Armed with a heart full of emotion and an ANU Foundation of the Visual Arts Scholarship, Alyssa Coursey is setting out to create art-works about the subject she knows best – herself.

Walk up Childers Street in the middle of a University semester and you’re surrounded by life. Past UniLodge and students rushing to classes, gathering to gossip and resting their minds. On towards the Street Theatre where actors rest in the sun between performances and a busy lunch trade buzzes through the doors. Ahead lies the School of Music with its budding musicians gathering on the lawn to jam away the afternoon. And at the top of the hill sits the imposing art deco walls of the School of Art, wherein lies a thriving community sharing a passion for artistic expression.
Alyssa Coursey has felt a great vibe since first setting foot in the School of Art. “It’s as though the studios had life,” she says. “There are paint splatters on the wall and it feels like one big studio. And it’s more of a community than you might expect a university division to be.”
While this community feeling drew her in, Coursey’s decision to move from Wollongong to study a degree with a major in Photomedia at ANU was cemented with an inaugural $5000 scholarship from the ANU Foundation for the Visual Arts. She impressed the Foundation with her passion for producing highly personal works of art, drawing on her emotions.
“Knowing that someone has the belief that you’re going to be able to pull through, that you’ve got potential in what you’re doing, and that you should be supported, is really great,” she says. “Especially coming to a place where I knew noone, I was quite nervous about moving here.”

So far Coursey is enjoying being part of the overall growth of the arts community in Canberra. Time will tell whether her experiences in the nation’s capital will influence her work – self-portraits in a range of media including photography, film and painting that depict her view of the world.

Although the tradition of self-portraiture reaches back for centuries, many artists admit to the difficulties of examining the self intimately enough to produce a meaningful self-portrait. For Coursey however, it is her natural perspective as an artist. “I don’t know what else to portray because I know myself, I know my feelings, I know what’s going on in my head,” she says. “My art has always been an expression of emotion and feelings rather than a social or political comment. I’m more focused on human emotion, thoughts, memory and the things that we all experience growing up.”

While doing her own growing up, Coursey was always creating, involved with art programs and after school classes at primary school in Wollongong. “My love of art stemmed from there,” she says. “But in high school I did art all the way through and had a really fantastic teacher who I was able to learn a lot from. Studying art has a practical side where you use your whole body and it’s raw – you work with that. And there’s the theoretical side which is focused on other people’s practice and it’s withdrawing. It makes a nice balance.”

So far in her first year of university, Coursey’s visual art program in the School of Art has concentrated on core studies and the basics of art theory and technique. The opportunity to begin developing a body of work is on hold until second year but she looks forward to watching her own work evolve as she progresses through her studies. “I feel like my work has followed my maturity levels and my experiences and I think that my art will now be the most exciting as this period in my life will be the most influential as to who I become.”

Coursey’s scholarship was the first awarded by the ANU Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Chair of the Foundation, Emeritus Professor David Williams said it will be an annual offering and hopes that as the Foundation grows, it will have the capacity to offer more than one each year to attract the best young artists from around Australia to Canberra and the School of Art visual arts program.

“The Foundation has made the support of scholarships for talented students its top priority,” Professor Williams says. “However, our goal is to enhance the artistic and cultural life of the entire University.” Other projects supported by the Foundation include special projects in conjunction with the Drill Hall Gallery such as the Three Creative Arts Fellows exhibition and catalogue, art acquisitions and campus sculpture commissions.

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ANU Reporter 
Spring 2007