Frances Barrett

Frances Barrett is an artist and Lecturer at UniSA Creative whose research focus is performance, installation and curating. Recently her research has pivoted around the modalities of listening and touch, with her works taking the form of immersive sound environments, live performances and performances with Museum and Gallery collections. 

In 2019 she was one of the three recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a solo commission for women working across performance and installation. The commissioned work, Meatus, will be presented by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2022. This project is the focus of her PhD, Meatus: A Curatorial Passage, which she undertook at Monash University (Supervisor: Tara McDowell, Associate Supervisor: Helen Hughes).Her recent projects include All Ears: A listening party, Campbelltown Arts Centre (Campbelltown, 2018); Into My Arms, Ace Open (Adelaide, 2018); and Handle, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art (New York, 2018). She was a studio artist at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the duration of 2018, Japan Foundation’s 2017 Curator Representative at Tokyo Performing Arts Market (Yokohama) and in 2015 was one of the selected artists in Kaldor Public Art Projects’ Australian Artist Residency Program. She is currently Chair of the Curatorial Advisory Panel for an upcoming symposium, VERS: Talking Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising, scheduled for 2022. This will be presented in partnership with Monash University Museum of Art, Samstag Museum of Art and ACE Open. In 2022 she will be presenting new work in a national tour presented by Museums and Galleries of NSW. 

Since 2007 she has been one member of the art collective, Barbara Cleveland, with Diana Baker Smith, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley. Their recent video and performance works are deliberations on history and memory as embodied action, as fiction, as mode of collaboration. Over the past 10 years they have presented their video installations and performances at Adelaide Biennial, National Gallery of Australia, Hayward Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul). Across 2022 and 2023 Museums and Galleries of NSW and Goulburn Regional Art Gallery will tour Barbara Cleveland’s survey exhibition, Thinking Business, throughout NSW and Queensland.

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy Monash University

• Bachelor of Arts with Honours (Performance and Theatre Studies) The University of New South Wales

• Bachelor of Art Theory The University of New South Wales