SSSHARC broker and facilitate research exchange between University of Sydney researchers and their outside interlocuters via visiting fellowships, exchanges and a range of in-house initiatives designed to build authentic research partnerships that will grow and change to meet the demands of the future.

Website:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/our-research/centres-institutes-and-groups/sydney-social-sciences-and-humanities-advanced-research-centre.html

Project Mentor at SSSHARC

SSSHARC Director

Professor Lee Wallace - Director, Sydney Social Science and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), The University of Sydney. 

Professor Lee Wallace is the Director of SSSHARC at The University of Sydney as well as steering social enterprise projects and the Research Impact Accelerator program. Wallace has won awards for her expertise and senior mentoring, including early career researchers and academics with non-traditional outputs with high social impact.

SSSHARC is a collaborative research space designed to advance innovative research partnerships and methodologies across the humanities and social sciences. They have a commitment to research excellence and knowledge sharing. 

Art/Play/Risk Collaboration

Dr Sanné Mestrom – Art/Play/Risk 2024 Principal Collaborator and Research Partner.

Dr. Mestrom is a Public artist, DECRA fellow an internationally recognised and award winning artist with extensive exhibtions and residencies, and her practice-led research seeks to incorporate “play” into a socially engaged practice as a means to question the social consequences of urban design. Her current research investigates ways that art in public places – and urban design more broadly – can become critically integrated, inclusive and interactive spaces. To do so, her projects bring together sculpture and the body to examine the role of art in rewriting current definitions of ‘play’ as relating to the physical, experiential and ideological conditions of ‘place’.

Creating temporary and permanent sculptural forms that respond to the built environment and our movement through it, softens the separation of art and everyday life; it is through this ‘softness’ that play has the potential to open up a space to escape certain logics, and denying logic is itself a subversive – and therefore political– action. Read more about award winning work in Vogue 2017 and her recent solo show in Vogue 2024.

Websites:

https://www.artplayrisk.com.au

https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/sanne-mestrom.html

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanne_mestrom/

Nadia Odlum, Art/Play/Risk Lab. PhD Candidate and Researcher.

PhD candidate, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney

Nadia Odlum is a multidisciplinary artist, driven by a fascination with urban environments. Using a broad range of materials and methods, they create playful and immersive works that explore personal and collective experiences of urban life. Often working site-specifically, Odlum deploys queer curiosity to seek out new interactions and perceptions within urban space. Odlum’s work has been shown in galleries and public spaces across Australia and internationally. This includes presentations at the Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks, Artspace, Home of the Arts (HOTA) and MANA Contemporary USA, as well as public art commissions for Urban Art Projects and the City of Parramatta Council and pedagogical projects for Kaldor Public Art Projects and The Powerhouse Museum. Nadia Odlum is a past artist in residence at Parramatta Artists’ Studios Rydalmere, and a current PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

nadiaodlum.com

Associate Professor Lian Loke – 2024 Principal collaborator and research partner.

ElectroSk8 curator 2019. based at the school of architecture, design and planning.

Dr Lian Loke is an Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. She is a member of the Design Lab, the Affective Interactions Lab and the Urban Interfaces Lab.

Lian’s research in the multi-disciplinary field of human-computer interaction studies the interactivity of humans and machines through a choreographic and somaesthetic lens. It is characterised by the translation of embodied knowledge from dance and somatics into an aesthetics of interaction that radically integrates epistemologies of practice from the arts and sciences. Her research explores how to design embodied and movement-based interactions and experiences with emerging technologies that support human agency, creative expression, skill and vitality. Her enduring interest in dance and the kinaesthetic imagination drives creative research into kinetic expression, with projects exploring how humans and robots can collaboratively interact through movement and gesture in a range of contexts from the personal and domestic to industrial. Research into body-focused interactive experiences includes projects on meditation and the use of sound, brainwave, breath and motion sensors as technologies for orchestrating attentional focus.

Websites:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/architecture/about/our-people/academic-staff/lian-loke.html

http://www.lianloke.com/electrosk8.html

Key Research Assistance

2024

SkateCER Research Assistants (qualitative data generation including filming and visual data, community / skater-informed insights and project design consultation)

Alicia Mardones Saavedra, roller skater and MA candidate, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, USYD – Instagram

Aaron Christiansen, landscape architecture student, BA Hons program, UNSW – Instagram

Art/Play/Risk Research Assistants

Nadia Odlum, artist, PhD Candidate USYD and research assistant, Art/Play/Risk – Website, About and Instagram

Caitlin Roseby, architect, CAD sessions – Instagram

Collaborative Outcomes with Art/Play/Risk

The Art Skate Dots co-design project by Art/Play/Risk Lab and Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate

Co-hosted City Canvas Symposium by Art/Play/Risk Lab and Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate

The Art/Play/Risk team also collaborated with Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate for the Festival of Urbanism panel at Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Collaborative Publications with Art/Play/Risk

Willing, I, Mestrom, S, Loke, L and Odlum, N (2025) ‘Skate and Collaborate: Carving Spaces to Create and Educate Through Sociology, Performance and Interaction Design, and Public Art’ for Hölsgens, S and Ong, A (eds) Skate/Worlds: New Pedagogies for Skateboarding. University of Groningen Press. pp 121 – 144 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21827/656f071868dee Available here

Collaborative Conference Talks with Art/Play/Risk

‘Spatial Justice and The Power of Urban Play: Skateboarding and Skateable Public Art as a Case Study for Creative Disruptions’ (2024), Dr Indigo Willing on co-authored paper with Dr Sanne Mestrom, A/Prof Lian Loke and Nadia Odlum, TASA annual conference, Perth, 28 November 2024. https://www.tasa.org.au/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=671860&module_id=654275

‘Grey Spaces, Urban Play and Planned Public Places: Skate, Create and Educate’. Chair of Panel with Poppy Starr, Nick Hayes, Timothy Lachlan, HY William Chan and Sanne Mestrom for Festival of Urbanism 18 November 2024. Recording here and info: https://www.festivalofurbanism.com/events/fou2024/grey-spaces-public-planning-places-and-urban-playskate-create-educate

‘Skate and Collaborate: Rolling Out Gender Equity’ Presented by Dr Indigo Willing on co-authored paper with Dr Sanne Mestrom, A/Prof Lian Loke and Nadia Odlum, ‘International Women in Sport Symposium 2024’, Western Sydney University, Convened by Dr Jessica Richards. 9 August 2024: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/wbrc/events/iwss_2024

Media on Public Art aspect of the project:

Architecture and Design. ‘How art and urban sports can create socially inclusive public spaces’. By Branko Miletic. 28 October 2024. https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/how-art-creates-socially-inclusive-public-spaces

Newsreel. ‘Potential in combining public art and urban sport’ 27 October 2024. https://newsreel.com.au/article/arts/potential-in-combing-public-art-and-urban-sport/

Arts Hub. ‘What do artists and skaters have in common?’ Story by Celina Lei. 24 October 2024. https://www.artshub.com.au/news/features/what-do-artists-and-skaters-have-in-common-2756139/

The National Tribune. ‘Public Art, Urban Sports And Skateable Cities’. 24 October 2024. https://www.nationaltribune.com.au/public-art-urban-sports-and-skateable-cities/

University of Sydney News. Public Art, Urban Sports and Skateable Cities, Dr Indigo Willing and Dr Sanne Mestrom interviewed by Liv Clayworth. 25 October 2024. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/10/24/public-art-urban-sports-and-skateable-cities.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawGIXYhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbU81gXEvbz6gbRr90-5x0v22_ig_u_N2ssWPbjW0vTkriSGNguzMMwUyQ_aem_tLJCwT24jkSzHCagEQnO3Q

‘How women skateboarders are flipping the script ahead of the Olympics.’ Dr Indigo Willing was interviewed for the University of Sydney News. 16 July 2024: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/07/16/how-women-skateboarders-are-flipping-the-script-ahead-of-the-olympics.html