Project lead: Dr Stuart Bailey
Funding and support: Exhibited at Sydenham International, Sydenham NSW.
Produced as an outcome of a residency at Frans Masereel Centre Belgium.

Bailey’s practice critiques political and subcultural resistance, often through the lens of the political poster. For Dead as Dreams he reflects on the strident approach of extreme music genres such as Black Metal, from the perspective of a fan. Rage, frustration, terror, hopelessness and melancholy have renewed relevance in the contemporary moment, yet the messages embodied in extreme music genres can be cloaked, full of irony, or even denied. Bailey raises questions about the political potential of Black Metal through printmaking, textiles and a schedule of live performances.

Project Lead: Associate Professor Jane Gavin
Funding and support: Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and UNESCO

This project positions creative practitioners as catalysts within Vietnam’s manufacturing sector. Through eight Creative Innovation Manufacturing Residencies, artists and designers collaborate directly with industry to promote innovation, sustainability, and socially responsible practices. This initiative aligns closely with UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating how creative methodologies can address economic, social, and environmental challenges.

Project Lead: Associate Professor Andrew Lavery
Funding and support: Nuova Luce, Group exhibition, Artereal Gallery

In his Time Machines series, Lavery assembles towers of salvaged crystal and repurposed wood stools, positioning them within the lineage of totemic structures—both ethnographic and secular—as markers of heritage, aspiration and belief. These fragile, glimmering forms elevate discarded domestic objects to the status of monuments, reflecting on the impermanence of taste, class and material culture.

The series pays homage to the conceptual legacy of Duchamp’s readymades while celebrating artisanal craftsmanship, with each crystal element meticulously cut, cold-worked, and polished. Through these assemblages, Lavery underscores the paradox of endurance and fragility, imbuing second-hand decanters and dishes—mute carriers of intimate histories—with new symbolic resonance. In doing so, Lavery’s Time Machines become an elegy to the past, an exploration of the present, and an invitation to reconsider the cyclical nature of urban and domestic life.

Project lead: Dr Sanné Mestrom
Funding and support: Australian Research Council funded DECRA Fellowship

ART/PLAY/RISK is an interdisciplinary research and creative project focused on designing for urban inclusion. The research provides new creative and scholarly research into public art’s role in the design and planning of intergenerational future cities. 

Positioning play as a vital tool for learning, social interaction and public engagement, our research explores the potential of public art to contribute to broadened and diversified opportunities for play in the public sphere. With a specific concentration on questions related to ‘risk’, ART/PLAY/RISK combines scholarly, artistic and interdisciplinary research to develop collaborative approaches to designing child-friendly cities. 

This research project takes the form of interdisciplinary symposia, traditional publications, non-traditional co-design projects and the fabrication of urban playable sculptures. 

Project Lead: Sophie Cox (HDR student)
Funding and support: This Here Then Now Museum Activation Project with Arts Upper Hunter and the Regional Arts Fund.

The series of works titled ‘Desks of Fabric’ are charcoal rubbings made by artist Sophie Cox on material sourced from around Scone. The works take their patterning from the imprint of marks made on school desks from Scone Grammar School. These marks have been reworked in thread by current students at the school. The desks bear the mark of the education process for past students. The artworks now bear both a record of these marks and the new ones sewn by current students. Through this, notions of time are explored and the place of education. As the students have learnt to embroider in the process of making these works, their education has been  recorded in this artwork.

In this work, Cox aims for viewers to consider education and its socio-poltical ramifications. She hopes people will consider the importance of all forms of education and their own personal experiences with it.

This work was produced with the assistance of volunteers at Scone and Upper Hunter Museum and Historical Society, the Arts Upper Hunter Team and students and staff from Scone Grammar School.