Fleur Summers

Ms. Fleur Summers

Senior Lecturer
See full profile

Details

Open to

  • Masters Research or PhD student supervision

About

Fleur Summers is a Senior Lecturer in sculpture at the School of Art, RMIT. She teaches a range of courses including studio practice at all levels and parctical workshops from bronze foundry to soft sculpture. She is also interested in spatial practices in general, socially engaged activities and  public art alongside the pedagogy of art education.

Fleur began her academic life studying science and worked professionally as a microbiologist for several years. This experience and ongoing interest in natural science informs and enriches her work.

 

Fleur is a practicing visual artist and has been exhibiting her work for the last two decades in artist run galleries and other spaces. Her work ranges from object based sculpture to installation work, moving image and public work. In 2019, she was commissioned to produce a public artwork for Jewell Station in Brunswick by VicTrack. This work Making Sense constructed of bronze and steel is designed to be touched and to create community connections. 

 

Fleur has been a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary and Artery Studios in Melbourne and is currently at Schoolhouse Studios.

Degrees

  • Masters Degree by Research, Creative Arts
  • RMIT University
  • Australia
  • 2008

Supervisor projects

  • The phenomenology of a Forest; Conscious making through Observation, Knowledge and Memory
  • 24 Jun 2025
  • CRAFT AS MATERIAL AND COMMUNITY REMEDIATION: an examination of gender, labour and activism
  • 8 Mar 2025
  • Inside Aphantasic Practice: exploring the impact of aphantasia on creative practice in image-making & animation
  • 29 Jun 2023
  • An Exploration of the Influence of Zen-inspired Poetic Nature Painting on Contemporary Abstraction
  • 4 Jul 2022
  • Trauma, Dissociation and the Boarding School Experience
  • 3 Jun 2021
  • Atmoscapes: Finding Place in a Spatial Practice
  • 24 Nov 2020
  • Materialising Deep Time: Spatial Investigations into Light and Fibre
  • 15 Oct 2020
  • Compressing Atmosphere: Ceramic Encounters With Clay, Body and Site
  • 7 Sep 2020
  • Adjacencies and distances: Sculptural site intervention
  • 2 Feb 2018
  • Inhabiting Thresholds: Encounters in Liminality Through Material Sculptural Practice
  • 22 Feb 2016
  • Unseen Equations: Sculptural Assemblage and Intersecting Topologies
  • 22 Feb 2016
  • In Flux: Explorations of material indeterminacy through sculptural practice 
  • 17 Sep 2015

Teaching interests

Art and neuroscience, embodied cognition and neuro-cognitive experience of art, interactive and kinetic works, sculpture and spatial practice, materiality, conceptual art, systems art and process based practice

Research interests

Fleur’s current project is titled Missing Links – Evolutionary theory as a model and scientific intervention as a strategy for artistic process and production. This project questions the production of knowledge through the synthesis and analysis of a collection of sculptural objects. It explores and constructs taxonomies and genealogies of objects from a series of disciplines including botany, evolutionary biology, microbiology, archaeology and museum practice. This research is informed by the works of theorists such as Darwin, Foucault and Deleuze.

Research interests include:

- Process and duration
- Developmental working sequences
- Discursive formations including museum collections and archives
- Intersections of science and art and the studio as laboratory
- Collaboration and authorial identities
- Conceptual art, minimalism and installation practice
aboriginal flag float-start torres strait flag float-start

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

More information