Exhibitions

‘The Urban Field Naturalists’ Guide to Lesser-Known Pollinators’ is an exhibition of visualisations, assemblages of design objects and digital augmentation which explore ways to tell stories about the natural world. The exhibition plays with the trope of ‘cabinets of curiosities’ to reimagine the naturalist tradition in the 21st century. 

This exhibition is an outcome of the Urban Field Naturalist Project (UFN), a collaboration with researchers from the environmental humanities and life sciences. The UFN Project has two main aims. First, to encourage people to engage with the biodiversity around them through community storytelling. Second, to reimagine the naturalist tradition for the 21st Century. Related to this second aim, two of the design research questions posed through the exhibition are:

1. How might we begin to reimagine the cabinet of curiosities without removing specimens from their place of origin? Is it possible to retain the wunder, minus the kammer?
2. How might we visualise and materialise ecological information beyond scientific charts and diagrams, into objects and spaces that can be encountered, experienced, inhabited?

A program of talks and workshops with designers, philosophers, scientists, and writers will run alongside the exhibition. More details coming soon!

Design and curation: Andrew Burrell and Zoë Sadokierski, Spec Studio, UTS School of Design 

Participating artists: Adam France, Cecilia Heffer, Donna Sgro, EggPicnic (Camila De Gregorio and Christopher Macaluso), Fionn McCabe, GraciaLouise, Katie Dean, Lucy Adelaide, Ross Gibson, Thom van Dooren, Timo Rissanen and Vanessa Berry.

EggPicnic in conversation with Dr John Martin from zoe sadokierski 

Donna Sgro and Cecilia Heffer: On drawing inspiration from nature for their textile design practices from zoe sadokierski 

To end the unprecedented year that was 2020, UTS Library created a moment of reprieve and distraction for our community with Selfie Rooms. Six immersive spaces, inspired by items in the Library's Special Collections, were designed and built creating a place to escape reality and take the perfect photo. 

The following items in Special Collections date from late 1800s to early 1900s and span themes on botany, design, art and education. Although diverse in content, they are demonstrative of fine colour illustration and book plate printing from the era.  

• Asano, Koka. [Oriental textile pattern book]. Japan: s.n., 1905.
• Bing, Samuel. Le Japon artistique: documents d’art et d’industrie. Paris: Librairie centrale des beaux-arts, 1888-1891.
• Cooke, George. The botanical cabinet: consisting of coloured delineations of plants from all countries, with a short account of each, directions for management, illustrator Conrad Loddiges & Sons, London: John and Arthur Arch, 1823.
• Haeckel, Ernst. Kunstformen der Natur. Leipzig; Vienna: Bibliographischen Instituts, 1899.
• Seaby, Alan William. Nelson’s blackboard drawing. London: Thomas Nelson, 1905.
• Wright, Lewis. Light: a course of experimental optics, chiefly with the lantern. London: Macmillan, 1882.

Empty Sky and Made In Isolation were two concurrent exhibitions showcasing student work.

To coincide with the release of the 34th UTS Writers Anthology, Empty Sky, selected pieces from the publication were displayed alongside objects, photographs and artworks that helped bring the stories to life. UTS Writers' Anthology is an annual publication that showcases the best writing from emerging and established writers across UTS. The featured writers included: Lucia Mai, Sophie Serafim, Andrea Kovacic, Judith Morison, Tom Disalvo, Clare Shiu, Georgia Wilde & Zoe Downing.

In 2020, the anthology was put together by the hard working student editorial committee: Paul Anderson, Lily Cameron, Grace Joseph, Amanda Rosso Buckton, Sophie Serafim, Lily Velez and academic advisor Dr Claire Corbett. 

Empty Sky and Made In Isolation were two concurrent exhibitions showcasing student work.

Made In Isolation showcased student work created under the COVID-19 lockdown constraints of Autumn Session 2020. The student writers and creators featured in the exhibition demonstrated their creativity, resilience and adaptability, despite the restrictions; an impressive achievement during these uncertain and turbulent times. The works on display included poetry, photography, photo media and films produced for courses, spanning the Bachelor of Design in Photography, and the Bachelor of Communications in Creative Writing and Media Arts and Production. Themes of the works included personal and emotive responses to the socio-political apocalyptic climate, exploring feelings of anxiety and detachment.

The exhibition presented works by UTS students: Jesse Vega, Zachariah Cutcliffe, Keira Baker, Veronica Moorhouse, Lily Cameron, Tom Disalvo, Fleur Connick & Lynn Chen.

Celebrating 40 years of 2SER 107.3, the community radio station jointly owned by UTS and Macquarie University, this interactive exhibition delved into the rich and vibrant history of the station’s past four decades of broadcast.

2SER (Sydney Educational Radio) launched to the public on 1 October 1979. Over 40 years, the station has grown in size and scope while aiming to represent Sydney as much as possible. 2SER has been a space for learning and innovation throughout its existence - at the forefront of social change, pioneering music scenes, creating award winning documentaries, and training thousands of journalists and other media professionals.

To present this multi-layered history, 2SER conducted 40 original interviews with some of the key players from the station’s past. The exhibition presented these interviews along with a plethora of stories, images, and artefacts from 2SER’s archives.

To mark the opening of the new UTS Blake Library in UTS Central, November 2019, this exhibition celebrated the completion of the UTS City Campus Master Plan  by looking back at the history of our precinct and the architectural accomplishments of the past decade. The exhibition showcased the complexity and significance of the UTS City Campus Master Plan through historical artifacts, photographs, plans, videos, architectural processes, and models.

The exhibition follows the journey of the campus redevelopment, from its announcement in 2008 on UTS’s 20th anniversary, to the realisation of the university’s vision for a world-leading campus at the gateway to downtown Sydney. The campus has evolved strategically in conjunction with, and was one of the catalysts for, the City of Sydney’s development of the wider precinct, creating a connected campus with immediate links to industry and the community. Celebrating the development of six distinctive UTS buildings including the newly completed UTS Central, as well as underground sporting facilities, and a network of revitalised learning and social spaces.

This UTS Library exhibition, curated by UTS and Western Sydney University, celebrated 2019: The International Year of Indigenous Languages, raising awareness of and promoting the preservation and complexity of the hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. The exhibition spotlighted language projects by members of First Peoples communities in Australia, as well as other researchers from universities around Australia. It introduced visitors to traditional spoken, sign and song languages through objects, documents and interactive multimedia as well as presenting ongoing efforts to reawaken ‘sleeping’ languages of our region.

The exhibition inaugurated the immersive virtual reality experience, Barrawao, created in a creative co-design partnership between academics, artists and designers, including both settler-Australians and members of First Peoples communities. In this experience, the viewer directs a self-guided virtual tour across nura (country) to hear traditional languages spoken, whilst simultaneously gaining insight into the connection between language and nura.
 

Coinciding with Sydney Writers' Festival, UTS Library and Vertigo Magazine teamed up to develop the first rendition of a Vertigo exhibition. On display was a selection of creative writing and poetry works from 2019’s first volume, alongside student-made artworks submitted for the exhibition that respond to the theme of ‘disrupt’.

In line with the Vertigo creative team’s vision for this year, Disrupt presents a selection of work that explores the unusual and the overlooked. As an extension of this volume, the exhibition includes artworks exploring unsettling themes such as: pain, anxiety, isolation, surveillance, resistance, depression, desire, loss and the uncanny.

A poetry reading was held at the exhibition closing event, where an amazing line up of student poets and writers responded to the theme of "disruption."

As part of Sydney Design Festival 2019, UTS Library in collaboration with the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building (DAB) presented an exhibition that showcased the outcomes and speculations of the Transformative Technologies + Data Poetics (TT+DP) group. The TT+DP research group are a multi-disciplinary collection of designers and makers operating in and around emerging technologies in architecture, visual communication design, and data visualisation.

Through their explorations in visualisations of complex data, mixed reality and automation within the building and construction industry, this exhibition illustrates how new technologies are enabling more inclusive design and review processes within various fields. Over the past months, TT+DP have developed two distinct projects that comparably use new technologies to assist complex ideas in becoming more accessible: Adrift, a data visualisation project that uses citizen science to collect data to map ocean microbes and Structural Hybrid, a real-world testing of robotic fabrication machinery to manufacture a complex structure.