Alice Lewis

Alice Lewis is a lecturer in landscape architecture exploring with an interest in the reciprocity of thought, action and the physical landscape.

Dr Alice Lewis is a lecturer in landscape architecture at RMIT University. She completed a PhD in 2020 exploring ways of engaging humans as caregivers for landscapes. Her research and teaching continues to work with embodied human action as an inescapable constituent of landscape systems and the most abundant resource we have to hand. Her approach to pedagogy builds directly on this research, which is often collaborative and interdisciplinary, and aims to cultivate practices of care between and for human and non-human environments.

Dr Lewis is interested in landscape architectural education as a place where the innovative and experimental practices needed to face our challenging future can be explored and developed. Pedagogies are focused on nurturing and developing cohesive and future-focused structures for learning that support both students and staff to make real world impact and contribute to timely conversations, such as those around climate and reconciliation.

Key projects:

Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 - National Gallery of Victoria (2024)

Reimagining Birrarung is the major summer exhibition of the NGV Australia galleries for 2024/25. Alice was invited to join the BUSH Projects team, who along with 8 other landscape architecture practices, produced provocations for Melbourne’s main river 50 years in the future. The provocation developed that in 2070, following public acquisition of a tract of private agricultural land, the Birrarung Bio-Zone is established as a protected ecological habitat spanning the upper Birrarung floodplain. LiDAR and computer generated sequences were used to understand the dynamics of river movement over millennia, and created equipment, maps and plans reveal how the Birrarung Bio-Zone would be maintained and accessed.

The exhibition interrogates policy and issues informing the river catchment. It has been reviewed by The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald, among other media, and is supported by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.

Future Matters: Drawing Connection with Places of Extraction -  Lab Here//To//For @ Vancouver Art Gallery (2023)

A public participatory drawing project developed for Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) Fashion Fictions exhibition. The Material Matters research hub (Emily Carr University of Art and Design) invited me to contribute a participatory project to their Lab Here//To//For as part of the VAG’s major show of 2023. The work uses base-map templates and question-prompts to help material designers trace the hidden impacts of material extraction. Guiding participants through map-making processes as a way of seeing helps reveal ecological entanglements, colonial histories and production processes of material use. Questioning the origins and impact of materials is important as legacies of extraction damage environments. This work has since been presented at ECLAS Conference 2024, and in the associated book Landscape Economy Handbook for Education, and has been included in the book Radical Fashion Exercises (Valis, 2023). 

Everything is Moving, All the Time - One By Walking Research Symposium (2023)

This project explores how maps can reveal human and geologic temporalities that are in process, and as such, how the power of maps can be redirected to unsettle ideas of human exceptionalism. This project was developed in response to an invitation by the steering committee of the international One By Walking research network to join their 2023 symposium in Korpo, Finland.

Maps developed used diagrams and cartographic projections to illustrate processes of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment occurring in the Finnish Archipelago and a walking activity (pictured) tracked geologic movement occurring over symposium attendees’ lifetime to draw human and geologic time together.

Publication: ‘Possibilities in motion: prosthetic maps and micro-walks for tectonic encounters’ in One by Walking: Transdisciplinary Mobilities and Methodologies (Lexington Books, 2025).

Awards:

2024 RMIT DSC Teaching Excellence Award

2016 Australian Postgraduate Award
2014 Australian Cycling Promotion Fund – Reignition for Innovation