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ABOUT
Amy Spiers is a white settler artist researcher of English, Scottish and European Jewish descent currently living and working on the unceded Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). Spiers is a Senior Research Fellow based at RMIT University School of Art and a current recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), undertaking a 3-year research project exploring settler artists' roles and responsibilities in transforming Australin national culture through truth-telling colonial injustices and affirming First Peoples' sovereignties. Spiers has recently co-edited the book, Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia, with Worimi creative, cultural practitioner and oral historian, Genevieve Grieves. She is leader of RMIT University School of Art’s Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group.
Spiers has worked broadly in the arts as an artist, curator, producer, writer and scholar for over 20 years, focussed particularly on creative research that explores the capacities of public and socially engaged art to critique and positively transform present society, and particularly how such art practices might generatively address silenced colonial violence and social tensions between Indigenous and settler peoples in Australia. Amy completed a Master of Fine Art in 2011 and a PhD in 2018 at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. The major artistic output of her PhD was #MirandaMustGo (2017), an creative campaign that called for settlers to end habitual associations at Hanging Rock, Central Victoria, Australia with a fiction of vanished white schoolgirls—including missing protagonist Miranda—derived from Joan Lindsay’s celebrated novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), and to instead address real First Peoples' losses and traumas in the region as a consequence of colonisation. This project became the subject of much media and public attention. Her practice-based PhD was awarded with no amendments from both examiners, and described by examiner Dr Marina Vishmidt of Goldsmiths, University of London, as “a superlative practice-based thesis” and other examiner, Dr Lucas Ihlein of University of Wollongong, as “an exemplary work of practice-based research”.
Spiers’ socially engaged, critical art practice focuses on the creation of live performances, multi-artform installations and conceptual artworks for both site-specific and gallery contexts. Her solo and collaborative artworks aim to prompt questions and debate about present society particularly about the gaps and silences in public discourse where difficult histories and social tensions are overlooked or smoothed over. Spiers has presented art projects across Australia and internationally, including at Fremantle Arts Centre, Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne), the Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg), MONA FOMA (Hobart) and the 2015 Vienna Biennale.
As an arts writer and researcher, Amy has published work in academic journals, exhibition catalogues and art magazines, including writing for Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Artlink, Public Art Dialogue, and the Journal of Arts and Communities, as well as contributing to key anthologies on socially engaged and public art practice such as Civic Actions: Artists’ Practices Beyond the Museum (Museum of Contemporary Art 2017), Engaging Publics, Public Engagement (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 2015) and The Questions We Ask Together (Open Engagment In Print 2015). More recently, Amy co-edited Let's Go Outside: Art in Public with Charlotte Day and Callum Morton for Monash University Museum of Art (Monash University Publishing 2022) and co-authored the book, Art/Work: Social Enterprise, Young Creatives & the Forces of Marginalisation, with Grace McQuilten, Kim Humphery and Peter Kelly (Palgrave Pivot, 2022).
Spiers also works as a curator and producer of exhibitions and public programs including co-curating with Grace McQuilten Takeover at Parliament Steps for ACCA’s Who’s Afraid of Public Space? program (2022) which involved a unique collaboration with diverse emerging artists from youth arts organisations Outer Urban Projects, The Social Studio and Youthworx. In 2024, she convened the program Activating Truth with art industry partners Next Wave and InPlace, to bring together Indigenous and settler artists from Canada and Australia to exchange and share knowledge about truth-telling through creative practice via a residency at Garambi Baanj and a public program at Brunswick Mechanics Institute. She also co-convened the online symposium Counter-monuments: Indigenous settler relations in Australian contemporary art and memorial practices with Genevieve Grieves that was hosted by ACCA in 2021.
Photo credit: Jody Haines
Further information
︎ RMIT Staff Profile
Contact
︎ amyspiers@gmail.com