Art professors win summer residency in Tasmania

Maja Godlewska and Marek Ranis, faculty members in the Department of Art & Art History, are the 2019 University of Tasmania Cradle Coast Campus Artists in Residence. They will travel to Tasmania in May to begin their project, “Landscape: A Place Remembered and Imagined.”

According to the University of Tasmania, Godlewska and Ranis, working directly with the local community, will explore the region’s environment and its place in the lives of locals. They will research how tourists interact with landscapes through technology and social media by visiting the most “instagrammable” North-West locations. Their resulting work will be a mixed-media installation and film that capture community relationships with the local landscape.

“We want to investigate how the natural landscape becomes ‘a place,’ a fabric of memories and identity, where objective geography is as important as collective and individual psycho-geography,” Godlewska said. “This will involve working on a collaborative scroll installation with community members, including Cradle Coast campus students and interested local artists. Our short film will document this work, while featuring interviews with project participants about their memories of the region’s landscapes. We hope this community project will prompt searches through family photo albums, meaningful conversations with relatives and revisiting childhood adventures, and that this, in turn, will deepen the awareness of the role natural environment plays in people’s lives.”

After returning to Charlotte, the professors plan to develop a series of paintings based on the raw material gathered in Tasmania.