VCA ART PHD CONFIRMATION SEMINARS
DAY TWO: SESSION FOUR
Briony Galligan: Throwing Trees: Pharmakon and Queer Lineages of Contagion
In my research, the ancient Greek term pharmakon — both remedy and poison, developed through Jacques Derrida’s understanding of indeterminacy and Bernard Stiegler’s account of the benefits and dangers of technology — is connected to queer theory, sickness and contagion as sites of resistance to dominant structures. The urban London plane tree, the AIDS
memorial garden and the hospital room are positioned within my work as vegetal, queer and sick bodies within the public infrastructure of the city. These figures take form in sculpture and challenge ideas of illness and healing as equilibrium, asking instead, how do we live and work with toxicity and ambiguity?
Image credit: Briony Galligan, Concrete paths, glazed earthenware casts of the AIDS Memorial Garden pavement
outside the old Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, steel bar and fixings, adhesive, spit, Baci wrappers, 2025.
George Paton Gallery in ‘Bells and Whistles’ curated by Channon Goodwin and Chantelle Mitchell with Jincheng
Deng, Tom Denize, Majed Fayad, Briony Galligan, and Jen Valender. Photo: Astrid Mulder
Thursday 05 March 2026 12.00 pm
Octagon Meeting Room, Crnr Dodds and Grant Street, Southbank
https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/87664681107?pwd=4a28FRRdBrCuCZ3schgonNYxByj1iw.1
Password: 649467
@brionygalligan@vca_mcm
VCA ART PHD CONFIRMATION SEMINARS
DAY THREE: SESSION FIVE
Yandell Walton: Entangled Agencies in Transdisciplinary Media Art
This research investigates how media art can articulate and enact ecological interdependence by decentralising human agency within creative processes. Through the development and
realisation of the ongoing artwork Ecological Adaptation, the research explores how experimental technologies, real-time systems, data driven processes, and networked computation,
can be mobilised to represent and materialise multispecies entanglement. The project situates itself within the fields of posthumanist theory & new materialism, engaging particularly with the writings of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad to frame a practice of “in-tra-active” making that positions the human as one element within a larger, dynamic network
of relations.
Image credit: Yandell Walton, Ecological Adaptation, 2025, Networked installation, LED screens, Real-Time mov-
ing image, motion capture, sound, performance, lighting, fog. Performer: Sarah Aiken
Wednesday 11 March 2026 12.30 pm
https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/83918874408?pwd=LK8eQIsJaLpkGryhG0TE8tFz15Q86d.1;
Password: 973370
@yandellw@vca_mcm
VCA ART PHD CONFIRMATION SEMINARS
DAY ONE: SESSION ONE
Nadege Philippe-Janon: Ecologies of Attention
Ecologies of Attention examines how everyday technologies modulate practices of attention across human and more-than-human relations. In response to the attention economy and tech-
no-narratives of productivity and efficiency, attention is approached as an embodied, relational process entwined with response-ability and ecological attunement.
Drawing from feminist technoscience, critical media theory, phenomenology and non-Western-ontologies, the research explores how attention can both sustain and potentially unsettle
dominant technological paradigms. Through playful experiments with sensory and kinetic installations, materials and video, attending to cyclical temporality, altered states of conscious-
ness, defamiliarisation and the uncanny, the works aim to reveal the ambivalent and the ecological, agitating habitual encounters within more-than-human ecologies.
Image credit: Nadege Philippe-Janon, Portal, 2025, wood, plaster, silicone, motor, mirror, water, bricks, builders
plastic, foraged clay, 3.5m x 1.5m x 1.5m. In When the Fog Clears, as part of Ten Days on the Island at Franklin
Watershed
Tuesday 03 March 2026 10.30 am
Buxton Contemporary Education Space
Level 1, Buxton Contemporary, Corner of Southbank Boulevard & Dodds St
https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/87664681107?pwd=4a28FRRdBrCuCZ3schgonNYxByj1iw.1
Password: 649467
@vca_mcm@buxton_contemporary
VCA ART PHD CONFIRMATION SEMINARS
DAY TWO: SESSION THREE
Noriko Nakamura: Embodied Transformation: Women’s Active Enfolding Possibilities
My research project explores the complexity of female embodied experiences and reimagines the narratives of feminine subjectivity for empowerment. Drawing from Western disciplines, I investigate the historical view of chora and its contemporary feminist interpretation as fluidity between subject and object through the fictional novel about a love affair between a single
mother and slime mould and sculptural installations. This concept is intertwined with Buddhist philosophy and scientific views on the transformation of slime mould to explore enfolding possibilities. This research is underpinned by my ongoing influence of Japanese animism Shinto, which considers the relationship between the human and material world. Through reflection on women’s experiences, this research bridges the Western theory and the contextualisation of Buddhism, science and Japanese cultural perspectives, occupying a unique interdisciplinary territory.
Image credit: Noriko Nakamura, Mother and daughter, 2025, Limestone, 44cm x 58cm x 34cm, Photo: Cristo
Croker Clears, as part of Ten Days on the Island at Franklin Watershed
Thursday 05 March 2026 10 am
Octagon Meeting Room, Crnr Dodds and Grant Street, Southbank
https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/87664681107?pwd=4a28FRRdBrCuCZ3schgonNYxByj1iw.1
Password: 649467
@norikonakamuracat@vca_mcm
VCA ART PHD CONFIRMATION SEMINARS
DAY ONE: SESSION TWO
Jen Valender: HARNESSING THE WILDS
How do the behaviours and perceptions of animals and natural elements—such as wind, rain and light—inspire new artistic languages within contemporary art? This project studies culture-nature intersections through a practice-led methodology, using art to confront, critique and reconcile with the challenges of creating within an era of eco logical uncertainty. Grounded in the cinematic, the research resides in a kaleidoscopic space between the fields of moving image, sculpture and performance art. Arising from the creative inquiry, this discussion traces the layered dynamics of coexistence
across interspecies and elemental performance.
Image credit: Jen Valender, Stormborne, 2025, dual-channel within single-channel, moving image installation with
stereo sound, 12min 30sec. ALPHA60 Project Space, SPRING1883 Art Fair, Room 422 Hotel Windsor. Photo: Tom
Noble, courtesy of the artist
Tuesday 03 March 2026 1.00 pm
Buxton Contemporary Education Space
Level 1, Buxton Contemporary, Corner of Southbank Boulevard & Dodds St
https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/87664681107?pwd=4a28FRRdBrCuCZ3schgonNYxByj1iw.1
Password: 649467
@jenvalender@vca_mcm@buxton_contemporary
VCA Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) Exhibition
Exhibition
Opening Thursday 5 February 2026, 5PM - 7PM
Exhibition Dates 6 - 12 February 2026
Open daily 11AM - 5PM
We are delighted to invite you to celebrate our Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) Exhibition. This exhibition, which celebrates the culmination of two years of research, comprises major solo projects by: Amina Jarra Briggs, Tom Denize, Liam Denny, Zane Edwards, Beau Emmett, Majed Fayad, Adam Gottlieb, Jonathon Harris, Oliver Henry, Kate Jones, Thea Jones, Emmy Mavroidis, Nino Muratore, Caoife Power and Christopher Theofanous.
The MFA Exhibition stretches across the Southbank campus occupying space in The Stables, Art Studios, VCA Artspace, The Octagon and Martyn Myer Arena, and runs concurrently with the PhD examination exhibition Resonant Entrail: Gothic Bodies and Sonic Materialism by Lewis Gittus in the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery.
@amina.briggs@tomdenize@liam_denny@yeszane@blow.emit@maf.zhf@_kate_j_jones_@exuberantonino@caoifepower@christophertheofanous@vca_mcm
Image: Tom Denize, Tipping An Oyster 2025, digital scan from 120mm negative (detail)
PHD EXAMINATION EXHIBITION
Lewis Gittus
Resonant Entrails 05 FEB - 12 FEB 2026
Opening 05 FEB, 5-7pm
Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery
40 Dodds Street, Southbank
The exhibition will feature two bodies of work, including an ongoing erasure project based on Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 Gothic romance novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and a ten-channel electroacoustic work comprised of Foley and synthesised noise. Foregrounding auditory ambiguity as a generative poetic device, the exhibition explores how Gothic conventions of representation can be extended within contemporary practice, while also questioning how the contingencies of a sound-based practice might foment new readings of the Gothic literary tradition.
@lewiscancut@vca_mcm
VCA ART PHD COMPLETION SEMINARS
Darren Wardle: Ornaments of Time: Ruinous Impulses in Contemporary Art
Ornaments of Time: Ruinous Impulses in Contemporary Art explores how contemporary artists use ruin aesthetics to critique the present and imagine the future. The research examines the interplay of time, decay, technology, and speculation in shaping our understanding of ruins, particularly in the aftermath of modernism. Through theoretical analysis, historical context, fieldwork, and creative inquiry (painting, digital image making, and video), the study argues that ruins act as metaphorical projection devices that disrupt linear ideas of progress. The mutability of ruins permits artists to repurpose their fragments to challenge cultural narratives and reimagine the future through the lens of collapse and transformation.
Zoom: https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/85670734947?pwd=2f0IECjuEtbXF7ooSsqGbbEqe1gCo8.1
Password: 315529
Image credit: Darren Wardle,The Afterlife of Things, 2024, acrylic and oil on linen, 152.5 x 244cm
Wednesday 10 December 11.30 am
Buxton Contemporary Education Space
Level 1, Buxton Contemporary,Corner of Southbank Boulevard & Dodds St
VCA ART PHD COMPLETION SEMINARS
Lewis Gittus: Resonant Entrails: Gothic Bodies and Sonic Materialism
Resonant Entrails: Gothic Bodies and Sonic Materialism contributes to the burgeoning field of Gothic sound studies through the development of multiple sound-based artworks. Foregrounding auditory ambiguity as a generative poetic device, Gittus’ research seeks to elaborate on Gothic sonic conventions that have historically challenged perceptions of organic bodily coherence inherited within the European ocular-centric
tradition. The project explores how Gothic conventions of representation can be extended within contemporary sound-based practice, while also questioning how the contingencies of a sound-based practice might foment new readings of the Gothic
literary tradition.
Image credit: Lewis Gittus, A Swarming of Points, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Tuesday 09 December 2.00 pm
Buxton Contemporary Education Space
Level 1, Buxton Contemporary,Corner of Southbank Boulevard & Dodds St
