Fine Arts research

It is this original research that drives Elam’s teaching programmes and helps maintain the School’s international profile. The range of staff research includes all the contemporary fine arts disciplines, from painting and sculpture to sound installation, photography, design, film and video, incorporating aspects of Māori and Pacific arts. Research at Elam also extends to the scholarship and pedagogy of fine arts, and a further dimension covers the key areas of art theory and criticism, including contemporary curatorial practices and the role of art in society.

All Elam students have the opportunity to be taught by and to engage with top researchers as part of their study. Courses in research methodology assist each student to develop a personal programme of research and creative practice that is both relevant and contemporary. The masters and doctoral programmes in particular equip students to participate fully in the research that distinguishes Elam within the international arena.

• Joyce Campbell: The Many Layered Place: Evoking Te Taniwha of Ruakituri, Hanagaroa and Te Reinga
  Joyce is working on the second stage of an ongoing research project that already exists as a series of photographic exhibitions. This new work adds a number of HD DVD interviews, transcriptions and edited texts as well as a supporting series of large format photographs and 16mm films to the project. The work aims to build an extensive narrative archive that secures for posterity a densely layered korero pertaining to two intersecting river valleys – Hangaroa and Ruakituri and their meeting place at Te Reinga in the Eastern Urewera.
  
  Working in collaboration with the Ngai Kohatu historian and kaumatua, Richard Niania, Joyce is identifying knowledge holders, archiving oral accounts and pinpointing significant sites relevant to ancient supernatural events, customary practices and historical conflicts in these two valleys. In particular she is focussing on inherited accounts of the journeys of the prophet Te Kooti Akikirangi Te Turuki and the birth (in his party) of the puhi, matriarch and orator Te Taniwha McRoberts, tracing their influence into the modern era. The work will be exhibited at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, with an accompanying symposium and the publication of a catalogue of essays.
   
• Associate Professor Derrick Cherrie: Going to Norway: A thin building sculpture project
  The objective of Derrick’s project is to promote reflection on the underlying social and economic conditions which support our built environment, by destabilising some of its most recognisable features.  Consisting of the creation of  six large outdoor and indoor sculptural works and a series of works on paper, Derrick explains that “the point of this project is not to develop new “architectural’ designs but to adapt existing forms, materials and building codes to perversely strained architectural ends.  It is intended that these works will challenge perceptions of what it means to live within the social contracts and material cultures that urban environments service and promote”.
   
• Lisa Crowley: Revisiting Modernist ideas of thought and production
  Lisa’s project is a case study of the production and dissemination of thought and politics through printed material. It explores how an icon of European architectural modernism, in this case Alvar Aalto’s Vyborg library in Finland, operates as a complex object that fosters the production of both ideologies and subjectivities. Aalto’s library has a particularly interesting history as it has been in Soviet and now Russian territory for much of its life.  Lisa’s exhibition at Te Tuhi, Auckland and her exhibition at Jensen Gallery, Sydney, form two halves of the project: her videos of the library in use, shown at Te Tuhi, will present the life of the library as a complex cultural object which functions as an idea; a machine for producing subjectivities; a functioning and elegant architectural site; and a model of socio-political forces. The Jensen Gallery images will evoke the processes of thought and feeling mediated by print culture.
   
• Dr Simon Ingram: Towards a version of Grote Reber’s radio telescope at Wheaton (Chicago, 1937)
  Chicago-born Grote Reber was the first, and for a full decade, the only radio astronomer in the world.  In 1937, after failing to gain government funding, he built a radio telescope in a vacant section next to his mother’s house.  The project caught the public’s imagination and resulted in considerable media attention.  From Reber’s original drawings Simon is developing a working scale model of the radio telescope which will be able to listen to radio signals directly from space and, interfacing with software and hardware, act as a painting machine.  Outputs will include an exhibition featuring the model telescope as sculpture, a book published by Poor FarmPress and a series of paintings and drawings.
   
• Alex Monteith: Extreme Surfing Aotearoa
  This project involves number of large-scale performance and video artworks with the participation of big-wave surfers, taking place over the winter storm seasons in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Alex is combining research on this cultural practice with new developments in the academic theories on performance art and video art.