Lecturer, Art History & Theory
She/her
Dr. Sera Waters is an Adelaide based artist, arts writer and academic. She has been a lecturer at Adelaide Central School of Art since 2009. Waters is a graduate (with honours) from the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia (1997-2000), has a Master of Arts (Art History) from University of Adelaide (2004-06), and was awarded her Phd from the University of South Australia in 2019. She has recently co-written the 2018 SALA monograph on Clare Belfrage, with Emeritus Professor Kay Lawrence.
In 2006 Waters was awarded a Ruth Tuck Scholarship to attend the Royal School of Needlework (Hampton Court Palace, Surrey, UK) to study hand embroidery. Since this time Waters’ art practice has been characterised by a darkly stitched meticulousness, particularly specialising in black work, and revelling in repetitiveness, pattern and crafting. Waters’ embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of Australian settler colonial histories, mostly to examine the home-making practices of women and her own genealogical ghostscapes.
Major works have been shown in Sappers and Shrapnel, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Nadlewerk at Galerie Handwerk, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Dark Portals, at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia (2013), Ghostscapes at Fontanelle Gallery, Adelaide (2014), and Spectre Folk at Hugo Michell Gallery (2015). In 2017 she was the recipient of the inaugural ACE Open South Australian artist commission, and staged her solo exhibition Domestic Arts. Her works are in the Cruthers collection of Women’s art, Ararat Regional Gallery, the Art Gallery of South Australia and private collections nationwide. Waters is a studio member of The Incinerator, Thebarton, and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.
Visit Sera’s website.