Not Quite Nature was a two-week Melbourne University elective commissioned by Project Toria in 2024, for London’s Architectural Association Visiting School. I co-led this unit with my teaching partner and creative collaborator, Lucy Moroney. For our student brief, we revisied the practice of taxonomy, culminating in a collection of interactive artworks.

Over two years of Victorian-centric practice based research, we expanded our ideas around how we survey context. The result was an archive of observations on select landscapes. For our final elective offering of this three year series, we tasked our student cohort with creating site-specific, multi-sensory artworks corresponding to these taxonomic studies, for showing in a public exhibition. We engaged experts to participate in this process by contributing to the students’ understanding of their multiple roles in this project—as historian, artist and curator—while confronting their biases and how they shape the narrative.

Responsibilities:
Brief Design
Project Management
Workshops
Tutoring
Guest Crit
Sound Design
Lighting Design
Installation
Videography
Editing

Guest Contributors:
Uncle Bill, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung
Andy Belcher, Landscape Architect
Owen Cafe, First Nations Activist and Landscape Architect

Guest Crits:
Erin Mathews, Exhibition Project Manager at Museums Victoria
Sally McPhee, placemaking producer for the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

Clients:

Architectural Association Visiting School (London)
Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne
Project (Vic)Toria

Erin Mathews
Mathews is a gallery professional who is passionate about equality curating, specialising in dynamic exhibition design and development. In 2023 Mathews gave an interactive talk on the foundations of curation and the role of storytelling in designing an exhibit. She discussed the role of exhibitions as testing grounds—where one can explore and distil ideas. Mathews took the students through the multitude of ways curators tell stories, and helped them to grapple with the process of elevating an object in status by curating it into an exhibit.