Rosie Issac awarded the 2023 Georges Mora Fellowship

Rosie Issac awarded the 2023 Georges Mora Fellowship

The Georges Mora Fellowship board is delighted to announce our 2023 fellowship has been awarded to Rosie Isaac.

Isaac will develop her project ‘A stored charge: a material study of electrical technologies and embodied futures’ which will explore the materiality of electricity and how electrification, and more recently battery technology, shapes social and political imagination. The project will challenge the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic, considering how metallic elements are absorbed and used within the body and how our nervous system functions electrically.

Beginning with materiality, the stuff of electricity, Isaac will weave the social, political, and speculative possibilities out of it. Batteries store chemical energy that is converted to electricity, that will allow EVs to replace petrol cars, or that will store sun for cloudy days. Batteries carry optimism – they are a technological solution to the climate crisis. But inevitably there are environmental and human costs to extracting the materials required to produce this ‘miracle’. In this project, Isaac frames the battery as a silver bullet, symbolic of a desire for technology that will save us from climate catastrophe. Throughout the fellowship, Isaac will research the 18th century discovery of electricity and its production as ‘magic’ and spectacle. Examining the electro-chemical processes that allow battery materials (lithium, graphite) to store, release and then recapture power.
 

Rosie Isaac (b. Naarm/Melbourne, 1990) is an artist with a research-based sculpture, writing and performance practice. Rosie’s practice focuses on the power relations embedded in language and other social institutions. She is interested in art making as a form of attention, one that might imagine different material and social futures. Recent projects include an iterative performance ‘What we habitually call’ first performed in 2021 at Ace Open as part of Reading Circles; ‘Brain blankets’ in collaboration with Aodhan Madden at the Foundation Fiminco, Paris, in 2021; ‘Intestine in my eye’ part of Next Wave Festival 2018; and ‘BACKWARD PLAY’ as part of Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV at 99% and Blindside in 2022. Her writing has been published in un. Magazine and Cordite Poetry review. She has worked in community radio production and as the co-editor of un. Magazine in 2020 with Elena Gomez. She is currently working on a solo sculpture show to be presented at Flippy’s Gallery in November 2022. Rosie is a Sessional Academic Lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts.