Current Projects
The role of Community Cultural Development Techniques in Establishing and Consolidating Sustainable Communities
Associate Professor David Watt
This is an ongoing project concerned with the collection, analysis and dissemination through publication of information on community-based performance projects.
Currently the research is focussing on:
- Community Cultural Development projects on public housing estates
- British precursors of Community Cultural Development performance work, in particular the documentary theatre work of Peter Cheeseman
- Community Cultural Development and recent developments in site-specific performance in the UK and Australia
- The international collaboration of Banner Theatre (UK) and Ground Zero (Canada) on migration issues
Artmaking, Identity, Representations of Knowledge and Wellbeing
Kath Grushka
Early career researcher Kath Grushka has combined her background in visual arts with her academic qualification in education to interrogate the contribution of visual art education to the intuitive, critical and creative aspects of how individuals construct meaning for themselves. Dr Grushka is researching the connections between health and well being and creativity and the embodied act of artmaking. Using the narratives of artmaking, her project is exploring the links between the unique epistemology of the visual as a philosophy of action or agency and knowledge by analysing how self image, technology, representation and narrative influence the construction of the contemporary subject.
The Royal On The Move
Miranda Lawry and Professor Anne Graham
The concept of art as community cultural development underpinned The Royal on the Move project. The initiative, jointly funded and developed by the University of Newcastle and Hunter New England Health's John Hunter Hospital (JHH), aimed to document and celebrate the closure of the iconic Royal Newcastle Hospital and the opening of a new facility.
Consisting of two related areas of artistic enquiry, the first component of the project was a street procession and drama production bringing together more than 2000 people.
The project's second component was the commissioning of artworks by the University's Professor Anne Graham and Miranda Lawry. Lawry's role in the initiative involved a series of enlarged digital photographs showing views of the ocean as seen through the windows of the Royal. Complementing Lawry's images and also on display in the Royal Wing is Anne Graham's mini museum - a collection of memorabilia gathered from the Royal prior to its closure.
Graham and Lawry believe art is a vital component in good health which can be used as calming, healing and recuperative factors. This belief has been borne out by the response to the digital images and mini museum in the Royal Wing at JHH.
"Relocation of services from the Royal, which had stood overlooking the Pacific Ocean for almost 200 years, to a new home at the John Hunter aroused strong feelings of loss and dislocation," JHH Arts for Health Co-ordinator, Pippa Robinson explained.
The Royal on the Move initiative aimed to acknowledge that loss while easing the burden of change.
