Critical Animals is a creative research symposium held annually as a part of This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle, Australia. It’s a forum for students, researchers, writers, artists, thinkers and curious individuals who are critically engaged with creative and experimental art practices. It’s an opportunity to present papers and ongoing research, as well as to challenge creative practices and work collaboratively with others in the field.
You can find out all about it over at http://criticalanimals.org/
Our co-directors for 2011 are:
Ella O’Keefe
Ella O’Keefe has produced programs for The Night Air on ABC Radio National and has recorded a series of interviews and readings with Australian poets for Final Draft, a books and writing program on community radio station 2SER FM. In 2011 she started a PhD at Deakin University, working with the concepts of visual imagination in contemporary poetry. She is still getting used to calling Melbourne home.
Julia Shaw
Julia has recently returned to Newcastle and is enjoying rediscovering the city’s artistic and architectural (and marine) environments. She has previously studied Architectural Technology and Art Theory and this year will commence post-graduate studies in Art Administration. She is interested in the creation of space particularly through installation, staging, land art, alternative architecture and decorative intervention. A current point of research is to the use of city space in display, an interest encouraged by attending the Venice and Lyon Biennales and more recently by her involvement with This Is Not Art. Julia was a volunteer for TINA in 2010 and is extremely excited to join the Critical Animals in 2011.
Yolande Norris
Yolande Norris is a Canberra based art school survivor and all round art tragic who has worked for organisations both large (National Gallery of Australia) and small (Canberra Contemporary Art Space). When she’s not wearing the Critical Animals director’s hat she is a curator, writer, streetpress editor, project coordinator, festival producer, blogger and shop girl.
