 We're here to celebrate that we're still standing at the end of 2020 and Particularly to celebrate women in the arts I'm Fiona Jenkins. I'm the convener of the A&E Gender Institute. I think I know a lot of you in the audience actually So welcome to this celebration. We're recording this not on Zoom. We're making a recording that we can put on a website And I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we meet on the beautiful land of the Ngunnawal and Namburi people and pay my respects to their elders and I'm extremely pleased that a very distinguished elder The wonderful Dr. Matilda house is here to give us all a welcome to her country. Thank you Matilda Have you got a mic? Hello, can you hear me up there? Yeah Well, here we are. I want to thank you all for being here this afternoon on this lovely day to you know to have this cherished things that we have about women in the arts and of course some From the time we are born We're doing something even if it's making mud pies because at the end of the day we're challenging ourselves for the future and I want to welcome you here to the land of my ancestors and to thank you very much for the honor and the privilege and To thank you all for being here today And I don't know the names of these beautiful ladies. You know, they may not like let me call them beautiful She's shaking her head like mad But anyways, I will I do acknowledge them and thank them very much for having me here today and To always say, you know, what a wonderful world we live in when we know that women are leading the way Right across the board, but when we talk about women in arts, it's a big step forward Because all the years that have gone by and my favorite woman in the arts was Maria Callas and I Every year Myself and my other two friends. We have a Maria Callas day We do our hair eyebrows Lipstick our beautiful red lipstick and we have flowers around us And we have a beautiful lunch to celebrate Maria Callas And I think people should look back and think of how women in those days Struggled to get to do the things and to hear and be what they wanted to be and I and she's my hero because she did go through such a lot and Always maintained her dignity and I'm quite sure you all have your own little heroes, but she was mine and I just thought I'd share that with you. I Hope he's agree with me about her because I Have portraits of her all around my place Or well big ones and little ones all around the place and my granddaughters They asked me about her and When I explained to them, but anyways, I got a book I found down a dreadful honor and It was all in Mexico So when they got basic man, didn't you look at it or just did you look at the picture? I was at all I don't know. Well, we'll have to find someone who can speak Mexican or Spanish and We'll have a good. I'll read But to this day and for years and years not just because of last few years or whatever But we've been celebrating Maria Callas Every year we don't go without it For a very special woman and of course you would have your own heroes Shake your heads. Yeah Yeah, I Can't stand up much because I've got a Fallen apart actually Fractured my shoulder and my hip as well. So I'm just happy to be here today to celebrate women in the arts and To always maintain The wonderful wonderful struggles that we all had and with the help of the guys Where would we be without them? Any here today? There you go All it takes is one going mate and That's what we love to celebrate all together So thank you very much everyone for being here today. Do you mind if I just sit here? I can't get up there and I'm Really appreciate you being here. So thank you very much and welcome here to Nambri Nanawalan on the land of my ancestors black Harry and the crew. Thank you Thank you so much Thank you Matilda and This is one of the images of from the gallery one of the works in the gallery National Gallery of Australia Know my name exhibition And of course one of the first things you'll actually see as you walk into that Exhibition is a wonderful portrait of this lady Matilda house and it's made by Brenda Croft who's in the School of Art here and it's very very impressive The whole exhibition is an absolutely stunning collection of art by Australian women artists and We wanted our celebration here today to salute this work alongside the Special exhibition the here I am exhibition. That's that's currently being curated at the AMU So you there's a gallery upstairs. It's got more Incredible works and there's a fabulous outdoor exhibition as well So we wanted to celebrate all of that and I think one of the things to recall here is that the the challenges for Women artists in breaking into the sort of recognition that's represented by being shown in the National Gallery is Just as bad as the kind of challenges faced by women in science, perhaps it's even worse I think we tend to talk more about women in science and less about women in art, but the the issues are very real and Significant so Go see the know my name exhibition. It is fantastic. It's really stunning eye-opening exhibition and Yes, it's centered around women artists, but there's nothing uniform about the kind of vision That that represents and I was trying to think about well What you know what did distinguish it and there is a really interesting feeling of the kind of absence of the male gaze That is such a prevalent feature of traditional art exhibition. It's it's a very different fresh feel to the gallery space and another thing I think that was quite striking was the sort of Crafts the things that are called crafts because they're women's work, you know shell work and beading and Weaving of various kinds. They're all represented in the gallery And I think what it shows is what these are as kind of undervalued traditions because they're seen as as women's work So There are those kind of themes but aside from that the art speaking of so many things is speaking about Environmental destruction the feeling of falling through the air The sense of bodies in and with space the sort of respect for land and landscape that I think Is such an important aspect of this this body of work It's a dislocating exhibition in many ways, but it's also I would say a kind of reinstating Exhibition it's very exciting and very worth seeing and I think it's art. That's really apt for our difficult times So for me this celebration is a bit of a book end to 2020 at the start of the year we had indigenous artist Julie Goff and political theorist Bonnie Honick speaking as our guests at a workshop that I organized with Des Mandeson under the title constitutional imaginaries and that was really about the way in which art can Disturb and disrupt and refound a sense of political order And we actually managed to hold it in one of the three weeks that were more or less normal at the start of 2020 So he felt very lucky there But one of the things that this Workshop was focused on was that it was the really important very powerful role that art plays in Negotiating all the difficult complex often violent national histories that we live with and Julie Goff's work obviously excels at this And I just wanted to include one image that I gather is coming later In there's a sort of phase two of the know my name exhibition There's there's a lot more they want to show and that's coming up. I think in 2021 so This is her work chase Where she placed this kind of thicket of tea tree sticks In the midst of the gallery and I've seen this work and it's incredibly pungent. There's a smell of the tea tree And inside this thicket there are these kind of scraps of cloth and material that you can tell has been some sort of violent chase That's taken place and of course the other wonderful thing about this work is the way it's placed in relation to the picture of Captain Cook founding, you know claiming the land and It makes that You know it obscures your vision of that it makes that a perplexing kind of image It places us into a relation with the the kind of violence that that entailed and I think it's a brilliant example of the ways in which a Lot of contemporary indigenous art is dealing in extraordinarily powerful ways with the whole theme of what we might mean by Acknowledgement and so to circle back to that that question of how we actually make acknowledgement I think is really beautifully manifested in some of this work that very difficult question so Any gender institute this year we've had a quite a difficult year like everybody But out of it in fact has emerged just by chance really a very strong Focus on the arts and we wanted to showcase that in this closing panel for the year and It's gender institutes very much about the members who come to us with ideas and creative thoughts about what they want to Do and our small grants are enabling, you know just fantastic work. So really today is about showcasing that work and We've cast it as as projects that are with as and about creative women in the arts and Alison older who will speak first I'll introduce all the panelists and then we can have their presentations but Alison is a printmaker in the School of Art and Design and her project still waiting for two Tomorrow which we help to fund is an investigation of graphic works from the past Together with the creation of new artworks to visualize a reimagined female future and Alison actually also has two works in the know my name exhibition, which is very exciting So I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the works that you've collected and made The next two projects come from a special call for applications that we put out midway through the year on the theme of gender and COVID-19 And I guess we weren't expecting to see such a strong focus on art in in the projects that came through but it was really great to see that because of course there's all sorts of ways in which art is important at these times and Julianne LeMond Together with her research team has been working for quite a while to monitor Women's presence and progression in literary publishing in collaboration with the stellar prize and Her project asks what happens to women's voices during a pandemic so exploring the impact of COVID-19 on women writers in Australia Bonnie McConnell is a ethnographer in the School of Music Her project looks at women's musical networks and communication and social support in African responses to COVID-19 And this year we've had a very special focus on early career Researches because we felt this was a very important time put in some extra support and Bonnie has been part of a group That we've dubbed the ECR incubator which Margaret Jolly has been generously facilitating Alongside Anna Ropak who also has been participating in that mentoring group And has a wonderful project and is from the School of Art and Design And her project standards stars is a very one of the very interesting projects that shows the intersections the really productive intersections of art and science that I think are Very number of these projects at ANU which are very interesting So Anna is is working with Drawings of what you'll tell you about it. I don't know I'm telling you about it So our final speaker is Lillian Smyth from the College of Health and Medicine also part of a team From the art school Who've been running an interdisciplinary workshop on visual art human anatomy and research processes? And this is again an incredible project that's been awarded by the ANU for its its innovation as a program So looking forward to hearing more about that Okay, so there'll be some time for Q&A after the panel, but we'll hear from everyone about their work first of all Alison, would you like to go first? Thank you. Thank you so much I'd also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Numburi people Thank You Matilda and also acknowledge the UN people where my studio situated out near Bradwood This is a research project still waiting for tomorrow. It's Basically, I'm analysing artwork printed on to 20th century ephemera With a name to animate the history of women's activism to imagine an optimistic and resilient future through the development of new creative work based on this This this research so graphics embedded Ontoprinted ephemera during times of social change Provide valuable insights into how women agitated for change and put forward new ideas Regarding what a positive future may look like and as we look at a world-facing climate induced catastrophe global pandemics and weakening democratic processes all of which negatively impact upon women It becomes important to share these cultural products and their and their strategies recontextualized through contemporary art so my own background is a is as a political poster maker from sort of the early 1980s and that's sort of the start of my interest in this work So let's show you some of them. So this this work behind me The impetus for this idea came from this work actually that I found in the Tom and Mary Wright collection held in the button archives here at the ANU Which I thought was prescient regarding the world today. So a new deal for women which was published in 1944 portrays a family looking out from their home onto a new dawn Which I think is pretty relevant and able to be adapted in this new isolationist world that we're living in now And I'll just quickly go through some of the other images. So these are two Ones from 1929 and ones from 1941. So I thought, you know, there's the one from 1929 the militant women of Australia I thought was so amazing in that the typography is sort of so minimalist and so sort of restrained and yet the arguments that they put forward are so strong and I just love that sort of dissonance between the typography and the Work So the production of posters placards and flies over the 20th century Generated and supported activist communities with low-cost do-it-yourself methods of production Which enabled productive discourse between groups outside of the male-centred mainstream and This cultural production in my opinion opens up new avenues of thinking and as historian Michelle Arrow writes Provides a way of imagining national belonging outside of the framework of efficiency and productivity Which I also think is interesting in these times, especially at the School of Art and Design at the moment This asserts assertion. So if you look at these works is most evidence in the contemporary resurgence of placards and used in situ and subsequently online as potent methods of communication So the ephemeral occasional fancival prosaic and at times mundane printed images found in the archive Provide a variety of perspectives developed during times of social unrest change and anxiety And these cultural products These cultural products and their strategies provide clues for action today through not only their militancy, but also their humor The works do not aim to neutralize the real Revolutionary thinking of past generations, but to continue and enhance the legacy of truth-telling and Idealism whose power in these works. I believe is still palpable. I'd love to know what every woman should know But I'll have to make it up myself This work I'll just show you Another one. So this is sort of from my own era. This is from Francis Button who worked in Matilda graphics Her work is actually in a feature in the no my name exhibition at the moment She's the woman who I've written about in the no my name catalogue who did the amazing vulva with the plastic zipper Crochet doily. It's an amazing piece of work and she was also instrumental in the women's domestic needlework group which produced an exhibition called the doily show which Just catapulted a whole different idea of how women's work is undervalued and that we should look at what our own Interests are and what we make and that they also tell stories. So that's one of Francis's work as she was making a living as a graphic designer And then there's this one which I think is a real cracker. So if you look at the at the text, it's got you know Grizzly stories in Canberra and it's got a thing about Brazil and then you know that could be Trump They're in the pink, you know over on the left So I mean I think these images are really interesting and and great to look at in terms of how we're seeing ourselves now and that we could For one thing is that we see these image images and not a lot has changed But in other ways we have to keep working and it's through these activist communities and groups and this low-cost work that I believe we can do that And then finally, thank you for Chris to Chris Wallace over here for this slogan, which I think is particularly apt Yeah, share the load share the power share the reward. Thank you very much everybody She knows I'm coming up to see her She didn't even get up to say hello Matilda here. I am. I worked with her father 30 years ago He was my friend and the most loveliest person that I could ever meet and I Want to say to you Allison You know, I hadn't forgotten you, but I am a bit blind as well. I Want to say to you. Thank you so much For your family for what you have done for my family. I really really appreciate it And I want to thank you so much for that. Thank you. Thank you But that's of knowing that family for over 30 years. We walked Namibia National Park We could circle around Canberra Over a hundred thousand times with her father leading us the way. Thank you. Great memories Thanks, Allison Julian, thanks very much. Oh, and it's great to be here So this project looks at what happens when a field of national artistic inquiry Our activity is undergoing real change in relation to gender inequality But then undergoes another major realignment due to a global health and economic crisis So we're asking what happens to feminist gains during a pandemic. Are we back at square one? How might we shore up what has been achieved? So we're looking at the field of women's writing and thinking about whose voices are heard and valued in the Australian public sphere When we talk about writers here, we're talking about creative writers. So fiction and poetry We're looking at playwrights. We're looking at literary critics So people who write about books in newspapers and magazines and literary studies academics So who write about and teach books in academic contexts? And this is a body of people who make up our literary culture who shape who we read what we value and how we think about it So historically in Australia as elsewhere women have had less access to the avenues that enable their work to Reach a reading public, especially book reviews. But that is something that has begun to shift So I think it's a little known fact that since 2015 the A&U Gender Institute has been Supporting and collaborating on a research project that has made a real and measurable impact on the gender equality of the Australian literary Landscape and that project is the cell account So it all started in 2010 when the US-based feminist literary organization VEDA Women in Literary Arts Started looking at the prestigious publications that published the kind of review that can make a writer's career And they found that the books being reviewed in these publications were overwhelmingly written by men So they started collecting statistics and publishing their results and in Australia in 2012 the newly funded feminist literary non-profit The Stella Prize Was wondering whether the situation in Australia was the same. So they started counting too and found that indeed it was So this was the results from the first Stella count So red is a me is books by men being reviewed and blue is the books by women So in 2013 my colleague Melinda Harvey and I started working with the Stella count And we said what if we asked more detailed questions not just about whether gender bias exists But how it's working in these publications So we started asking questions like was the proportion of men and women receiving the long group high profile reviews that really boost a writer's career And unsurprisingly men male writers were receiving most of them and in 2015 We received a grant from the Gender Institute to get some ANU students involved in this project So making connections with the Stella Prize with the literary world in Melbourne and participating in public events like this one So we so these these interns also use this work then to think about their own research projects around gender and literature So we've now run two sets of internships The photo on the left is a lesson to all short people when you're being photographed with tall people We have now run two sets of these internships and The second time around the number of applicants increased fourfold and when we were reading the applications It was just this moment of just being inspired by these young women who are at ANU these students We have a real interest and engagement with questions of gender and the literary sphere gender and culture here at ANU So we kept counting and things began to change So this is the representation of women authors in Australia's review pages from when the count began to the last count from 2018 The 2019 counts been delayed because of COVID So in the first still account in 2012 only one of the 12 publications countered had reached yet Had was that gender parity in the representation of men and women in its pages in the last count nine of the 12 had Reached parity and one of them the Fairfax papers is very nearly there. So we went across the period of this project We've gone from a situation Where gender inequality was to the norm to now gender equity in book reviews is now no longer the exception But it is the norm But then this unusually happy story about about gender equity was interrupted by a global pandemic With its impact as you all know, you don't need to see these headlines felt Felt disproportionately by women who've borne the brunt of job losses and increased caring responsibilities It's also the COVID-19 has also ravaged the art sector in Australia And as you all know has had a dramatic impact on university budgets, especially for contracting casual staff and initial findings are also There's these studies are beginning to emerge here where we've seen COVID impact had a gendered impact in terms of research productivity and submission rates From the point of view of Australia's literary sector It's really important to recognize that academic research and teaching in literary studies In in academia is deeply intertwined with public literary cultures So the concurrent impacts of COVID on both university and public and publishing sectors is really significant for our literary culture So before the pandemic Australia's writers were already financially precarious But now their main sources of income the publication of their work in newspapers and magazines literary journalism And casual university teaching have all been placed under threat So Australian writer Gail Jones said in a piece in the Guardian last week Writers incomes are disastrously low $12,900 a year on average and COVID-19 has eliminated other forms of supplementary income So for playwrights Productions have been cancelled, commissions have dried up for novelists and their publishers The main avenues to promote and sell new books So illiterate festivals, tours, book launches and events have largely disappeared And recent Australian Society of Authors survey found that one of the major impacts is actually the cancellation of event of workshop events So in libraries schools and universities and writers often really rely on these to make to make to make an income So we're in a situation where the entire university and literary sectors in Australia are undergoing this major Realignment and we don't yet know what they will look like when we come out the other side or even to something like COVID normal Whatever that will mean. I don't really know but So is it going to be a culture in which women's voices are heard and valued? So what we're seeking to do with this project is to track some indices of women writers access to the public sphere Before during and after the height of the pandemic So from 2019 to 2022 to understand what its impact will be on the gender equality of our literary culture So to do this I'm working with critic and scholar from Manish University Melinda Harvey The Ethel Tori lecturer in drama here at ANU Rebecca Claude and one of our wonderful PhD students Alice Grundy And we're we're collecting data about gender and publication across Australian newspapers magazines online and academic journals And creative journals like these and this slide is purely just to show you how beautiful their covers are To understand the impact of COVID-19 on the ability of women writers to reach audiences And on the gender equality of Australia's literary cultures more broadly. Thanks Thank you, Julianne We're just going to sanitize the clicker in between. We've got COVID rules up here. Thank you. My praise All right, it's great to be here and hear about these this amazing work I really want to thank the gender institute for this opportunity and also The ECR incubator program, which has been amazing. It's great to be a part of this through interdisciplinary really supportive network Um, so my current research is looking at how COVID-19 is affecting women's musical performance practices This is a multi-sided project Quite an ambitious project in Gambia Tanzania and in Australia But i'm focusing today just on a few themes that are coming out of the african-based research And this project is ongoing. So these are kind of some preliminary findings right now and the project is Being conducted in collaboration with partners in Tanzania in the Gambia Dr. Kenman Mapana from the University of Dar es Salaam and the Chalmino Arts Council Bubadabo and the Gambia Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and the National Center for Arts and Culture So this is very much a partnership So i've been doing work in the Gambia and Tanzania for over 15 years now Looking at music and the current project is extending this long-term research to explore the impact of the pandemic on women And we found that reactions to COVID-19 have reinforced gendered forms of inequality and stigmatization And these are familiar patterns in responses to other diseases such as HIV AIDS and Ebola At the same time the pandemic has also inspired new forms of connection and solidarity across social and geographic distance So we're exploring these seemingly contradictory dynamics the way the pandemic divides us and also brings us closer together in new ways And music provides a unique lens through which to understand some of this complexity And the changes to our creativity and social relations that we see emerging at the current moment Some of these will likely be short-lived, but others We expect will endure into the future So it's really important to understand what is happening in terms of these changes to musicality and sociality In a comparison of the Gambia and Tanzania Enables us to consider diversity in the way that performers are responding to the pandemic And to examine perspectives that are missing from dominant narratives about music and COVID-19 And also forms of music that Tend to have less prestige and less attention placed on them despite their significance within communities Musical performance practices are highly complex and diverse both within and across these research sites In addition, these two countries have had very different public health responses So the Gambia has been praised for its rapid response to the disease While Tanzania's government has been widely criticized for suppressing information about the virus But our focus is primarily on the artistic impacts and responses So some initial findings First of all the pandemic restrictions have inspired changes to the creative process For example, many of the community-based groups that we're working with have had to shift from a collective compositional approach Where music is composed in a large ensemble setting To a more hierarchical model where one or two people compose pieces and then teach them to others in a small group setting And for many groups that are used to performing in close proximity to one another They find this kind of approach To rehearsal and performance very unsatisfactory Physical closeness is very much part of the participatory music experience the sound And the overall event So not being able to come together in this way fundamentally changes music making At the same time for others It has opened up new opportunities. So particularly for more high-profile commercially successful performers They've been able to disseminate their music through social media to access new audiences to engage in new kinds of collaborations But for many of the community-based groups This is not an option or these these kinds of opportunities are much more limited And groups have also experienced changes in the sense of social connection associated with music making In the absence of restrictions music events and rehearsals are seen very much as social activities They create a sense of social connection and support for participants So not being able to play music together has magnified a sense of social isolation And for some people They've been able to maintain connections through social media through phone through text messages and sharing music through these Formats as well, but for others their access to these kinds of Communication is limited So we see a disparity in the way that the pandemic is affecting different groups with women particularly impacted Due to factors such as limited access to technology poor internet connectivity Lack of income to buy phone data and higher rates of illiteracy which make it harder to engage with social media And many people have experienced increased economic stress due to a lack of opportunities to perform And the broader economic challenges of the pandemic and particularly the reduction in truism So some music groups have worked together to support Their most vulnerable members So when someone is experiencing extreme hardship other group members collect small donations and then deliver it to the family That is in difficulty. So these musical networks are also social support networks And in terms of the repertoire that is being produced during this period We've seen a proliferation of songs relating to covid 19 and these take different forms So some songs include very detailed health information about how to prevent the spread of the virus Other songs focus on ways we can cope during crisis So these include our religious messages from christian or muslim perspectives or messages of social support and love in the face of crisis And this repertoire builds on established approaches in these regions where women's songs have long served as a resource for navigating change and uncertainty Of creating a sense of social support and communicating lifesaving information So in other words the performers that we're working with in both countries do not see their work as solely entertainment The musical practices in tanzania and the gambia Are highly complex with significant diversity in musical features and social contexts of performance At the same time the responses to covid 19 reflect a shared view of musical performance as a resource for social support For collective action and dissemination of information So these are themes that we're continuing to explore In this research, which is ongoing To end i'd like to play an excerpt of a song In the wrong direction An excerpt of a song from the yati group in ansali village in tanzania So this song that we'll hear is in the nindo style. The style used to be associated with gatherings Called by local chiefs where they would disseminate information to local residents Since the 1970s this nindo style has been adapted for a variety of entertainment and communication contexts It features the distinctive wagogo vocal harmonies and the vocal techniques and women's dancing style that's characteristic of this region So the song that we'll hear is in the kiswahili language And it calls on all tanzanians to work together To follow the advice of health workers to prevent the spread of covid 19 through good hygiene and physical distancing Could you press play on that? Thanks everyone. I'll stop there. Thank you bonnie. It's so nice to have music included as well. Um So ana rapic is going to tell us about her projects. Yeah Why thank you Thanks everyone. Um, so um today i'll be talking about um A project that i'm making as part of a research project a research fellowship at the museum of applied arts and sciences in sythene I'm an artist. I work with traditional and new media including drawing moving image Digital media and interactive installation And I think this project is a good example of how I bring all of those elements together so I want I went to the museum wanting to explore mixed reality as a digital storytelling technique in relation to museum objects particularly narratives related to the process of recording and observing Meteorological and astronaut astronomical events in australian history. Sorry i'm getting my words mixed up I began by looking at objects such as measurement devices and first-hand descriptions of weather conditions and natural phenomena particularly searching for parts Of the collection that linked scientific concepts to personal stories And I came across the astrographic catalog, which was a global scientific endeavor to map the sky in the 19th and early 20th century As part of this international project women played an important role By working as star measures in the sydney melbourne and perth observatories from 1890 to 1964 Their job was to take the measurements of the astrographic plates that the male astronomers Created at night in the observatories and calculate information including the position and magnitudes of stars across the relevant sky sections for each observatory So I was interested in the astrographic catalog for several reasons The women weren't sufficiently recognized for their contribution at the time And it also provides an interesting insight into this shift from qualitative to quantitative methods of observation and representation As photography took over from manual processes and that's something i'm interested in my work generally So at the museum and at sydney observatory, I looked at the type catalogs written Notebooks glass plates and the measuring machines that were involved in the astrographic catalog And I was particularly drawn to the handwritten log books that contain these long form calculations scribbled notes crossed out Errors and also importantly the signatures of these women These marks capture a materiality of both human labor and technological development that came together through the astrographic catalog And also represents processes and identities that became lost in the official typed catalogs So i'm making a physical installation and a virtual experience based on this that Reanimates the women's handwriting and illuminates their work by focusing on their signatures In the installation Which this is some work in progress for the installation here The women's handwriting is laser etched onto the surface of circular double-sided mirrors that will mechanically rotate And be lit in ways that reflect the writing into the dark and space around them It references mirrors in Telescopes as well as the intimacy of a makeup mirror and also alludes to fundamental elements of astronomy such as Cycles orbits and the motion of light and shadow And there's also an important interplay between visibility and invisibility By etching away the reflective surface I'm allowing the absence of the women's drawn marks to emerge to deliberately amplify the invisibility of their original work To make the digital Version of the work. I intended to base this digital artwork on the structure of a star gazing app used to look at the sky That usually shows constellations appearing on the screen of a mobile phone But in my work, I wanted the real positions of the stars in the sky to be Layered with signatures of the women who mapped them for the astrographic catalog This approach aimed to use the technology made possible through the knowledge gained from their work to reinsert their names into that space So while I have basic skills in augmented reality, the agenda institute ground allowed me to work with a developer Peter Heyman to make something that wouldn't have otherwise been possible with my own skills These images show the first iteration of this work, which was a digital mock-up of the mirror installation Where the mirrors became search lights that spotlights that you could use to search a digital virtual sky for the signatures This work is showing more of a first prototype of the user's perspective Being able to use the mobile phone to search around a virtual space So just in terms of process while Peter was developing the app I've been working on the archival research data collection and making the drawn animations, which is what I'll go through briefly now So returning to the archives for a second time I began exploring how a sense of personality emerged through the logbooks in how the varying styles of handwriting Correspond to the signatures that I was looking for I also had conversations with researcher Tona Stevenson, who's written a great deal on the astrographic catalog and That was really helpful for my work And the astronomer at Sydney observatory Andrew Jacob about the scope of my project And like a lot of my projects, I realized that what I wanted to do was way too big I now had to scale it back a bit So a way I decided to do that was to represent the data according to the areas of sky captured in a photographic plate rather than trying to look at constellations, which were much smaller And by doing that, I was able to reduce the size of the project, but still encompass its aims That said, I might still have to reduce it more So basically where I'm up to now is data collection still and cross-referencing multiple sources of data To match those plate numbers with the women's signatures I'm doing this using a document or a few documents at the Sydney Observatory and the New South Wales State Archives That provide various information with plate numbers The minute books, which is the the bottom left image has really nice personal notes in it Such as one of them says Miss Alexander absent because she was ill in the morning and I really like finding gems like that within the logbooks And I'm also looking at the there's hundreds of Probably thousands of logbooks in boxes in the museum archives And I'm looking at as much as fat as I can and linking it all together in this epic spreadsheet So eventually this data will be fed into the Program This is the first prototype which shows how I'm using the Plate or the animation the drawn animation of the plate as a window into different views of the sky This example shows a parallax effect where when you look through the plate It gives a 3d view of a sky that you would otherwise see in a two-dimensional form And this Shows a build-up of those plates and I'm aiming to include more and more plates and as you explore this virtual space and walk up um, you can you'll see the signatures kind of building up which Would happen if you're in a virtual space exploring that night sky So one thing I'm excited about is the patterns that are emerging when the plates are positioned at the right Declination, which is their position in the sky Because the patterns are emerging with so this is showing because it's a ring that's representing The Sydney sky section because I'm working with the Sydney astrographic plates at this stage And there's also nice relationships of Emerging between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space when there's a build-up of these plates as well So the Yeah, I've got a lot to do on this stage still but one thing I'm hoping to do in the future is integrating sound and narratives of potentially women scientists or astronomers Working now reflecting on this narrative. Um, and I'll leave it there. Thank you Thanks so much Anna. So, um, lillian All right, did I turn the mic on successfully? Yes All right, so I'm the rogue scientist on today's panel and possibly paradoxically. I'm going to be talking about reintroducing women to the arts once we get some slides So I guess as some background The problem that we're looking to solve here is that young female academics tend to opt out of academia So there's my lovely title slide So basically what the literature suggests is that this actually boils down to fear So it's partly because of precarious employment. It's because of being systematically underpaid at every level of academia It's about an uneven distribution of familial responsibilities But basically women feel unsafe in academia and as a result they reduce their degree of creativity They don't take risks and they're not confident and because of this they actually typically end up opting out So this is a problem that we wanted to solve I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world where young female academics are opting out just because they're afraid So what we wanted to do was um build a series of workshops that helped young female academics in building their creativity and their work In building confidence and in building their publicity for risk taking So likely for me, I know a crack team of female academics who already have a course that runs along these lines for students So the course is bio 2222 which is more locally referred to as the exquisite course This team here is christina valter, lisa crossing and alex web and they want a really great course that integrates anatomy and visual art So the students actually learn both both disciplines alongside one another on equal footing by focusing on the human form So we've done some research on this course, which is how i'm involved because i'm a psychologist And we've done some research on this course and what we find is that the students actually do improve in terms of their creativity And in terms of their self perceptions of creativity they improve in confidence And they're much more willing to take risks in their work. And what they suggest that that's caused by is what we're calling structured uncertainty Which is basically a context where it's open and there are options But there are limits So you're not just kind of left in a free-for-all where you sort of panic and freeze up But actually we sort of structure and scaffold the way you deal with uncertainty And the second thing is the interdisciplinarity of it So dealing with different perspective different ways of looking different ways of thinking different ways of problem solving And finally what we're calling Defamiliarization, which is basically where they get to recognize familiar concepts in a different form So the number of science students who are astonished at the relationship between the iterative process of making art and hypothesis testing concept Every year they're flabbergasted and it actually helps in the way that they think about the way they might approach research So what we did was we tried to make series of workshops for young female academics So we didn't put a limit on what that means people got to self define That actually uses this paradigm for professional development So basically we based it around the human form partially because two of our team are anatomists and partially because of very good analog to the research process So i'm going to whisk through our concepts fairly quickly because i want to show you a lot of the art that participants made because it's very good So our first session was a sculpture walk So the idea of this was to expose the participants to the ideas of context So we did our sculpture walk of the a and u sculptor collection and talked a lot about the difference between Making an art and putting it in a context and making some art that actually responds to the context So we had a look at the ways in which various artworks had been sort of made and plonked Versus made in response to a particular area and discussed the way that that actually relates to the research process You know, you can run a study and try and shoehorn into a journal Or you can actually try and respond to the literature in the lay of the land And then a pandemic broke out which was not great for us because we wanted face-to-face hands on collaborative workshops So then we actually moved online for something like six months So part of what we wanted to do with these workshops was to get the The participants to form a community in some way and share experiences And that was supposed to happen organically as part of the exercises But because we've been moved online, we basically just put all that content in the online stuff So every month we met and we shared experiences and we set them homework So those were kind of fun and achievable things that were also important steps on the way to basically digging new heels in an academia So things like saying no to something So your homework for this month was to go home and say no to something and then report back on how that went Take a professional risk edit the word just out of all of your emails Other other fun bits of homework and people found them quite challenging but also quite rewarding And I think the largest take home was nothing falls down if I say no I don't get fired for not apologizing in every email I send And that was a really useful process for our participants just to kind of Get comfortable with each other form a group and think about the sorts of issues You know the death of a thousand cuts it is being a young female academic And then we can back up so we could have more workshops, which was great So the next workshop that we had was focused around the human spine So the concept here was looking at strength and flexibility and you know the foundation on which you build things And so what we did was actually we we got Aaron Anderson So this is Christina on the left here explaining The anatomy of the human spine and the anatomy it's vertebrae and then we had Alisa talking about how you might draw the vertebrae I'm thinking about ways of looking at ways of relating to the spine in the context of what you know That it's anatomical function is we then work them through a few different ways of doing art So I guess I should preface this with none of our participants were artistically inclined They were from a broad range of backgrounds, but none of them are visual artists And so we did some analytical drawing because that often makes the scientists a little bit more comfortable But we also did some expressive drawing So I have a little gallery here of some of ours So on the left here We have one of our analytical drawings from Ellen Lynch who is an engineer Then we have one of our more expressive drawings from Cassie Williams who is in literature And then we have another one of our analytical drawings from Jean Duh who is public health And he's also here so Randall Tosfidge, innocence of a drawing Our next session with then what we call the beautiful mess So this one was about letting go this was about letting go of the perfectionism letting go of the control So one of the largest problems that we find for young female researchers is that they're afraid to start They're afraid to mess it up. They're afraid to take that step So what we did was focused on abstraction and then curation So basically the first stage was here's some paint here's some paper here's some materials make a mess And you can see we created quite a bit of mess So we have lots of these and everybody goes to take them home and they're great The second stage of the workshop was looking at the mess you made and picking out the good bits So assembling it curating the mess So it was a lesson in basically throwing everything at the wall and then pulling off the good bits and assembling it together into a cogent idea So again, we have some great work here. So on the left here. This is this is Ellen's work This is talking about her phd work, which was about basically tearing back Some very rigid and black and white sort of ideas and engineering and looking at the human aspects underneath The middle one here is another one of genes Which I really liked and it was about kind of chaotic spiral ideas And this one on the right here was about genes working menstruation So it's about the tension between, you know, the blue menstruation you see in ads and the reality of it And also the the tension between, you know, real and appearance in that she has some physical drips as well as painted drips So our final workshop and I'm putting very quickly because I know I ramble our final workshop was looking at invisible bodies So this is basically about drawing the implied body by drawing empty clothes But the main research lesson that participants took away from this one is that we only gave them one piece of paper So they got to keep iteratively drawing over and over their mess. The process was draw it Okay, now rub it back draw it again rub it back Once it got into a mess you tried a different material to try and build over the top So basically the process was about working through the mess you've made and actually following it through to completion And again, we have some great art here. So we have Cassie Ellen and Gene again who were very good at that giving me consent to show everyone their art So you can see on the left here We have an empty little jacket an empty dress and another empty dress and these were great projects in terms of just committing to decisions You made I want to cover the whole page in black ink and then I had to work with that and kind of develop that through to a gray artwork And so I think in the end what we found was that this was a great pilot program But we want more data So obviously, you know COVID was with a substantial effect We couldn't actually get as many people as we wanted to into rooms And everyone had to wear masks and gloves and gowns and it was all a bit much But basically we got a lot of great feedback from our participants That it had made them feel like they could try things You know, it gave them permission to fail it gave them permission to make a mess And that was basically what we set out to do And I think I'll stop there Thanks so much. Well, I think that really evidence is what a fantastic array of interesting projects that we've been Happy to sponsor this year