Dr Annemarie Murland

Born in Glasgow, 1962, Annemarie Murland completed her undergraduate studies at the School of Fine, The University of Newcastle in 2005 and went on, thereafter, to complete her research higher degree in 2009. Her thesis, entitled: Migration, Memory and Landscape: Recontextualising Personal Experience through Contemporary Abstract Painting explored felt experience through a multidisciplinary lens. Murland is an accomplished artist with an exemplary academic record, receiving a University and Faculty Medal for her Honours Degree submission and earned a scholarship for the duration of her PhD candidature (completed 2009). Her interdisciplinary artistic practice, research, and collaborations continue to seek and define the multifaceted nature of visual praxis within the context of Women’s Stories of Migration and the broader space of contemporary visual culture. Dr Murland is currently employed at the University of Newcastle where she is the course coordinator of Visual Art, Foundation Studies at the Ourimbah and Callaghan campus. She previously lectured and tutored [2006-14] in the School of Fine Art undergraduate and postgraduate program, practice and theory at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Dr Annemarie Murland exhibits nationally and internationally and maintains an active studio practice in Newcastle, NSW.

Research Expertise
My key research interests is an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to practice-led research in the field of Migrational Studies that has proved particularly effective in demonstrating a visually literate means to explore a personal migrant experience within a contemporary global context. I continue to expand my research initiatives that question the role of materiality and the role of poiesis in developing abstract drawings, paintings, poems and video works of art.

Teaching Expertise
I integrate dynamic traditional and experimental material methodologies and processes as knowledge building tools in my tailored teaching and learning studio sessions to engage students in critical knowledge exchange. A multi-disciplinary, philosophical and experimental approach to knowledge production provides the student with new ways of seeing through practice. By exploring the space and material capacity of creative practice through integrating research, analysis and practice we deepen the domain and extend the student experience. As an expanded field of inquiry, contemporary art practice is collaborative, cross-disciplinary and an interactive form of representation that offers new possibilities to communicate intertextually. As a research method, creative practice requires the artist as a researcher to use insight and imagination in their inquiry in order to expand the field of discovery. Questions that surround visual experience are conceptually developed through studio praxis that contextualises the researcher's awareness and or observation of contemporary visual culture, creating meaning and understanding through the art object. 

Administrative Expertise
In my capacity as an artist, researcher, lecturer and tutor of undergraduate and postgraduate studies I am fully experienced in developing and recording course content, [studio practice and theory], using traditional and web-based media. I work collectively with my colleagues and have contributed to the development of assessment rubrics in 2D studies that evaluate creative practice within a research context. I am conversant in recording practice led discovery as creative output within existing the value systems that operate in traditional spheres of knowledge production - Universities. I am also compliant with University policy in relation to the storage of information, ethics submission, confirmation reporting, editing, critical writing and issues surrounding plagiarism. 

Collaborative Projects

The Marian Thread: a homage to otherness. The collaborative practice-led research project, artists, Dr Annemarie Murland and Kiera OToole explore a visual response to the Problematics of Identity and Sexuality, from an Irish Catholic, Feminine Perspective.

Greetings from the Irish in Australia: An International, Collaborative Research Project, 2013. Artists, 
Dr Annemarie Murland and Kiera O'Toole, invited academics and artists from a range of tertiary institutions within Australia, to provide a collective overview of what it means to be Irish, home and away, in the form of an edited book entitled: Greetings from the Irish in Australia. Foreword Irish Ambassador to Australia 2013.

Migrant Woman Project 2018/19: Lead artist and researcher, Personal stories of migration provide the content and framework for the development of this year-long collaborative project. Dr Annemarie Murland, lead researcher and artist, plus 7 migrant women.

Artists Kiera OToole and Annemarie Murland have assumed the role of cultural commentator in this artistic project, titled: The Book of Ruth. The project will explore how migration, a current global phenomenon has penetrated the psyche and lived experience of contemporary society when examined through an artistic framework. The language, practice and experience of aesthetics seeks to displace migration from its everyday context so that it can be experienced anew.  

This project seeks to visualise an aesthetics of migration through the art practice of Ruth McVey an itinerant nomad who moves across a range of border states and topographies to examine the singularity of a personal migrant experience when rendered and measured through a  ‘glocal’  and multicultural lens. The artist rejects any notion of identity politics as a catalyst for making, rather she actively engages with [local] material culture through her site-specific encounters with space and place. Her aim is to record how cultural ‘difference’ as experience provides a departure point to reimagine migration as an autonomous aesthetic that has the capacity to transmute as it moves beyond its host territory.