Susan Fereday

For the botanical artist, see Susan Fereday (botanical artist).

Susan Fereday (born 1959) is an Australian artist, writer, curator and educator. She holds a doctorate from Monash University, Melbourne. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia.

Biography

Fereday studied to be a photographic technician in Adelaide. She attended Prahran College in Melbourne to study photographic art, obtaining her Bachelor of Arts in 1986 and her Master of Arts (Fine Art) in 1992. She performed research Paris in 1996–1997 on a scholarship from Samsung. She received her doctorate from Monash University in 2010.

Fereday has been a lecturer in art theory and studio practice at the Victorian College of the Arts (1990-93), Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1998-2000), and Monash University (2005-08). Fereday uses various media, including installation art, photography, and video. She collects and displays found photographs; in her series Under a Steel Sky, photos taken in the 1950s are sequenced to resemble Robert Frank's series, The Americans.

Fereday's doctoral thesis, Light Out of Darkness: the origin of photography in mystery and melancholy, was a study of the work of pioneer photographers Nicéphore Niépce and William Henry Fox Talbot.

Curator

Fereday was the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne during the period 1992 to 1995.

Exhibitions she has curated include:

• 1996: Ruins in Reverse exhibiting artists Lauren Berkowitz, Adam Boyd, Colin Duncan, Hewson-Walker, Shaun Kirby, Chris Langton, Callum Morton, Rose Nolan, Deborah Ostrow, Kathy Temin, Chris Ulbrick, Chris White, Constanze Zikos, at RMIT Gallery
• 1995: Like-ness: 46 photographs from Waverley City Collection, Centre for Contemporary Photography
• 1994: Ipso-Photo, co-curated with Stuart Koop, artists; Margaret Roberts, Chris Fortescue, Marie Sierra-Hughes, Phillip Watkins, at Centre for Contemporary Photography
• 1994: Don’t Stop, co-curated with Shiralee Saul, gallery shop and mail-order catalogue of works by thirty artists, Linden Gallery
• 1993: Immortality, Rose Farrell & George Parkin, Jeff Gibson, Chris Tabecki, Polixeni Papapetrou, Heather Fernon, at Centre for Contemporary Photography
• 1992: After the Fact: Photographs from the Police Forensic Archive, Victorian Centre for Photography

Exhibitions

Solo:

• 2013, to March 24: Infinite Image: Susan Fereday, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy
• 2013, to March 9: All Seeing, Sarah Scout Presents, 1a Crossley St, Melbourne

Group

• 2011, 14 May to 19 June: A Way of Calling, curated by Melissa Keys, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne

Collections

Fereday's work is held in the following public collection:

• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: 5 works (as of June 2018)

See also

• List of contemporary artists
• List of Australian artists

Further reading

• Ella Mudie, ‘Double exposure for faded images,’ The Age A2, 30/8/2008, p. 17-18
• Robert Nelson, ‘Memories lie beyond the surface’, The Age, 25/6/2008, p. 16
• Penny Webb, ‘Following the Customs of the Country’, The Age, 01/03/2005, p. 17
• Ihor Holubisky, 'Susan Fereday at Brisbane IMA', Art & Australia, Summer 2002, pp. 234–235 [1]
• Robert Schubert, ‘Susan Fereday: Sutton Gallery’, Art & Text, #52, 1995, pp. 91–92
• Robert Nelson, ‘Installation poking at hole in halo’, The Age, 17/5/1995, p. 21
• Stuart Koop, ‘Review: Susan Fereday’, Art & Text, #43, 1992, pp. 78–79
• Rex Butler, ‘A Love That Cannot Speak Its Name’, Agenda, #15, 1990, p. 19 [2]
• Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey, ‘Value’, Eyeline, #12, 1990, pp. 43–44 [3]
• Carolyn Barnes, ‘Value’, Agenda, #10, 1990, pp. 22–23 [4]

External links

• Official website
• Artist's page at Sarah Scout Gallery
• Entry in the Dictionary of Australian Artists