Publications and Exhibition Catalogues
I have authored, edited and contributed essays, to numerous art and architecture publications and exhibition catalogues. A few are below.
I have especially enjoyed taking a creative and poetic approach to some recent texts.
Renzo Piano: The Art of Making Buildings
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018
Author and co-editor exhibition catalogue
This book, accompanying an exhibition at the Royal Academy, provides an intimate look at the life and work of Renzo Piano. The book opens with my essay “An Architect of Dignity” and an interview with Piano, followed by a series of texts by major figures from the worlds of culture, engineering and building. These include Richard Rogers, Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Lorenzo Ciccarelli, Fulvio Irace, Alistair Guthrie, Susumu Shingu, Sir John Tusa, Paul Winkler and actor Roberto Benigni.
The UK Pavilion – nicknamed ‘Dandelion’ by the Chinese people – was designed by Thomas Heatherwick. It was visited by almost 8 million people at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, winning the Expo’s Gold Medal for design and the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize. I wrote a book charting the development of the project from competition stage to finished pavilion, uncovering the roots of Heatherwick’s idea and the story of those who helped realise its vision, including project manager Mace, engineer Adams Kara Taylor and exhibition designers Casson Mann and Troika. The dual-language book was designed by Marque.
Dandelion: Making of the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010
The British Council Visual Arts Publications, 2011
Author
Essay:
Sensing Spaces: Reflections on a Creative Experiment
Sensing Spaces: Reflections on a Creative Experiment, outlined the thinking behind Sensing Spaces, the curatorial strategy, and the exhibition’s outcomes and is presented alongside a series of installation photographs by Hélène Binet.
It features in Sensing Architecture: Essays on the Nature of Architectural Experience, a collection of essays that provides commentary on the philosophical, psychological, social and economic ideas that shape our experience of architecture. Edited by Owen Hopkins, it derives from a symposium of the same name that accompanied Sensing Spaces. Other essays:
Night Moves: Dissolving Time and Space in the Nocturnal City by Nick Dunn
Portraits of Experience: The Cathedral Photographs of Frederick H. Evans by Dervla MacManus
Labyrinthine Time: J. G. Ballard, Robert Smithson and Tacita Dean by Nicole Sierra
On Boredom: The Blurred Spaces of Maxim Gorky’s Coney Island by Christian Parreno
Sensing Spaces
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014
Editor and author, exhibition catalogue
The Sensing Spaces exhibition sought to make an audience attentive to the complexity of architectural experience through large scale immersive installations by Grafton Architects (Ireland), Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso and Germany), Kengo Kuma (Japan), Li Xiaodong (China), Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Chile) and Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura (Portugal).
This catalogue brings the focus back to the sensual aspects of architecture: the subtle and intangible ways it impacts on human experience. It features my introduction to the exhibition and an essay by Philip Ursprung “Presence: the light touch of architecture’, as well as conversations with the architects, their sketches of the installations and key buildings.
Essay: Choreographing Curatorial Conversations
in Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice: Curated Works from the P.E.A.R. Journal
Edited by Matthew Butcher and Megan O'Shea for UCL Press, 2020
My essay focused on curating architectural exhibition, particularly those that are abstract, relational and performative. The piece explores issues of permission, participation and intuition, that is interwoven with conversations with three artists / choreographers, Vera Tussing, Bim Malcomson, and Ray Young.
I have long found conversations to be a creative and critical tool and have sought them to drive my work. Vera and I met during Sensing Spaces, and she observed, “there was a shared language beyond our different fields; a common way of approach…. the way you used language and discussed your exhibition, could have been me talking about my work”.
Essay: What is the fuel of our fables?
in Fossil Fables
Exhibition Catalogue, Tin Sheds Gallery, 2023
Fossil fables is a collection of works exposing Australia’s fraught and complex relationship with fossil fuel extraction. They use the tools of architecture to analyse and communicate the far reaching environmental, social and political implications of the country’s economic reliance on coal mining.
For my introductory text I sought to create images with words to convey the complexity of the issues and humanise them, and to conjure the experience of the exhibition.
A project by the Global Extraction Observatory, a research collective founded by Dr. Eduardo Kairuz and Dr. Sam Spurr, with collaborators d’Arcy Newberry Dupé and Bader Bud Rizk. The book was designed and edited by Therese Keogh.
Essay: Exhibition Rituals
Banquet exhibition catalogue, Tin Sheds Gallery, 2022
I wrote an introductory essay to the catalogue, on the value of architecture exhibitions and how they can create participatory and performative spaces that enable the critical interrogation of ideas.
Banquet re-imagined the Tin Sheds Gallery as a banquet hall, transforming into a spatial laboratory exploring food processes and the human condition. Fictional moments in film and literature were re-animated through seven handcrafted analogue ‘food machines’, accompanied by architectural drawings. Created by Marissa Lindquist, Michael Chapman, Timothy Burke, Derren Lowe, Imogen Sage and Robyn Schmidt.
Essay: Taken to the Edge
Paul Connor Recent Paintings
I throughly enjoyed writing a text for Paul Connor, about a new body of paintings called Cliff Paintings of Tarralbe (South Head) and having a conversation with him at Art Atrium about his latest exhibition.
The essay starts as follows:
Paul Connor takes us to the edge….
To the sheer edge of the tamed land and the vast wild ocean
To the deep edge of time and ourselves
University of Sydney, School of Architecture, Design, Planning, Graduation catalogues
Editor and editorial author
I curated and co-edited the University of Sydney Graduate Exhibition catalogues 2020-2022 alongside my role as Graduate Exhibition co-ordinator, and in 2021/22 leading the student elective who devised and realised the shows.
Catalogues designed and produced by Adrian Thai