main conference abstracts & biographies - University of New South ...

Educator’s Association, NSW (VADEA). She continues to advocate against the
Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s (ACARA) proposals for the Arts
identifying how they diminish expectations for learning and teaching in the Visual
Arts and other artforms.
LOUISE FOWLER-SMITH
Changing Perceptions –the new Land/Eco Art, ILIRI and the Creative Laboratory
What is Experimental Art and how does it relate to the most pressing issues of the
21 st century? Many would consider the most important global issue of our time to
revolve around the problems caused by Climate Change. My paper explores
what artists are contributing to the debate that searches for possible solutions,
and asks if the artist can change the way society perceives in order to change
how we live on the planet? My talk will look at the new (and experimental)
Environmental Art Movement that is occurring globally, with some specific
examples in the USA, Europe and Asia.
As Director of ILIRI I will also talk about collaboration with Engineers to explore my
initiative of building with water retaining walls (The water tank house) or junk
bricks, the establishment of the Creative Laboratory for experimental Land/Art
projects at the UNSW Fowlers Gap Research Station and the Art, Environment
and Sustainability Hub proposed for Broken Hill.
BIOGRAPHY
Louise Fowler Smith is Senior Lecturer at the College of Fine Arts UNSW and
Director of ILIRI which aims to promote new ways of perceiving the land in the
21 st century. She has established the ILIRI ‘Creative Laboratory’ – a large area of
land at Fowlers Gap where artists, architects, scientists - people concerned with
the environment – can collaborate on projects that explore new ways of
perceiving, interacting and living in a land starved of water.
Her work focuses on notions of perception and in the belief that how we
perceive and contemplate the land affects how we treat the land, and
ultimately how we live within it. She believes that we are less likely to honour and
respect the land if we see it as separate from ourselves. This perception remains
pertinent irrespective of how the land is ideologically managed across cultural
divides.
As an environmentally concerned artist, the most recent work of Louise Fowler-
Smith focuses on the veneration of trees, a subject she was drawn to not only for
the magnitude of its environmental significance, but its universal and panreligious
symbolic importance.
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