Felicity Spear
Independent Visual Artist
Abstract
Extending vision: sky-situated knowledge and the artists eye
Increasingly, we are looking beyond our planet to speculate about our place in the Universe. In the context of ideas about the sky and cosmic space, art works have the potential to provoke curiosity and to play an educative and imaginative role in visualising connections with science, history and a space beyond the full range of our senses. While both artists and scientists reconstruct the material world on the basis of understanding, artists are able to exploit subjectivity and are not accountable to demonstrate proof. In this way, art seeks a poetic dimension or insight which speaks of things outside art in new or different ways. This paper discusses my recent research and the exhibitions I curated to coincide with the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. Included in these were an astrophotographer and a number of Australian artists, both Western and Indigenous, whose work has been influenced by the speculative and experimental processes involved with observation, image-capture and mapping, and the technological developments which shape human consciousness. They draw also on the history of human efforts to picture whatever lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere. This space, mostly beyond the naked eye, is revealed now through a machine-produced visibility which extends our vision. Together, these works show us how various systems of knowledge have sought to make sense of the cosmos and our place within it.
MP3 of Felicity's presentation
pdf of Felicity's presentation
Biographical Details
Felicity Spear has been a practising and exhibiting artist for the past twenty years. Trained as a teacher, she went on to develop a professional art practice, combining this with further university study. She completed an MA by Research at RMIT University in Melbourne in 1999. In 2007 she completed a PhD at Monash University with a project titled Extending vision: mapping space in light and time. Spear received an Australian Post-Graduate Award as well as a Post-Graduate Travel Grant, which, in 2004, assisted her to further her research at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. In 2005-6 her work was exhibited in the UK. To coincide with the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, Spear curated two exhibitions, Sky Lab, and Beyond Visibility: light and dust, together with noted astro-photographer David Malin, and the highly regarded indigenous artist Gulumbu Yunupingu. Spear was included also in the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition Shared Sky. She has had two independent residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and been short-listed in a number of prizes, as well as receiving grants for collaborative work with other artists in Australia and the UK.