The Ian Potter Museum of Art Miegunyah Student Project Award 2018
The Ian Potter Museum of Art offers six competitive awards of $2000 each for small projects focused on the Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Collection. The Ian Potter Museum of Art Miegunyah Student Project Award scheme aims to give students experience in working in an interdisciplinary context with a significant and extensive material and visual culture collection. In recognition of the changing face of academic engagement these projects also give students the opportunity to think about how to share their research with a range of audiences and make use of multiple modes of distribution.
The Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Collection is varied, reflecting Russell Grimwade’s own interests as a collector, an industrialist, chemist, and entrepreneur, with a fascination with early Melbourne history in particular. It includes many works of art in various media, including decorative arts, drawings and prints, furniture, paintings, photographs, prints and textiles. Recipients of the Award may choose to research a single artwork from The Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Collection, or a small group of works.
Outcomes of each project, developed across semester two 2019, will include an 800-1000 word written summary of the research strategy and findings, and a 20-30 minute public presentation at the Ian Potter Museum of Art focussing on research outcomes.
As this project is designed to reflect the intersection between material/visual culture collections and the wide range of academic disciplines at the University of Melbourne, the outcomes of the project will take a forms that are directly relevant to each student’s principal discipline and there is latitude for a variety of approaches within the broad framework of written, in-person and digital productions. Project outcomes will be linked to the Potter website, related to Academic Programs.
‘I appreciated the opportunity to explore the Grimwade collection. After working closely with its artefacts I was surprised and humbled, they provide a unique perspective on Australian history and should be continuously investigated.’ – Student feedback
2018 Recipients:
Katja Wagner – Architecture
The Grimwades’ Miegunyah: an architectural palimpsest
Wey Yao Wong – Botany
Scientific curation with Grimwade’s Eucalypts
Luna Mrozik Gawler – Creative Writing
Ecologies of silence – an exploration of ‘storied matter’ in colonial Australia, using natural specimens from the collection as stimuli
Catherine Gay – History
‘All life and usefulness’: Girls and needlework in late nineteenth-century Victoria
Cathleen Rosier – Art History
Re-carving life: Indigenous artists and the practice of carved emu eggs in the early twentieth century
Laura di Blasi – Creative Writing
Searching for identity – How do we negotiate our identities within a nation that possesses multiple histories?