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Visiting Artist Series

➔

Amy Spiers in conversation with Leah Decter

EVENT LOCATION:
Bell Auditorium (D440)

Event Date & Time:
March 18, 2025, 1:30 p.m.

Artist Statement

Amy Spiers engages in creative, practice-led research that explores how public and socially engaged art might generatively address difficult colonial histories, ongoing injustices and social relations between First Peoples and settlers in Australia.

Their art practice focuses on the creation of live performances, multi-artform installations, digital and conceptual artworks for both site-specific and gallery contexts. Spiers aims to prompt questions and debate about about gaps and silences in public discourse where difficult histories and social tensions are overlooked or smoothed over.

Indicative of Spiers’ work is “#MirandaMustGo” (2017-present), an artistic campaign that calls for settlers to end habitual associations at the iconic Hanging Rock, Australia with fictional character Miranda and the story of vanished white schoolgirls derived from Joan Lindsay’s novel “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1967), and instead address real First Peoples’ losses and traumas at the site. This project became the subject of much media and public attention.

Website: https://amyspiers.com.au/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spiers_amy/

Amy Spiers portrait

About Amy Spiers and Leah Decter

Amy Spiers is a white settler artist and researcher of Jewish, Scottish and British descent currently living and working on the unceded Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). Spiers is a Senior Research Fellow based at RMIT University School of Art and a recent recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), currently undertaking a 3 year research project exploring settler artists’ roles and responsibilities in truth-telling colonial injustices and advancing First Peoples’ sovereignties. Spiers has recently co-edited the book, “Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia”, with Worimi creative, cultural practitioner and oral historian, Genevieve Grieves.

Leah Decter is a white settler artist-scholar of Jewish ancestry who divides her time between Treaty 1 territory and Kjipuktuk/Halifax where she is a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies at NSCAD University. She has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork in Canada and internationally, and her writing has appeared in edited collections, academic journals and contemporary art publications including Making (Eco)Logical: Locating Canadian Arts in the Environmental Humanities, Performance Matters Journal, C Magazine (with Tania Willard) and a Special Issue of PUBLIC Journal, “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures,” she co-edited with Carla Taunton.