Susan Fereday (born 1959) is an Australian artist, writer, curator and educator. She holds a doctorate from Monash University, Melbourne. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia.

Biography

Fereday studied to be a photographic technician in Adelaide. She attended Prahran College in Melbourne to study photographic art, obtaining her Bachelor of Arts in 1986 and her Master of Arts (Fine Art) in 1992. She performed research Paris in 1996–1997 on a scholarship from Samstag. She received her doctorate from Monash University in 2010. Fereday has been a lecturer in art theory and studio practice at the Victorian College of the Arts (1990–93), Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1998-2000), and Monash University (2005–08).

Artist

Since the 1980s Fereday has exhibited artworks in various media, including objets trouvés, installation art, photography, and video. She has collected and displayed found photographs taken by anonymous amateurs in the 1950s. Penny Webb places her "Ilsley Green Road" series by an unknown photographer at Sutton Gallery in "country lanes in England in the 1950s," while her series Under a Steel Sky, at West Space in 2008 used similar material, as critic, Robert Nelson notes; "From unrelated sources in the United States [. . .] Fereday has collected pictures of people in cars, on the road, in the countryside." Both commentators understand that the sequencing is intended to create a narrative, as Nelson reports;"They are printed to a large scale, which the original photographers would never have contemplated; but the resolution is consistent. Not knowing the sources, you impute a single narrative to the pictures.'"Fereday's doctoral thesis, Light Out of Darkness: the origin of photography in mystery and melancholy, was a study of the work of pioneer photographers Nicéphore Niépce and William Henry Fox Talbot.

Curator

Fereday was the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne during the period 1992 to 1995. Exhibitions she has curated include:

Exhibitions

Solo

Group

Collections

Fereday's work is held in the following public collection: