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December 2020
Welcome to the latest issue of e-news from the University of Melbourne Museums and Collections. This electronic newsletter is circulated each month and provides information on current exhibitions, events and news items from the University’s museums and collections.
Explore the University’s Museums and Collections and Cultural Commons websites for individual collection details and more online content.
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News
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Pride of place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection
For three years Alisa Bunbury, Grimwade Collection Curator, has been delving into the stores and shelves that house the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequests. One of the most significant collections gifted to the University of Melbourne, this collection comprises a rich array of art, books and archives, and is cared for jointly by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne Archives and the Baillieu Library Rare Books collection. This extensive research has resulted in the substantial illustrated book Pride of place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection, which is published this month by The Miegunyah Press.
Scientist, philanthropist and collector, Sir Russell Grimwade (1879-1955) was a student, supporter and long-serving Council member of the University of Melbourne. He bequeathed his collection of Australiana – books, art and objects relating to the colonisation of Australia – to the University, as well as funds to establish The Miegunyah Press. This support was complemented by Lady Grimwade (1886-1973), who bequeathed additional art, furniture, decorative arts and personal items, funds and her Toorak house Miegunyah. This diverse material was received by the University in 1973 and has been studied and exhibited since that time, notably the magnificent oil painting Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852, painted by William Strutt in 1887 and acquired by Russell shortly before his death.
In the twenty-first century, collections that record the European occupation of Australia require careful reconsideration. Forty academics and specialists from Australia and New Zealand generously contributed to this publication, each examining and bringing a fresh insight to the books, prints, drawings, paintings, photographs, ephemera and other objects that comprise this collection. Acquisitions made through the Russell and Mab Grimwade Miegunyah Fund – established following the sale of their house – are also included, including recent purchases not previously published.
Pride of the place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection is the first book to survey this important collection in such depth, showing many highlights as well as lesser-known items. By enhancing access to this collection and offering new insights, it aims to contribute to the ongoing appraisal of our imperial past. |
Women of the Conservatorium: Mary Mauricette MacGillicuddy
In the Baillieu Library Rare Music collection there is a series of seven untitled, cloth-bound scrapbooks, each containing newspaper clippings dating from 1930-1947. These scrapbooks reveal a snapshot of the Melbourne music scene and concert-life during that period. In particular, they provide an insight into the life of the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium of Music, its alumni and students. The fifth scrapbook contains the image reproduced here of Conservatorium student Mary Mauricette MacGillicuddy. Published in March of 1936, MacGillicuddy, then 23 years of age, was photographed in the lead up to her farewell concert at the Melbourne Town Hall. MacGillicuddy was about to venture abroad, where she would find fame, though perhaps not precisely in the form she, or her admirers, expected.
Before MacGillicuddy set off to explore the musical world in London, she had already lived an accomplished and eventful young life, full of prodigious musical talent, academic excellence, and social charm. Known as ‘Billie’ or ‘Bill’ to her friends and family, MacGillicuddy was born in Melbourne in 1913. She was the first child of Dr. Maurice MacGillicuddy and his wife, Nell Morris, well-known figures in Melbourne society at the time. MacGillicuddy and her younger sister Joan, attended Catholic Ladies College in East Melbourne. From an early age, both MacGillicuddy sisters demonstrated a prodigious talent for music and performance.
In 1927, at just 14 years of age, MacGillicuddy began her tertiary musical education at the Conservatorium. In 1930, MacGillicuddy was awarded a three-years’ entrance exhibition, rendering her first three years free of tuition costs. She began studying piano and ‘music culture’ under eminent teacher of the pianoforte, Francis William Homewood, who described her as a musician of ‘rare insight and understanding’. More
Image: Dickinson-Monteath Studio [photographer], ‘Pianist Mauricette MacGillicuddy prior to her departure abroad’, press clipping, Table Talk, Melbourne, 12 March 1936. Baillieu Library Rare Music collection, The University of Melbourne |
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Grant Stevens: Fawn in the Forest
Live stream available until 20 December 2020.
Buxton Contemporary is delighted to announce the launch of its third Light Source commission Fawn in the Forest by Sydney-based artist Grant Stevens.
In Fawn in the Forest, an animated juvenile deer wanders through a computer-generated redwood forest. Programmed with artificial intelligence (AI), the fawn moves placidly around the environment, walking, eating, and resting undisturbed by distraction, living by algorithm. An AI camera tracks its movements, gliding through the forest to create a single continuous point of view shot, rendering in real-time. The fawn is isolated, confined and alone, but also protected and buffered from the chaotic world beyond.
Working predominantly with computer graphics, moving image, and photography, Grant Stevens’ practice considers the various ways that digital technologies and conventions of representation mediate our inner worlds and social realities. In the contemporary world pervaded by film, television and the internet screens, Grant invites us to explore how we understand, relate to each other and ourselves, construct and communicate our experiences – lived, imagined, social and psychological.
Grant Stevens has exhibited widely nationally and internationally since the early 2000s. His work is represented in numerous public, private and corporate collections, including: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Kaldor Collection, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas. He is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, and Starkwhite, Auckland, and is currently Deputy Head of the School of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales.
Image: Grant Stevens, still from Fawn in the Forest [detail]. Live streamed procedurally generated computer graphics with sound. Assisted by Pat Younis. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney |
Journeys of the imagination: Postcards from Archives
In a special blog post celebrating 60 years of the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA), Archivist Melinda Barrie explores personal correspondence within the UMA’s collections, drawing parallels with her own experience of sending mail in response to the imposed isolation experienced by many this year. The UMA’s holdings contain hundreds of postcards and the collection as a whole provides a fascinating montage of personal experience, landscape, ritual, built heritage and environment. Many of the postcards at the UMA can be found online for research and study purposes.
Image: Detail from an early 1950s postcard depicting a 6th century mosaic from San Vitale Church, Ravenna. Joseph Terence Burke Personal Papers, University of Melbourne Archives |
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Science meets art: The botanical drawings of Margaret Stones
The Ian Potter Museums of Art’s latest Up from the Vaults talk is hosted by Tim Uebergang, Curator of Horticulture at the University Of Melbourne’s System Garden. In this talk, Tim delves into the fascinating life and prolific body of work of the late Australian botanical illustrator, Margaret Stones AM MBE (1920-2018), who is internationally recognised as one of the most important botanical artists of her time.
Born in Colac, Victoria, Stones was a master of capturing the essence of plants in art form and enjoyed an illustrious international career working as principal contributing artist to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine in London for over 30 years, contributing designs for Australian postage stamps and producing works for the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
The University of Melbourne Art Collection holds a substantial number of Stones’ works, produced from the 1940s onward. Tim guides us through a number of these works, which speak to her great skill and accuracy. As he discusses their many scientific and artistic merits, Tim brings Stones’ works to life with wonderfully insightful and layered detail.
Watch
Image: Margaret Stones, Banksia sp., late 1940s. The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973
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Jigsaws for #HistoryMonth2020
During October, Archives and Special Collections participated in #HistoryMonth2020, through a special collaboration with the @unilibrary Twitter account. Throughout the month, weekly themes were used to reveal diverse collection objects from across the Archives, Rare Books and Rare Music.
As part of #HistoryMonth2020 Twitter followers across the University’s twittersphere voted in a series of weekly polls to select an image from the collections to be made into a digital jigsaw, for addition to the jigsaws available on the Archives and Special Collections webpage. University history particularly generated a high level of engagement, with followers putting forward their own images of the University campuses for consideration. This initiative was conceived by Carmen Mok, an Archives and Special Collections Intern working across a number of digital engagement activities.
Image: Jigsaw made from an image of the first women medical students at the University of Melbourne, 1887. University of Melbourne Archives |
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Exhibitions
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The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis
Buxton Contemporary is reopening with The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis.
What confrontations, complexities, critiques and conundra emerge when art adopts the perspective of the alien? The implications of this anthropic inversion proliferate throughout Xenogenesis, the first major solo exhibition of The Otolith Group in Australia, which brings together a cross-section of influential artworks from 2013 to 2018.
The works selected are linked by The Otolith Group’s concern to formulate a science fiction of the present using historical and contemporary images and sounds. By treating the technologies of images, sounds, voices and colours as narrative vehicles for transtemporal travel, the artists seek to re-imagine the contemporary global crises that ‘we’ have inherited from colonialism, re-narrate the ways in which humans have shaped the planet, and reconfigure the ways that ‘we’ are changing in response to new technologies. Curated by Annie Fletcher. More
Image: The Otolith Group, O Horizon, 2018 [still detail], original format 4K video, colour, sound, duration 90 min, courtesy of The Otolith Group and LUX, London, © the artists |
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Stay connected
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Cultural Commons at the University of Melbourne
Stay connected, inspired and engaged with the University of Melbourne’s arts and culture through virtual tours, online collections, videos, catalogues, podcasts and more. At the heart of our community, culture brings us together.
The University of Melbourne’s Cultural Commons provides access to a unique group of museums, galleries, theatres, collections, and knowledge. It represents what we value, hold, discover and create and what collectively helps us to understand what it means to be human.
The University of Melbourne acknowledge and pay respects to the Boonwurrung, Wurundjeri, Dja Dja Wurrung peoples and the Yorta Yorta nation, the traditional owners of the lands on which our venues and campuses are situated.
Image: Display of mallets for percussion instruments, c.1930s. Various makers including J.C Deagan (instrument maker). Grainger Museum collection, The University of Melbourne |
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University of Melbourne Collections online
Looking for something extra to read while social distancing at home? There are 24 back issues of the University of Melbourne Collections magazine available online for you to explore. Covering all of the University’s cultural collections, the magazines includes a range of fascinating articles written by curators, academics, students and Museums and Collection Project Program volunteers. |
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