Dr Sally Gray is a Sydney based independent scholar and curator who has, since 1989, initiated and produced numerous art, design, craft, fashion and urban planning projects. Gray’s art and fashion scholarship is published in refereed journals and books and she has been a recipient of research fellowships, including individual awards from the Australian Research Council (2010-12) and the Churchill Trust (1993). Her curated exhibitions have appeared in Beijing, London, Sydney, Melbourne and regional cities in Australia. Between 2002 and 2009 she wrote and taught courses in Art and Fashion History at the University of New South Wales and between 2013 and 2015 was Visiting Scholar in Cultural History at the same university. In 2015–16 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Fashion, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.
Dr Sally Gray on David McDiarmid
1 November 2017
Writer and curator, Dr Sally Gray discussed the work and legacy of David McDiarmid, as part of Studio Voltaire’s offsite project Rainbow Aphorisms.
This talk includes a screening of A Short History of Facial Hair (Hermano Silva, 2011) – an illustrated essay that McDiarmid presented at the forum HIV: Towards a Paradigm, in Melbourne in April 1993.
A Short History of Facial Hair uses the artist’s personal fashion, grooming and adornment story to tell his political and sexual history over a twenty year period. McDiarmid traces how gay politics changed during what he described as ‘an extraordinary time of redefinition and deconstruction of our identities from camp to gay to queer’, exploring links between art, identity, politics, dress and adornment.
Read more about David McDiarmid and Rainbow Aphorisms