Art & science

Briony Barr is a visual artist whose practice investigates individual and collaborative rule-based drawing. As an extension of her individual process-based methodology, she regularly collaborates with scientists, as well as large groups of people, to generate artworks. In an on-going collaboration with physicist Andrew Melatos, she makes large-scale drawings (involving 20 or more participants) exploring the evolution of complex systems.

Briony earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and MFA from the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne, Australia. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Australia, Mexico, America and South Korea.

Most recently, her collaborative work Experiment #4 (part of the ongoing Drawing on Complexity series) was included in The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Inauguration show in Seoul.

Her work has been supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award (2008) and a New Work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts (2012).

Leah Heiss is a Melbourne-based artist and designer whose practice is located at the nexus of art, design and science - using advanced technologies to develop potent human scale projects. Her process is deeply collaborative, working with experts from nanotechnology through to manufacturing.

Current projects include new forms for hearing technologies, biosignal sensing jewellery, emergency jewellery for times of crisis, swallowable devices to detect gas fluctuations within the body, and ongoing experimentation with next-generation materials such as magnetic liquids, memory metals, and electricity conducting textiles.

James Saunders is an actor who has appeared extensively on stage (Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Company B Belvoir, Bell Shakespeare), on film (The Turning, Animal Kingdom) and on television (Offspring, Winners and Losers, Neighbours).

James Saunders has performed with the Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Company B Belvoir, Bell Shakespeare Company, Playbox, Eleventh Hour and La Mama, as well as in both the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and numerous international festivals throughout Europe and USA.

He wrote and performed The Harry Harlow Project, premiering at the Victorian Arts Centre in 2009, and touring to Australian capital cities in 2011, now commissioned by ABC Radio for the Radio National show Hindsight. He developed the show into a feature film, currently in development with Berlin based director Eron Sheean. His new theatre show, Fugue, is currently in development in collaboration with neuroscientists at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes, University of Melbourne and Monash University.

Other recent theatre credits include On the production of Monsters, Richard III, Don Juan in Soho, all for the MTC; Song of the Bleeding Throat for Eleventh Hour, Bare Witness for Mobile States, Appetite (KAGE Dance Theatre) for the Melbourne Festival, Antigone for Company B Belvoir, Fat Pig for STC, Small Metal Objects for Back to Back Theatre touring around Australia and to Europe in 2007-9, and Bell Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.

He won a Best Actor Green Room Award for The Black Swan of Trespass, by Lally Katz, which then toured to New York (and is the winner of 8 local and international awards). He was also a member of the Green Room Award winning ensemble Playbox Inside 2001, where he featured in Seven Days of Silence, Ancient Enmity and Public Dancing. James received a Goethe Institute Scholarship to Berlin in 2005, and collaborated with Film Director Eron Sheean on the feature Errors of the Human Body at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.

Film credits include the feature films The Turning and Animal Kingdom. TV credits include Offspring, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Winners and Losers (recurring), Utopia Girls, City Homicide, Neighbours, Wilfred, Blue Heelers and Stingers.

James featured in the German/Australian co-production film A Familiar Lullaby by Lally Katz. He is a graduate of the VCA.

Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, multi-media artist and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Age and many more. She is director/co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave—a creative multi-media show about gravitational waves with sell-out shows as part of Melbourne International Arts Festival, World Science Festival Brisbane and featured at New Scientist Live (UK). Alicia’s TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about combining art with science. In 2021 she completed the Boyd Garret residency (City of Melbourne) and a Virtual Writer in Residency for Manchester City of Literature. In 2023 she has received ANAT’s Synapse Artist Residency and has co-created an art installation for Science Gallery Melbourne’s exhibition, Dark Matters.