PhD candidate Sienna van Rossum entered Griffith’s Three Minute Thesis competition unsure if her topic could translate into an engaging presentation.
The Queensland College of Art and Design student came second in the Arts, Education and Law group heat, but went on to impress the judges enough to win the University 3MT final held at South Bank in August.
In her thesis, Ms van Rossum is investigating new ways in which we can better understand images and not take what we see at face value.
She used one of her oil portraits for her presentation slide and asked the audience to relax, absorb the image, and think about what they felt and how they responded to what they saw.
“What I was trying to do was have people take a moment to contemplate how they look, and how the way they look at the world affects them, how it has a profound influence as to how we shape today and tomorrow,” Ms van Rossum said.
“The act of looking is super important in my thesis, and we need to slow it down to know what we are doing and more importantly, where we are going.”
Ms van Rossum’s 3MT presentation titled ‘Making contact with images: a return to the art of looking’ was judged the best of the 11 finalists, with the judges saying it was ‘clear, understandable and engaging, with demonstrable research impact’.
The judges were also won over by her ability to put context behind her research and praised her originality for using a single image on her slide.
Ms van Rossum will now head to the Asia-Pacific 3MT final in October when she’ll look to become Griffith’s inaugural winner of the regional decider.
The presentation from Salvador Cantellano from the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research and Climate Action Beacon was also highly praised and named runner-up, and also claimed the People’s Choice award.
His presentation was titled ‘Reshaping the world through documentary cinema’.
