Visitor Profile August 2019

In this month's Visitor Profile, we speak with VCA/MCM academic Paul Fletcher about his involvement in our current exhibition Fabric Culture.

Hi Paul, welcome back to the Grainger Museum. Please could you introduce yourself to our Museum audience, and explain what your role is here at the University of Melbourne.

Hi, my name is Paul Fletcher and I am part of the Film & TV School of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, where I teach animation. I work with sound, animation, installation, projection and all things related to the output of animation.

Great! What has been your involvement in our current exhibition Fabric Culture? How did you involve your students in the exhibition too?

Well, its been a long involvement and long development!

The students as well as myself and Anthony (Lyons - lecturer in Interactive Composition) were all responding to the costumes within the Grainger Museum collection. We were especially interested in the toweling costumes, as well as those with beading (unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to explore these costumes further).

The task for both the Animation and Interactive Composition students was to recreate and extend upon the patterns we saw on costumes, which seemed to somehow imply animation and music already. So we worked these into animations and sound. These were then edited together, creating a further collective interactive piece, which is on continuous play within the exhibition.

Are you happy with the outcome of the exhibition? And with the performance you and Anthony did in this space?

I am happy that it is done! And because lots of people visiting the Museum have seen the students’ work. The performance was fun, and people seemed to enjoy that as well, which is great.

Many thanks to Paul for taking the time to respond to our questions. You can find Paul at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music Southbank campus. Or if you are very lucky, you may see him tinkering with the mechanisms of the washing machine currently on display as part of Fabric Culture!