Art and philosophy win 2014 JG Crawford Prize

Two CASS scholars, artist Dr Julie Brooke and philosopher Dr John Cusbert have been awarded one of the highest honours available to ANU PhD students, the JG Crawford Prize.

Awarded each year by an ANU committee, the JG Crawford prize recognises high quality research from the previous academic year.

Dr Julie Brooke is the first School of Art PhD graduate to receive the prize, and said she’s delighted to see visual arts research, which focuses on studio work and exhibitions, recognised by the University in this way.

A scientist before starting an undergraduate degree in the School of Art’s Painting Workshop, Dr Brooke’s work blends the worlds of art and science.

“It’s been interesting go through the undergraduate degree, where I felt as though I was doing something completely different from my scientific training,” she says.

“Then as I started on my PhD research, I realised there were many similarities in the way that I used to think in the laboratory and the way that I think in the studio.”

While Dr Brooke’s earlier paintings focused on realistic representations, her more recent work and PhD research is characterised by mind-bending optical illusions and geometric, abstract patterns often based on mathematical or scientific themes.

“In my work I wanted to create 3 dimensional but also impossible objects – they look as though they could be objects, yet they can’t actually exist in the real world.

“This is my way of representing hypothetical thought, where there are multiple possibilities that can’t all actually exist. One of my favourite aspects of science is the hypothetical stage, finding multiple ways of explaining data. In an experiment, you would then go and systematically disprove your hypotheses relating to an experiment, but in visual art you can keep multiple possibilities open in an image.

“For me it was a way of thinking about this part of science that I really loved, but exploring it through painting and drawing.”

Dr Brooke is now working as a Research Fellow at the School of Art, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Applied Mathematics as part of the 2014 Vice-Chancellor's College Artist Fellows Scheme. The work she created during this collaboration was on display at the School of Art Foyer Gallery in February.

For his research in philosophy, Dr John Cusbert looked into the relationship between probability, time and causation – research deemed “highly original, indeed ground-breaking” by his supervisor Professor Alan Hajek.

“We normally assume that only the future can be objectively ‘chancy’, and that the past is fixed and settled,” says Dr Cusbert.

“For example: while tomorrow's weather is a matter of chance, yesterday's isn't (anymore). I wanted to know how objective probability might work if causation could run ‘backwards’ in time, that is, if later events could cause earlier ones. This sounds far-fetched, but philosophers and physicists take it pretty seriously! In my thesis I developed a theory of objective chance that fits with backwards causation, and allows the past to be chancy.”

Dr Cusbert has now taken up a Research Fellow position at the University of Oxford, working of a project called Population Ethics: Theory and Practice. The project aims to develop a moral framework that can be used to compare scenarios involving different total populations of people, and is also investigating the practical consequences of these theoretical issues for health care, economics and climate change policy.