Melinda Rackham

Melinda Rackham (born 1959) is an Australian artist, writer and curator.

Education and early Art

Rackham studied sculpture and performance at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, graduating in 1989 with the Sculpture and Alumni prizes. It was here she was first involved in Australian artist-run initiatives, initially as co-Director in 1987 (with Adrienne Doig) of ArtHaus laneway gallery in Darlinghurst, then as a member of Ultimo Project Studio Collective in Ultimo and Glebe in Sydney.

In 1995, whilst completing a Master of Arts in Women's Studies at the University of Wollongong, Rackham became one of the earliest Australian curators of Internet Art.[1] In collaboration with Louise Manner, Ali Smith and Sandy Indlekofer-O’Sullivan, Rackham produced the 1995 exhibition WWWO : Wollongong Worlds Women Online - an Australian online women's group exhibition, featuring the first or early digital works from 30 Australian women including Francis Dyson and Mez Breeze.

In 2000, Rackham's carrier won The Mayne Award for Multimedia[2] as part of the Adelaide Festival Awards. In an interview with Eugene Thacker in CTheory Rackham speaks of dealing with the body at a molecular level" infectious agents .. steaming open protoplasmic envelopes, penetrating cellular cores, crossing species boundaries, and shattering illusions of the discrete autonomy of ourselves"[3]

As a pioneering artist and commentator on identity, locality and sexuality in networked, 3d multi-user, game and mobile environments, Rackham's artworks were widely exhibited during the first wave of internet art (1995–2003) being included in seminal exhibitions like Art Entertainment Network, Beyond Interface, Arco Electronico, File, ISEA, European Media Art Festival, transmediale, lab3D, Perspecta99, la Biennale de Montreal 2000, and Biennial of Buenos Aires 2002.

She is founder and producer the online media arts forum, –empyre–, from 2002 as part of her doctoral thesis on Art and Identity in Virtual Reality Environments.[4] -empyre- featured in events at NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, and documenta in the Documenta 12 magazines project (2006).[5]

Building "empyrean" - one of Australia's first multi-user virtual reality environments, Rackham explored the conception of electronically mediated environments as "soft skinned space", and encouraged users' to explore their relationship with their avatars.[6]

Two of Rackham's internet artworks are included in N. Katherine Hayle's "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary"[7] - a book designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom along with the CD "The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1". Hayles's systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, the complex and compelling issues at stake and wide-ranging implications for literary study.

Work

In 2003-04, Rackham was invited to be the inaugural Curator of Networked Media at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne and later 2010-2102 partner curator for Australia's Royal Institution.

Rackham was Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology[8] from 2005 until 2009. She fostered the development of wearable technologies - producing the re:Skin Masterclass, and curating Coded Cloth exhibition of wearable technology at Samstag Museum in 2008.[9]

As an adjunct professor at RMIT University,from 2009-2012, Rackham continued to curate and write on the emerging art and cultures manifesting across networked, responsive, biological, wearable and distributed practices and environments. In 2010 she curated "Dream Worlds: Australian Moving Image",[10] platforming artists on the 27 meter long public screen in Beijing's exclusive Sanlitun Village and large screens in Xian, and examined the cultural impact of media arts in China and Hong Kong.

After researching and writing the substantial monograph "Catherine Truman : Touching Distance" [11] published in 2016, she took a sabbatical and lived part-time over a period of two years on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Indigenous Homelands of Central Australia.

In 2017 Rackham was appointed Adjunct Research Professor[12] at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia where she continues to investigate and publish on the arts, environment and feminisms. In 2019 she completed a suite of Essays[13] for Cyberfeminist sheroes VNS Matrix Archive, and is co-authoring with Elvis Richardson, the forthcoming CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions since 2008 documenting the origins and evolution of CoUNTess and proposing interventions into gender asymmetry in the Australian artworld.

Adoption

Adopted at the age of 1 month from St. Anthony's Foundling Home in Croydon, NSW, Kerri Anne Burgess was renamed Melinda Mary Rackham. She grew up in Tamworth - a socially awkward only child who excelled academically. At 15 she gave birth to a son, Brendan Rackham, who, due to lack of adoptive family support was also removed for adoption. In 1982 Rackham discovered Brendan was profoundly disabled and had died several months earlier. Prompted after 30 years by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard's 2013 Adoption Apology,[14] she became an advocate for exposing the secrecy and trauma of Forced adoption in Australia.

Rackham was an active member of the adoptee advocacy group IDentityRites[15] from 2014-2017. She served on the Steering Committee which commissioned "The Space Between",[16] a commemorative public artwork in recognition of the long lasting effects of Forced Adoption practices in South Australia, located in Grundy Gardens along Adelaide's River Torrens, unveiled on 14 July 2016.[17]

With IDentityRites, Rackham co-authored and co-produced a volume of poetry and prose, "ADOPTED",[18] in 2017.,[19] and in 2018 she featured in Heather Waters documentary film on the lifelong effects of adoption 'You Should be Grateful'[20]

Awards
  • 2018 SALA Festival Patron’s Art Writer’s Award, Australia[21]
  • 2001 SoundSpace Award for Virtual Environments, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Germany[22]
  • 2000 The Mayne Award for Multimedia [23] as part of the Adelaide Festival Awards

References
  1. http://scanlines.net/node/1621
  2. https://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/adelaide-festival-awards-for-literature
  3. 14432-Article Text-12777-1-10-20150824.pdf
  4. Josephine Bosma, Constructing Media Spaces: The novelty of net(worked) art was and is all about access and engagement, MedienKunstNetz, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/public_sphere_s/media_spaces/18/
  5. http://www.subtle.net/empyre/documenta.html
  6. http://scan.net.au/scan/magazine/display.php?journal_id=14
  7. http://newhorizons.eliterature.org/index.php
  8. http://www.anat.org.au
  9. Coded Cloth: a 21st-Century Revolution in Art, Fashion and Design Leonardo Vol. 42, No. 5, MIT Press, USA, p 386-393 [2009] http://www.subtle.net/pdf/MRLEON.pdf
  10. http://www.dreamworlds.com.au
  11. http://www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product.php?productid=1298&cat=0&page=&featured=Y
  12. https://people.unisa.edu.au/Melinda.Rackham
  13. https://vnsmatrix.net/essays/manifesto
  14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hVbokTpYeg
  15. https://identityritesblog.wordpress.com
  16. http://www.chebart.com/projects-1#/the-space-between/
  17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHThgf-rhMg
  18. http://www.ipsify.com/adopted/
  19. http://radioadelaide.org.au/2017/07/20/adopted-sharing-stories-of-trauma-loss-and-identity/
  20. https://www.watersproductions.com.au/you-should-be-grateful/
  21. https://www.salafestival.com/news/38/
  22. http://www.subtle.net/archive/Sound-Space.html
  23. https://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/adelaide-festival-awards-for-literature

Further reading
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