Join writer & curator Julie Ewington, artist Helen Grace, cinematographer Erika Addis and producer & director Pat Fiske for a morning of conversation highlighting the work of women in contemporary art and film.
Join artist Helen Grace for a deep dive into the making of her film Serious Undertakings, along with the team that created it with her, Pat Fiske and Erika Addis. Expanding out from the focused artist’s talk, curator and writer Julie Ewington will speak about feminism and art history in the context of the 1980s in Australia.
Julie Ewington
Julie Ewington is a curator and writer based in Sydney, with a life-long commitment to exploring work by living Australian artists. Between 2001-2014 Julie headed Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, contributing to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art between 1996-2012. Recent projects include Juanita McLauchlan: gii mara-bula/Heart Hand-also, (Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, 2023). Her writing includes major books—Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014)—and numerous essays; she edits publications for Australian and international museums, and writes for journals including Art Monthly and Australian Book Review
Helen Grace
Helen Grace is a new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic whose work constitutes a critical archive of Australian social and political life from the 1970s. Her practice maps queer and feminist politics in this period, investigating the gendered politics of living spaces; the ways of organising, working and exercising freedom in the everyday.
Grace was the Founding Director of the MA Programme in Visual Culture Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong and is now Associate, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney; in 2012-13 she was Visiting Professor in the Department of English, National Central University, Taiwan on a National Science Council Fellowship. Her work is in the collections of Artbank, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and Art Gallery of South Australia as well as private collections nationally and internationally.
Erika Addis
Erika Addis is acclaimed for her cinematography on long form and series documentaries, short and experimental films. She shot and produced the award-winning Serious Undertakings (1983). She is the first female national president of the Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS). She has taught post graduate cinematography courses around the world, and she is a trailblazer for cine women for over 40 years.
Pat Fiske OAM
Pat Fiske OAM, Bower Bird Films, has directed and/or produced many award-winning documentaries and mentored many young filmmakers over the years. In 2001-2002 she was Documentary Consultant at SBS Independent television for 18 months. In 2001 she was awarded the prestigious Stanley Hawes Award for her outstanding contribution to the documentary industry in Australia and was Co-Head of Documentary at AFTRS from 2002-2008.
In 2023 Pat was awarded the Order of Australia for her service to the film industry. Pat is now raising money to restore and preserve two of her films that are still on 16mm – For All the World to See, a portrait of Prof Fred Hollows (1992) and Woolloomooloo (1978).
Wilder Times
Wilder Times sees the return of a series of Shoalhaven landscape paintings by Arthur Boyd to Bundanon for the first time since their creation in 1984 as a commission for the new Arts Centre Melbourne.
The exhibition also brings together over 60 works by seminal Australian artists from the same time Boyd created this momentous body of work. The exhibition provides a window into a period of cultural dynamism in Australia, when ideas of landscape, land ownership and environmental protection were actively interrogated.
