DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, awarded by Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, UK. The position was a fully funded Doctoral Collage studentship. Practice-led research title: Cinematic Experiments. MASTER OF ARTS, Interior Design, Faculty of Environmental Design and Construction, Royal Institute of Technology, Melbourne. DIPLOMA, Advanced Computer Applications for Theatre Design, Central School of Speech and Drama, London. Australia Council for the Arts professional development: Scenography at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design, London. Australia Council for the Arts professional development: SPECIAL RESEARCH FELLOW, in lighting design, Master’s Program, Yale School of Drama, New Haven Connecticut, U.S.A. Studied, BACHELOR OF ARTS (Visual Art), Film-making and New Art Studies, City Art Institute Sydney, Australia.

Current, Faculty, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India
Lecturer, BA cohort Lighting Design, Academy of Music and Performing Arts, Sydney, Australia. (2023/21)
Lecturer and Mentor MA, Program Solo/Dance/Authorship, University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. (2021/18)
Producer, International Centre for Choreography, working with Garry Stewart, Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre. (2021)

Director, Critical Path, a leading Choreographic Research Centre, Sydney, Australia. (2007/15)

Ongoing – self determined art, and design practice.

Current research: making with light – illuminating family violence, collaborations with my mother, contested spaces, interactive systems, and the value of art on display in public hospitals.

My multidisciplinary approach probes interrelationships between movement, devised spaces, and media technologies. Here, I often intersect real world spaces and computer generated and/or captured movement to explore film as a kinetic material. Another interest is using archival footage to abstract and challenge notions of general knowledge.

Sharing a fascination of moving image technologies with Soviet film director Dziga Vertov, I am curious about what the eye of the camera (e.g. perspective, scale, mobility) brings to the audience’s experience of the image. My work with the performative image also explores what Sergei Eisenstein, another prominent Soviet film director, called the ‘dynamic square’, a frame with malleable proportions that should be responsive to the needs of the artist. Like these maverick filmmakers my experimentation seeks flexibility and a potentially limitless number of modes of encounter between the viewer and the cinematic frame.

My approach to image creation argues against what theorist Ann Friedberg termed a ‘stabilized format for the film screen’ (2006). My consideration and treatment of real and virtual world devised space has its roots in notions illusions generated between transition e.g. framing in the theatre and cinema. For example, many of my works deploy darkness at the edge of a cinema frame like a theatrical wing. In this way I use illusionistic edges to bridge spatial and temporal worlds.

As an interdisciplinary Faculty at SMI, I enjoy teaching and mentoring students in course work, studios and workshops and elective programs. I teach across levels, from foundation to post graduate in Contemporary Arts Practice, Film, Experience Design, Digital Media Arts, and Industrial Arts and Design Practice. For example: Interim Dec 2023 2nd and 3rd years Moving Fields, co-facilitated with Sai Mulpuru.Starting with 60 interviews on the experience of migration, with residents of Yelahanka, the students interpreted these human stories. Responding to the emerging themes students interwove digital and analogue forms. The outcome, a site specific installation of combining moving image, kinetic, and sculptural installations aimed to create experiences that prompt the audience to engage with the human journey of migration and the vital role it plays in the development of the city. Experience Design workshop 2024 Master students. Rhapsody, the workshop explored the video-game as a prosocial artistic medium, which aesthetically addresses the challenging issues of intergenerational impact of family violence that manifest under the cultural radar. The video-game concept has a distinct intention to be thought-provoking for a diverse audience and empower players to act and to choose modes that challenge, rewrite and recreate their environment. General Studies 2024 2nd and 3rd years The influence of the expanded cinema movement and associated avant-garde movements coerced cinema off the screen and into the world. Critically, artists of this period explored what Sheldon Renan a scholar interested in American underground film calls ‘a new, radically heterogeneous cinema in [an] onslaught of new image-making and practices: video, television, computer graphics, multi-media, theatre light shows and so on’. This period can also be viewed as a transitional one where artists from other disciplines turned their attention to media art as a means of generating social change and going beyond and against boundaries.

In 2022/24, I facilitated a number two-week professional development workshop that introduce my Cinematic Experiments methodology to a mixed cohort of film and performance artist. We explore a hybrid of experimental film-making, performance and digital spaces.

Creative projects include two large-scale projection commissions by the Illuminate Adelaide Festival 2022.

One, Cacophony’, projected on a city restaurant façade, the images metaphorically peer through windows and listens to silence surrounding family violence. Two, a 25 min video track for a performance of Steve Reich’s ground-breaking Different Trains for String Quartet and Tape (1988). The video wall incorporates multiple image loops drawn from my woman with a movie camera 16 mm archive, and newly generated 2D and 3D images.

In 2021 I curated, A Way of Being an intimate retrospective of art by my mother, Pru La Motte (1928-2020). Pru was an intrepid Australian feminist artist and craftswoman. The retrospective brought together her creative works from the 1960s to the 2000s and included a new experimental digital archive, I made of Pru’s work in 1970s. In 2021, I also collaborated with Julianne Peirce, on Wear the Light, a creative project exploring light as a wearable medium. We created night cloths for roving performances.

In Local Sites (2020), I explored a series of contentious and undefined spaces. I asked questions about how these spaces of indeterminacy can become sites for actions and events. The exploration was supported by OSCA, Open Space Contemporary Arts, Projects of The Everyday commissioning program.