Professor Robert Baines

Key Activities

Robert Baines is the Director of Research and Innovation in the RMIT School of Art. He is the coordinator for postgraduate Gold & Silversmithing, and an internationally respected gold and silversmithing artist, researcher, academic and author.

National and international awards and prizes received by Robert Baines show a consistent excellence in research areas of artist goldsmithing and archaeometallurgy. In 1979 he received a Winston Churchill Study Grant and this has been followed by Senior Fulbright and two Senior Andrew Mellon Conservation Fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This was followed by a research scholarship in The Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008

His work as an exhibiting artist goldsmith is collected in prestigious public collections in Great Britain, Germany, France, New Zealand, and Australia such as Schmuckmuseum, Pforzheim, Germany; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ville de Cagnes-sur-Mer, France; Deutsches Blockflötenmuseum, Fulda, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; and the National Gallery of Australia.

Exhibiting internationally he is the winner of major international and national prizes such as the Friedrich Becker Preis 2008, Bayerische Staatpreis 2005 gold medal at the 57 Internationale Handwerksmesse, München and in Australia the Cicely and Colin Rigg Craft Award, 1997 (the richest craft prize in Australia) at the National Gallery of Victoria; TheSeppelt Contemporary Art Award, 1998 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

A graduate of RMIT in gold and silversmithing, Baines also holds a Ph.D in Fine Art and a Master of Arts in classics and archaeology from Monash University. He has made a significant contribution to Australian jewellery, object-making, and international historical scholarship for over twenty-five years. In 2004 he had an exhibition of his research, EntdeckerderantikenGoldschmiedetechnik, at the prestigious Staatliche Antikensammlungen, München, Germany.

Robert Baines’ principal areas of leadership have been in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT and the other being within the community of the art industry as initiator and convenor of fora: Jewellery Philosophies-Contexts of Working 1990- seminars and publications with JMGA(Vic), and editor of LEMEL, national journal of the JMGA 1995-1998. He managed the Melbourne International MokumeGane Symposium and Exhibition 2002-3 and was chairman of the 11^th Biennial JMGA International Conference “Inherited Futures: Technology to Trap Ideas” 2004.

His multi-disciplinary research is comprised of three areas: first in archaeometallurgy; second as an artist goldsmith; and third in publishing text and commentary. Each has its community of researchers and validity in the quest for new knowledge. The undergirding condition of his scholarship is as resource for teaching and revelation. Not confined to being a knowledge source the synthesized research offers methodologies for strategies of learning and vantage points for further considerations. Archaeometallurgy is the synthesis of dissimilar disciplines principally directed toward Bronze Age gold technology and jewellery history. This interdisciplinary understanding of material science of metallurgy and chemistry is combined with the social and material history.

New applications of existing knowledge inform us of ancient and historical goldwork that makes up our material culture. This integration of existing and new knowledge informs us about artifact and increases our knowledge of jewellery collections. This informed position facilitates the authenticating of artworks and identifying fakes. Here is a real world issue and within our cultural history synthesized knowledge through scholarship can authenticate artifacts, which are components of our intellectual culture and capital. Innovation in the understanding of the research in archaeometallurgy has led Robert Baines to a new methodology of scholarship and has been an internationally recognised ‘breakthrough’ within the research community. A particular pursuit is to gain an understanding of the thinking and character of the ancient goldsmith.

Scholarship as artist goldsmith in studio practice is the integration of this new knowledge and its application to build new creative works. His PhD, The Reconstruction of Historical Jewellery and its Relevance as Contemporary Artefact addresses how the dating of ancient jewellery is given by the archaeological context; and technology, applied by the ancient goldsmith, is traceable through archaeometallurgy. His research is to analyse historical jewellery and to construct copies based on the known technology of the era. Resultant laboratory constructions with their historical correctness will then be available for reworking to convey a contemporary visual relevance and a statement of history. The results of these analyses and reconstructions form the basis of metalwork objects in which contemporary aesthetics are informed by historical practice - Robert Baines builds fictitious jewellery.

Qualifications

Ph.D in Fine Art, MA in Classics and Archaeology; Diploma of Art.

School of Art Research Cluster

Art and Object

Research Outputs

Research Supervision

Kirsten Haydon, PhD, first supervisor. “Antarctic Landscapes in Souvenir and Jewellery”

Roseanne Bartley, (NZ), MA, first supervisor. “The Crafting of Text on Emblematic Objects: Jewellery and Tableware”

Prue Venables, PhD, second supervisor. “Pending”

Julie Mitchell, MA, first supervisor. “Repetition and the Devotional Object”

Vicky Shukuroglou, MA, first supervisor. “Origins, Procedure and Artefact”

Simon Cottrell, MA, second supervisor. “Creating Parallels Between the Building of Mental Concept and the Building of Material Object”

Jun Sung-Kim, (Korea) MFA, first supervisor. “A New Korean Vessel”

Vanessa Raimondo, MFA, first supervisor, “Continuing Mesh”

Teresa Lane, MFA, first supervisor. “Changing Faces”

Emma Price, MFA, first supervisor. “Natural Fiction”

Nina Oikawa, MFA, first supervisor. “Mutual Conversations”