The Researchers
Dr Harriet Parsons
Harriet Parsons is an artist and independent researcher. She graduated from the Sydney College of the Arts in 1997 and exhibited regularly until 2011 in galleries in Sydney and Melbourne. She received a Master’s degree from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012 and completed her PhD in 2019 at the School of Culture and Communication, Melbourne University. Since 2020 she has been the Director of Currency House, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes the interests of creative practitioners and publishes the essay series, the New Platform Papers.
Dr Chris Bond
Chris Bond is a contemporary artist who creates hand-made facsimiles of books, magazines, exhibition catalogues and correspondence that become the documentary materials for his installations that hijack the conventions of the museum display. His narrative scenarios construct uncannily real worlds in which fictional artists, writers and organisations are the subjects of fantastic stories that hover on the edge of possibility.
He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) Honours at RMIT in 1997 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts (Visual Art) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. He has featured in 24 solo and 130 curated exhibitions at venues including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Gertrude Contemporary, Blindside, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Bus Projects, Heide Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Samstag Museum, Adelaide.
In 2001 he was awarded a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary. In 2013, he won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, and in 2017 the BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award and received an Australia Council Art Development Grant.
He is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. He lives and works in Melbourne.
Matthew Coller
Matthew Coller has an Honours degree in Science (1995) and a Masters degree in Multi Media (2004) from Monash University. He is the director of Temporal Earth, a company he founded which applies a time dimension to geography to explore history, archaeology and geology. He regularly collaborates with historical researchers, libraries and museums to create data-driven historical animations that visually represent the social and environmental changes that have taken place in a location or landscape over time. The project delivers learning resources on a range of topics on Australia's past, present and future.