- Tactile Catalogue (PDF: 1Mb) --

The thematic group exhibition Tactile Imagination at Sydney's prestigious Ivan Dougherty Gallery represents a path-breaking showcase of creative practice by members of the Design Research cluster in UNSW's Faculty of the Built Environment (FBE). Of all the research activities conducted by staff and students within the Faculty, design research arguably produces the most distinctive, diverse, interdisciplinary, and intellectually thought provoking expressions of individual and collaborative creative activity.

This curated exhibition emerges from the cluster's focus on p ractice-led research and captures a diversity of artworks ranging across sculpture, video, light installation, industrial products and textile art. The forms are variously ingenious, inspired, and inscrutable, ranging from the playful to the ethereal, but all are theorised through interplays of the visual and the textual. The concerns are mostly conceptual and propositional rather than explicitly functional. At first glance, while distant from the academic concerns of built environment research, they are in fact subtly constructive gestures deeply revealing of the creativity of practice.. As Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge document in Thinking Through Art (2006), artworks framed as academic research demand their own rigorous protocols, although regardless of this particular context, art 'is always in and of this world' and its concerns have 'a far wider remit'.

The importance of this exhibition is thus twofold. It not only captures and contributes to a vibrant design research culture within the FBE, but also initiates dialogues of critiques and creativity within the wider community.

Robert Freestone
Acting Associate Dean/Research
Faculty of the Built Environment