About
artist, writer, academic, higher education leader
My interests across both my professional and creative practice have always focused around narratives for change and our ability to create myths of meaning through telling vibrant layered stories.
I am currently Provost with the Careers and Industry division of Navitas, Australia’s largest private higher education provider. I lead teaching and learning quality and innovation across ACAP, our human services and business college, and SAE University College, our creative industries college.
I trained as an artist and exhibited in the 1990s and early 2000’s but have only recently returned to public art-making after a time concentrating on my academic career. My early work focused on old master imagery digitally recontextualised to investigate sexuality religion and death, as a response to the then evolving HIV epidemic. This work evolved into my ongoing series, Urban Abstractions an investigation of abstract photography: when is an image there, when is it a blur? My academic research also explores the evocative and the symbolic, particularly contemporary mythologies and the way media navigate a continuing sense of impending apocalyptic threat. My current images, which include photogravure etchings, digital photography, monpronts and mokulito, combine this interest in apocalyptic mythologies and my ongoing exploration of abstraction as a feeling-toned language that is capable of speaking both personally and politically.
I am currently working with multimedia combinations of print techniques: mokulito and watercolour and ink monoprints; digital prints and mokulito; digital prints and photogravure. These combinations allows the layering of blooming colour with powerful blocks of granulated tone. This process reminds me of American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell’s comment: 'Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work.' In seeking to resolve a surface, its tensions and contradictions also become apparent as does the patterned chaos that underpins our world.
In 2022 I was awarded 2nd prize in the Jack Wilkins Experimental Photography Prize. I have also been a finalist in the Milburn Prize (2023); the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize (2023); the Olive Cotton Award (2023) and the Tacit Still Life Prize (2022). I am actively involved in the printmaking community and I’m currently a member of the Baldessin Press & Studio Committee of Management, a not-for-profit access, education and editioning studio.
Prior to my current role at Navitas I held a number of senior leadership roles at the University of Wollongong, where I was Journalism program lead and at Deakin University where I was Pro-Vice Chancellor Teaching and Learning and Director of Digital Learning. My team in Deakin Learning Futures led work on CloudFirst approaches to teaching and learning which put the online experience at the heart of learning design. This included the world first Degrees at FutureLearn Project which saw Deakin become the first university to launch a suite of degrees on a MOOC platform. At UOW I was Head, Digital Pedagogies and was one of the academic leads on the UOW Curriculum Transformation Project (CTP) an ambitious five-year project to review and transform the curriculum of all UOW degrees.
Prior to becoming an academic I was editor of Sydney Star Observer, Australia’s oldest and largest circulation gay and lesbian weekly newspaper from 1999 until early 2006. Prior to that I worked primarily in magazines doing a range of arts journalism. In the early nineties I was Melbourne editor of Monument – one of Australia’s leading architecture and design magazines and movies editor of SBS television’s subscriber magazine, Ariel.
I’ve written widely about art and architecture, gay/lesbian issues, religion, music, film and journalism.
In 2012 I completed a PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, where I previously taught part-time in the journalism program.
