DrMerinda Kelly

About me

I have an extensive background in creative practice, art education and creative industry contexts. My creative practice explores the social, material, and affective intensities of discarded objects, archives, and their entanglements with bodily labour, schooling and the projects of colonisation, de-reindustrialisation, hypercapitalism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Through the intersection of creative practice, embodied pedagogy and research, I study the impacts of immersive encounters with art, culture, and heritage on citizens, including children, young people, and their communities in urban and regional institutions and public contexts. I also investigate why the arts and culture and arts education remain underfunded and undervalued in contemporary society despite their enduring presence throughout civilisation as universal languages for communicating stories, meanings and ideas about what it is to be human. At Deakin, I teach sustainable, inclusive practices and decolonising pedagogies for making and responding in visual arts, media, visual communication design, design technology (hard and soft material), and media/media arts education. 

About my Research

Activating experiential arts encounters for all 

In the research dimension of my role, I work individually and collectively to design and activate socially engaged art projects and public art encounters that bring the arts and culture into closer and more meaningful relation with the everyday lives of intergenerational citizens. My research centres on designing and researching performative, hands-on and decolonising counter practices and pedagogies for eliciting critical and creative ways of seeing, feeling, thinking and making. I ask what creative practice and decolonising pedagogies can do to generate new affective intensities, perspectives, ideas and meanings through embodied arts experiences in galleries, museums, universities, schools, early childhood, community arts centres and unexpected public spaces. I specialise in practice-led and arts-based, affective and post-qualitative research methods. Integral to my research and teaching is the production and delivery of professional learning experiences and participatory events for educators, artists, cultural producers and community arts practitioners.  My teaching at Deakin involves preparing post-graduate creatives to become art and design educators or professional artists and designers with PhDs. 

About my teaching and service:

Advocacy and activism for the arts and culture as diverse, universal forms of human meaning-making and communication. Accessing art and culture is a matter of equality and social and planetary justice for all.

My advocacy and activism for children, youth and their kin and communities to access engaging and meaningful encounters with the arts and culture in their everyday lives is informed by my professional experiences as an artist, arts educator and creative producer in schools, universities, galleries and community contexts. Children and youth require durational access to art in their schooling and lives more than ever before, yet 'learning IN' the visual arts is dissolving into service to other learning areas at a rapid rate. My advocacy is also fuelled by working as an art and design educator, K-12 teaching and learning director and head of a dedicated senior secondary art, design and technology campus. I have also been employed as a curriculum writer and Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA) studio arts examiner, examination writer and VCE studio arts textbook author.