Emerald Wise

PhD Candidate, The University of Newcastle
Bachelor of Environmental Design UWA
Masters of Architecture MSD

CV


Emerald is a creative practitioner, academic, and educator, in the expanded field of architecture, whose work revolves around ways of looking at the world and embodied processes for enacting knowledge.

Her creative and academic practices are intertwined and inseparable. They are centred on a ceaseless pursuit of experiential knowledge, where she designs and enacts practices for isolating the varied layers of spatial perception within experience and interrogating how they each contribute to our sense of being in space. For Emerald creative practice is a form of daily research, wherein she reconceives the sublime, not as a moment of profound accidental capture, but as a methodology for the pursuit of experiential knowledge, that involves an incremental alteration to our perceptual constancies. Her practice involves writing, drawing, making, skiing, flying, diving, healing practices that are centred on proprioception, and various meditation practices centred on altering perceptual experience.

She co-founded UNMAKE, and the architectural practice Whispering Smith - which she left in 2018 - and has participated in the activation of numerous studio and exhibition spaces. She has taught architecture and visual communications, for over a decade, across various institutions in Australia including, Monash University, RMIT, The University of Newcastle, The University of Western Australia, and Curtin University, as well as teaching internationally (online) at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Newcastle, where she draws on research in perceptual neuroscience to examine how various sensory modalities and cognitive processes layer into one another to enact the different scales of spatial experience. Within this framework, she questions how task dependant sensory prejudices condition not only our ontology but our epistemology and pursuit thereof.