In conversation: Julie Ewington and Emma Fielden, with a poetry reading by Carol Jenkins

This conversation and poetry reading took place at The Lock-Up, Newcastle Australia, on 14 September 2019, for the An Immeasurable Distance.
The event is introduced by Courtney Novak, Artistic Director of The Lock-Up

Julie Ewington is a writer, curator and broadcaster based in Sydney. An authority on contemporary Australian art, especially art by women, and contemporary art from Southeast Asia, she has held both academic and curatorial positions, always focusing on contemporary art. Her interests extend from feminism to cosmopolitanism, from installation to jewellery, from museum projects to cultural resistance.

Between 2001-14 Julie was Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Key achievements there included the 2005 retrospective The Art of Fiona Hall; the national surveys Contemporary Australia: Optimism (2008) and Contemporary Australia: Women (2012); and contributing to six editions of the Gallery’s acclaimed Asia-Pacific Triennial

In 2014, Julie received the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Award to honour her achievements as a curator, writer, and advocate for the visual arts.

Since 2014 Julie has written catalogue essays, and reviews for journals including The Monthly and Artforum.  Major publications include monographs on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014). In 2016 Julie curated The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver for TarraWarra Museum of Art, and was a member of the curatorium for Unfinished Business: Perpectives on art and feminism, which concluded at ACCA, Melbourne, in March 2018. 

Carol Jenkins is a poet based in Sydney, Australia. At university she studied science, followed by a graduate diploma in Labour Law and a Masters in Public Health. After a career in chemical regulation and assessment she has pursued creative writing since 2003, and in 2007 established River Road press which produces audio CDs of Australian poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and her poem “Shirt/Post Shirt” was commended in the 2007 Newcastle Poetry Prize. Her latest book A Crooked Stile was published by Puncher & Wattman in August 2019. She has two earlier collections of poetry Fishing in the Devonian (2008) and Xn, (2013), both short listed for Premiers’ Awards, and an illustrated novel Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series (2016), all from Puncher & Wattman. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French and Russian.