Issues in contemporary conservation
About
The Issues in Contemporary Conservation Group positions the Cripps Institute at the forefront of new thinking in cultural conservation. It explores ethical, social, and philosophical questions about what conservation is and how it can be ethically practiced. It will platform issues, concepts and approaches to conservation from within the field and from related disciplines, testing them through real-world research to develop socially grounded and responsible ways of caring for cultural heritage.
Projects
Forkology: conservators as art-developers
Workshops and lectures were executed in Melbourne (GCCMC), London (UCL), Vienna (Art Academy) and Bern (HKB) diffracting conservation through the lens of Gustav Metzger’s (1926–2017) radical artistic philosophies. The workshops put into action the argument that conservators, like artists, engage in acts of creation, transformation, and destruction. Just as Metzger’s auto-destructive art sought to emphasise impermanence, conservation should be seen as a dynamic, iterative process and by comparing conservation to Version Control Systems in engineering and software development reinforces the idea that artworks, like programs, exist in multiple versions, each shaped by external factors and agencies. Reimagining the conservation of Metzger’s work Liquid Crystal Environment 50 years into the future challenges conservators to rethink their role, shifting from change management to active participants in an artwork’s ongoing evolution.
Material Mobility and Cultural Exchange: Mapping Indonesia Diaspora Art Practices in Australia
This two-year postdoctoral project focuses on exploring the materials and techniques of Indonesian diaspora artists living in Australia, and co-developing new frameworks for artist and conservator collaboration. Approximately ten artists—established, mid-career, and emerging—living across Melbourne, Sydney and Northern NSW joined the project in 2025 to participate in long-form studio-based interviews (audio and video recorded), followed by conservation lab collaboration to take place in 2026. The interviews examine each artist's relationship to their materials, where they have come from and how these material preferences may reflect the cultural knowledge systems, personal histories, philosophical frameworks, and the lived experience of being both in Indonesia and Australia that informs artistic practice. Situated within the history of Australia-Indonesia cross-cultural engagement, this project asks: How do art materials, techniques, and cultural knowledge shift and adapt when artists from Indonesia migrate to Australia; and what do these shifting transcultural practices reveal about diasporic identity, material mobility and the broader landscape of Australia-Indonesia cultural connections?
