibition became part of the SITUATION Symposium held in 2014 at RMIT Interior Design. 

Keywords: process-led, site responsive, surface, structure, scaffolding, soft and hard infrastructure

Material adventures, site situations and things in tableaux
Semester 2, 2014
Taught with Louisa King (landscape architect)

The studio explored the process of adaptation as a way of understanding the psychological, spatial, relational, and physical potentials of sites. The term ‘site’ can mean different things through processes involved in movements between exterior and interior, site and non-site, object and model. Site can refer to the physical location of a given place; it could also refer to an object, event, or condition that is specific to that location. Students engaged in a series of site visits to undertake activities in site to produce gestures occurring in specific geographical locations that could be remade in other sites. The idea of dual space, a fluctuation or multiplicity within, between, relating to ideas of the physical and the virtual in relation to site informed a way of working. Making activities in one site allowed the possibility for a repeated activity in the other. The studio practised this through two stages. One, a discourse produced through reading, writing, making in-situ responses and producing artifacts. Two, the tableaux as a process of arrangement and design through the location and display of objects. The design of tableaux involved questioning and exploration through the making of display systems (such as the plinth, podium, bench, stage, stand).

Keywords: site responsive, surfacing, iteration, exterior, interiority, arrangement, exhibition, display

Spatial strategies and speculative tactics for use and appropriation
Semester 1, 2015

Using the Tarneit Community Learning Centre site in the City of Wyndham, the studio explored ideas and techniques of connectivity to develop a re-thinking of the community learning centre as a site of connectivity and belonging. Students engaged in a range of diagrammatic explorations through in site activities, material and immaterial gestures, and model making to develop experimental tactics and modes of working concerning programmatic concerns, flexible arrangements, and furniture systems. The diagram was a central concept and approach to working as it enabled ideas of flexibility and movement through change and rearrangement which aligned with the notion of connectivity as not a static condition but something in flux and open to variation. The studio was an opportunity for students to engage in a creative practice that combines methods of responsiveness, activism, and intervention to develop approaches for connection, community, and belonging. The council supported this studio and its undertaking, as it operated as a ‘think tank’ for future possibilities regarding the design of community centres and greater community engagement more broadly in the City of Wyndham.

Keywords: site responsive, community, materiality, diagraming, arrangement, iteration, appropriation


Surface scenarios and material adventures in depth
Semester 2, 2015

The studio explored the interplay between the two dimensional and three dimensional, between image and object - through the meditation and re-imagining of the medium of photography. Students worked in various ways, from generating sculptures re-presented as photographs to photographs rendered as sculpture. By developing techniques for sculpture and photography to intersect, students were asked to approach the photograph as a site to create sculptural compositions rather than simply as a method and means of documentation. With a particular emphasis on material, form, surface, space and the image-making process, the studio questioned the notion of medium specificity and traced the ambivalent relationships between object and image, the original and the copy, ideas of appropriation and cultural implications. Ideas related to the exploitation, recirculation and and proliferation of images engaged students in a contemporary discourse that explored the medium between photography. As image-makers, the students developed critical thinking concerning the role and potential of images in a post-internet discourse. 

Keywords: 2D to 3D, 3D to 2D, object, surface, perceptual depth, image, slippery, materiality, photography


Props & meditative acts in tableaux
Semester 1, 2016

The studio explored contemporary ideas of retail through the interplay between exhibition and retail by challenging the consumer relationship and experience. Through binary associations of object/subject, consumer/user, function/fashion, the studio explored approaches of betweenness through material-led processes of mediating and appropriating. The studio examined and expanded the conventional definitions of retail as more than the commodification of objects and user relations through a series of projects that explore rituals, instruments, symbols through concepts on memory, intimacy, value, narrative, and time.

Keywords: retail, exhibition, relational, object, surface, programmatic, ritual, value, duration, process-led


In assemblage
Semester 2, 2018

The meaning of the word image is traditionally concerned with something visual or being represented, such as a symbol or illustration. This studio proposed that images such as photographs, could convey absence and presence, the past and the present, allowing them to be experienced as more than static objects or stationary instants in time. As such, images are composites of surfaces with inherent materialities, which prompt qualities that can transform and proliferate to be expressive and dynamic depending on their relationship to time and space. Materials, surfaces, and images are in constant relationship with forces, phenomena, matter. This studio explored how images can shift beyond imitation and adornment, to interiorise through relations and dynamics between surfaces and a world of forces. Due to the new possibilities of digital media, manipulation and editing, and the volume of visual material in circulation, the importance of the image has changed dramatically. Images do not operate in isolation, as the image is already made from a composition of other images. The camera is used commonly and thus is part of re-presented reality. These diverse levels of imagery are the focus of the studio. This studio examined and expanded the conventional definitions of image production by challenging notions of representation and engaged in the slippery territory between subjective and objective. As image-makers, students examined this condition of image-making and questioned the cultural, material, and spatial potentials of images by examining materiality, symbolic potentials, context, content, authenticity, permanence, and stability. Students came to understand that images are vulnerable to manipulation by the maker, producer, and consumer in the post-internet age. 

Keywords: process-led, image, surface, arrangement, assemblage, display, image, composition


 
Notation /nə(ʊ)ˈteɪʃn/
2018, 2019, 2020, 2022

This specialisation explored the spatial, relational, and temporal potentials of notations. Through a multiplicity of mediums, materials and media, notations are considered as concept, composition, instruction, and situation. The specialisation asked students to engage in experimentation through different kinds of notations and various mediums, materials and contexts, students developed a notational practice where distinct rhythms, potentials, and intricacies to space emerged. Notations assume all varieties of either prescribed or casual actions as part of our every day - by recording observations, drawing spontaneous doodles, sketching designs for communication, and making notes for future reference. Notations can be a deliberate means to communicate thought and intention, while also potentially involving less predetermined gestures, such as the effect of traces made from incidental marks, contingent on unplanned forces. Students worked between representation and abstraction, formal and informal processes, digital and material, intention and the accidental, knowing and misunderstanding, humour, and disposition, to explore how notations can cause a composite of formations, interpretations and qualities. This slippage or friction concerning notations was encouraged and celebrated, and the idea of notations being misunderstood enabled students to open their thinking to learning the difficulties of cultural interpretation and meaning. 

Keywords: process-led, composition, annotations, lively, beyond representation, assemblage, materiality

Surfacing collections
Semester 1, 2023
Co-taught with Millie Cattlin (These Are The Projects We Do Together)

This studio is a provocation for experiencing and perceiving the materiality and temporality in the world. The studio considers and explores how surfaces are open to material, durational, and ecological forces where they are in becoming, with the potential to be lively. For James J Gibson (1986), human perception is an ecology of realities entangled in a relationship involving “places, surfaces, layouts, motions, events, animals, people and artifacts” (p. 66) that structure and facilitate perception. Gibson’s primary concern is how perception is composed by and in relation to surfaces, as surfaces separate mediums and substances within the environment. Interior design is often understood as space that exists inside buildings or in relationship to architecture. This studio offers up a different framing through attention to surfaces and their material and spatial potentials and how an ‘interior’ is produced in relation to surfaces and sites. Based in a Quarry site in Beech Forest, in the Otways, this studio enables students to explore the process and production of materiality through site-responsive spatial propositions, students will learn to value material, ephemeral, spatial and temporal encounters concerned with surfaces, as a critical and spatial practice of relevance within contemporary practice.

Keywords: process-led, annotations, materiality, site responsiveness, surfacing, collecting, arranging