Rod Ewins was born in Fiji, fourth generation of a family of settlers who arrived in Fiji in 1876, the year after it became a British colony. His areas of formal study in a lifelong process of education in Fiji, Australia and England have spanned art, music, science, education, sociology and anthropology. His professional career has been as a practising artist (printmaker and theoretician), university lecturer and administrator. He was made Reader in Fine Art, with the designation of Associate Professor. He was on different occasions and over a period of years Dean of Visual and Performing Arts, and retired from the University as Head of the Tasmanian School of Art, Australia’s oldest art school. He continues his association with the University as an Honorary Research Associate.
Rod’s long career of art practice and exhibition was recognised with invitations to take part in a number of international exhibitions, and he won prizes in two of these, in Australia and Spain. His work is represented in several of Australia’s state galleries, and in public, institutional and private collections in Australia, Britain, USA, Canada, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, and the Ukraine. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery mounted a major retrospective of his work in 1990, then in 1997 the Australian National Gallery acquired his ‘lifetime work’ archive, making him one of only a handful of Australian artists so collected.
In 1979, concurrent with his own ongoing art practice, Rod began reseaching Fijian art and material culture, undertaking seven field trips in the twenty years since then, and publishing two books, a video and a number of articles on Fijian art. The cross-disciplinary fusion which has marked his career resulted in his undertaking doctoral studies in Sociology and Anthropology while he was still Dean of Visual & Performing Arts. These came to a conclusion with the recent submission of his PhD thesis on the social role of ethnic art in the negotiation of identity.
Rod’s talk at SUNY Oswego will address his research in Fiji. Illustrating his talk with photographs from the field, he will discuss the nature of research in another culture, and the impact of different cultural, aesthetic and social systems on his own philosophy and values.