We had a blockbuster lecture lined up for Wednesday 19th May 2021, Professor Simone Douglas, daughter of our honourable member John Douglas VK2ZWD.

Watch video of lecture on VK2MB-TV

Check out Professor Douglas’ details here: https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty/simone-douglas/

Professor Simone Douglas will talk about her art + science project Ice Boat. Situated near Broken Hill and 7 years in R&D, Ice Boat will manifest as a 35metre long boat made of ice on the ancient bed of a prehistoric Australian  ocean visible from space. As Ice Boat melts over the course of a month, it tilts toward the heat of the sun, following its arc across the sky and reforming into a “sea” of water. 

Ice Boat involves the local Land Council, the wider outback community (park rangers, local tradespeople), the scientific community (glaciologists, meteorologists), structural and environmental engineers. Ice Boat will be built using a sustainable-energy  strategy, utilising strategies such as solar, melt-water capture and repurposing of materials used in the build. 

The project will also result in bilateral exchange and educational outcomes through mentorships provided for Broken Hill high school students and American and Australian university students building international  institutional research links and regional education centers.

Let’s have a great turnout for this exciting lecture. Something different to inspire us.

Simone DOUGLAS 

Professor Simone Douglas has over two decades of developing, testing and enabling ideas, across a broad range of critical and community contexts, and across some seven universities including the University of Sydney and the University of NSW. 

Fundamental to Douglas’ work is the advocacy and advancement of art towards our collective future. At Parsons School of Design, The New School in NYC where she is tenured faculty, she was the director of the MFA Fine Arts program ahead of becoming a full professor. Douglas has been invited to lead projects internationally including for; Tsinghua University, Beijing; and the Koln International School of Design (KISD), Koln. These have taken place in locations from the Gobi Desert Inner Mongolia, to Central Australia.

Douglas has an extensive international career and her works have been curated into international survey exhibitions and published widely in journals and art anthologies. Her work incorporates installation, photography, sculpture, video and durational site specific works. This ongoing commitment to the engagement with environment, inter- cultural dialogue facilitation and art as a medium that can instigate change, is the backbone of Douglas’ larger agenda within her practice.

Douglas’ works have been exhibited internationally at, and are held in, collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Her work has also been exhibited at including; Jane Lombard Gallery, Gallery MC (NYC); the Photographers Gallery (London); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney); the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Palour Projects (Athens NY), (Sydney), Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Beijing), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth NZ), Elam Project Space, The University of Auckland (Auckland),Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin), Athens Fine Art School (Delphi), and at art festivals such as the European Month of the Photo (Paris),The Auckland Festival of Photography and the Pingyao Festival of Photography.   

Her work has been published in journals including Artforum, Blind Spot, Conveyor (USA);  Creative Camera (U.K); and Art & Australia, Photofile, Qantas Spirit of Australia Inflight Magazine, (not only) black + white(Australia) , and art anthologies including, Look: Contemporary Australian Photography Since 1980, Anne Marsh (ed);  Photography: Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, Judy Annear (ed.); Animae: The Invisible Sources of the Artwork: Talks with Today’s Artists. Zachary Zachs writes of her work in Artforum

 ‘Simone Douglas’s Promise,…, an eleven-foot-long assemblage of yellow pine that resembles the skeleton of a giant beast picked clean, or the torn-open spine of a book. Its vertebration resounds, suggesting that a topology of variance in wood might be as articulate as any string of Latin letters’

Douglas’s wider career in the arts is broad reaching and extends to exhibitions, curating, writing, and editing books. As the first international Artist as Curator for the Auckland Festival, Douglas and curated the banner exhibition Home a year-long curatorial project involving artists from six countries in the Australasia-Pacific Region. She curated the international exhibitions, Endless Days and At The Edge of the Universe successively for the Pingyao International Festival for Photography (Pingyao) and All the Rivers Run for the Australian Consulate (NYC).  She was project director and curator on behalf of the Getty Conservation Institute and the Australian Museum for Picture Sydney: landmarks of a new generation at the Australian Museum and curator for the international exhibition Landmarks of a New Generation (Sydney, Mumbai, LA, Berlin, Cape Town), Sydney Olympic Arts Festival, Australian Museum. 

Douglas has been collaborating since 2014 across a series of international conferences, symposia, and publications Anywhere I – IV,  dedicated to publicly connecting diverse artistic activities taking place outside traditional exhibition circuits. Her co-edited book (with Dr. Sean Lowry and Dr. Adam Geczy) Where is Art?: Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art, will be published in2021 by Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies, Routledge: New York.