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COFA student invited to Harvard Conference on climate change

Article released: Monday, 17 August, 2009

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COFA PhD candidate Peter Charuk has been accepted as one of only 16 Australian students to attend the “Climate: Science + Humanities” conference at Harvard University in March of 2010.  The conference looks to bring together 40 graduates from China, Australia and the U.S. to present their global perspectives on the climate and climate change from three very different national bases, aiming to highlight research works that display genuine disciplinary crossover. Half the participants will be from humanities and social science disciplines, and the other half from the sciences.
Peter Charuk decided to apply to the conference as he thought it would be a very rare occurrence for an artist to speak at such an event as the Harvard Conference.

“There is a massive amount of work being done on climate change by artists but they seem to go unheard. Scientific results seem to dominate the airways but I feel that other voices can contribute just as well, by providing alternate points of view and different ways of seeing the world,” explains Charuk.

Charuk recently held an exhibition at the Western Plains Cultural Centre entitled Perspectives.Art.Ecology. The exhibition was a retrospective body of work spanning Charuks’ 30 year long career as an artist, and included collaborative works between Charuk and regional artists Kim Goldsmith and Gail Naden. Charuk has been researching the natural environment and the impact humans have on it for many years. His first major body of work, a series of large photo- etchings entitled Alternate Answers, 1980, combined original newspaper clippings, photographs, sketches and writings that reflected the global ecological, scientific and political issues associated with the energy crisis of the late 1970’s.  More recently Charuk has been researching work for his PhD in the School of Media Arts at COFA, looking at the experimental investigation of seen and unseen phenomena and its artistic re/construction using poetic methodology. Put more simply, Charuk elaborates, “In my work there is an interaction with mediated scientific methodologies and mythological interpretations of water as phenomena, such as its material form as ice. This new work investigates light, water and ice as ingredients of transitional elemental states, and the pursuit of light transmission and optic phenomena, like frozen water acting as a lens.”

Peter Charuk has had an extensive career in the visual and electronic arts. His experience includes exhibitions in the US, Belgium, UK, and numerous Australian Galleries.

For more information on Peter E. Charuk please visit: http://www.petercharuk.com/

For more information on Climate: Science + Humanities conference at harvard in 2010, please visit: http://www.go8.edu.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=236&Itemid=192