Memories and accounts of the State’s North-West landscapes will be interpreted in a prestigious University of Tasmania residency.
Professors Maja Godlewska and Marek Ranis from North Carolina, USA, have been announced as the 2019 Cradle Coast campus artists in residence.
The collaborating visual artists will travel to Tasmania in May to commence their project, Landscape: A Place Remembered and Imagined.
Working directly with the local community, the pair will explore the region’s environment and its place in the lives of locals.
They will also research how tourists interact with landscapes through technology and social media by visiting the most ‘instagrammable’ North-West locations.
Their resulting work will be a mixed-media installation and film that captures community relationships with the local landscape.
Both Maja and Marek are art professors at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in the Department of Art and Art History.
“We want to investigate how the natural landscape becomes ‘a place’, a fabric of memories and identity, where objective geography is as important as collective and individual psychogeography,” Professor Godlewska said.
“This will involve working on a collaborative scroll installation with community members, including Cradle Coast campus students and interested local artists.
“Our short film will document this work, while featuring interviews with project participants about their memories of the region’s landscapes.
“We hope this community project will prompt searches through family photo albums, meaningful conversations with relatives, and revisiting childhood adventures, and that this, in turn, will deepen the awareness of the role natural environment plays in people’s lives.”
Professor Marek Ranis said receiving the opportunity to work in Tasmania was a dream come true.
