Faculty Member, School of Humanities and Communication Arts
Lecturer (Design)
Arts
About
Samantha Edwards is a graphic designer, photographer and lecturer in visual communication at the University of Western Sydney. She is the program coordinator of the AGDA award winning fourth year professional student design studio ‘Rabbit Hole’. Samantha has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree from the University of Sydney and Diploma of Design from Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts. In 2011 she was the recipient of the highly prestigious Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence.
Samantha has extensive industry experience, working as a designer for two of Sydney’s leading branding consultancies – Billy Blue Creative and EKH Design. Samantha has also guest lectured at Billy Blue and Parsons School of Design in Paris. As a photographer she exhibits her work widely both in Australia and Europe and is represented in Paris by Galerie Emotion.
Samantha has just submitted her doctoral thesis for examination. Her PhD thesis is titled Graffiti Achaeography: The poetics of engagement in Sydney’s inner suburbs. This practice-based research project intervenes in the material traces of graffiti writing and urban art practice from inner Sydney’s recent urban past. It is an endeavour to map, frame, decipher and archive the tensions and dialogues in the differentiated and fragmented traces of illicit graffiti production to further insights into the relationship between place and cultural practice.
The research method draws from an expansive interdisciplinary frame that combines and weaves connections between archaeology and photography, what Michael Shanks refers to as archaeography. It is a framework developed to negotiate contemporaneous forms of archaeological intervention with material culture. I consider the photographic analysis of graffiti to be an archaeological matter because as artefacts of the methodological process photographs capture temporal fragments which through reframing make further interventions possible. It is a reflexive approach informed by post structuralism. To map the shifting landscape of graffiti production I have drawn from psychogeography and Debord’s theory of the dérive. For the analytical work I have turned to the concepts of multimodality and intertextuality to afford an effective reading of the differentiated material and semiotic assemblages of graffiti and urban art in situ.
The creation of the Sydney Graffiti Archive as a living repository for the photographs further re-emphasises the value of the recontextualisation of graffiti, as monuments to the past and sites of knowledge in their own right. The significance of this counter archive lies in its powerful reflexive mnemonic that encourages new ways of seeing illicit graffiti texts as it reshapes present relations to the past and subverts conventional notions of cultural heritage.
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