Find a Fine Arts supervisor
Fine Arts academic staff have a wealth of experience and expertise in their research.
Jon Bywater
Jon is a Pākehā critic who writes about art and music with a particular interest in politics and place. His writing has addressed contemporary art in a broad range of media and artistic modes appearing in journals including Afterall, art-agenda, Artforum, Art New Zealand, Contemporary HUM, Frieze and Reading Room, and several monographs and exhibition catalogues.
Research areas
- Contemporary art
- Art criticism
- Artist-run initiatives
- Large-scale periodic exhibitions
- Art identified with Aotearoa New Zealand in a globalising art world
- Tino rangatiratanga / Indigenous sovereignty
- Theory for creative practice
James Cousins
James works to prise open new sets of critical possibilities for painting. Unique to his approach is a practice that builds upon processes connected to post-minimalism and contemporary painting, mapping a convergence of figurative and abstract modes of representation.
Recent ideas exploring forming of painting as a space of transmission have opened new terrains - spaces that seek to demonstrate a new phenomenology of information transfer via a re-enactment and relocation of recycled images in different places and times.
Lisa Crowley
Lisa is a lecturer whose practice concentrates on both photography and moving image. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Lisa’s practice draws on diverse lineages of feminist practice. These different strands of thought, spanning the scientific, the mystic and the creative, share an understanding of the natural world through embodied and speculative orientations.
Research areas
- Photography
- Film
- Video
- Installation
- Feminist new materialisms
- Analogue / film based materialities and their relationship to materialist subjectivities
Gavin Hipkins
Gavin has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally over the last two decades, working primarily in expanded photographic series.
Research areas
- Contemporary fine arts
- Photography and experimental film, including landscape traditions and postcolonial theory
- Digital montage and discourses of hybridity
- Photo and filmic experimental narrative structures
Dr Lucille Holmes
Lucille Holmes, PhD, is a cultural theorist, writer, psychoanalyst and senior lecturer with long-term experience in doctoral supervision. She currently supervisors PhD and Doctor of Fine Arts projects in a diverse range of artistic and theoretical frameworks.
Research areas
- Artistic research
- Relationships of ethics and aesthetics
- Applications of psychoanalytic theory to visual art practices
Dr Simon Ingram
Simon has developed a way to build on and collaborate with abstract problems inherent to both painting history and science's attempts to plot living systems and cosmic radiation.
More recently he has extended this by disrupting the technical-aesthetic framework central to his approach.
Dr Sean Kerr
Dr Sean Kerr is a practicing artist specialising in Real-time 3d, VR and interactive technologies. Sean has produced two books: Bruce is in the Garden, So Someone is in the Garden, and Pop. Both were published by Clouds publishing.
Research areas
- Investigating the emerging area of new media technologies from the perspective of their interactive potential
- Creative practice projects including real-time 3d, VR, MR and AR, physical computing, internet art, installation and sonic works
- These projects pursue interactive relationships that occur as audience, artist and technology interfaced in a complex dynamic
- View Sean's website of research work
Alex Monteith
Research areas
- Aotearoa surfing culture
- acrobatic/stunt flight
- helicopter alpine search and rescue flight
- motorcycle culture
Performance art issues are explored in relationship to contemporary cultural activities that are radically sensitive to geography. Within adrenalin and speed sports-genres, relationships of technology to the body, technology to territory and action to site are explored, including implications of on-board video culture.
Associate Professor Peter Robinson
Peter is an internationally acclaimed artist whose research interests include installation, sculpture, painting and art education theory and practice.
His recent work investigates both the materiality and metaphoric potential of his chosen medium. Whether it is the massive weightless volume of polystyrene forms or the densely contracted materiality of felt, Peter's sculptural propositions play out various oppositions such as density and lightness, dispersion and compression.
Associate Professor Peter Shand
Peter is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts. He has wide experience in public service in the creative sector as well as a long-standing record of publication and curation in his areas of research.
Research areas
- Contemporary art
- Contemporary fashion theory
- Art and law
- Cultural Heritage
- Copyright
Jim Speers
Jim's work involves documentary filmmaking. Most recently Jim directed a documentary focused on rural Japan. Through his Field Recordings project, Jim has also worked with a collective of Chinese and New Zealand artists who produce Chinese language documentary artworks which are exhibited internationally. Jim's ongoing interest lies in the presentation of culture within everyday life, and the difficulties generated by cross-cultural communication.
Research areas
- Documentary filmmaking
- Sculpture and installation
Dr Ruth Watson
Ruth Watson’s research focuses on the relations of place and representation, especially the image of the world as constructed by cartography.
Research areas
- Video installation
- Sculpture
- Painting
- History of cartography relating to cordiform maps of the sixteenth century
Tara Winters
Tara has a background in graphic design and has worked as a freelance designer for many years in the areas of print and interactive media. Tara's work takes a critical gaze over the various forms of teaching and learning practices occurring in contemporary art and design education. Recent work includes the development of a structure for facilitating meta-learning in art and design education, and a system for helping international students in the creative arts with orienting to a new academic context.
Research areas
- Fluid and dynamic forms of representation offered by digital technologies
- Art and design pedagogy
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