Paula Dawson’s art works simulate and/or evoke complex states of being. Dawson has held residencies at the Laboratoire de Physique et Optique Besancon, France; RMIT Applied Physics Department, Melbourne Australia; the Holocentre, New York, and the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first major holographic work, There’s No Place Like Home (1980) is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra http://nga.gov.au/exhibitions/Dawson/index.htm and her best-known installation To Absent Friends (1988), a bar room in which holograms replace all reflective surfaces, was awarded the Grand Prix of the First High Tec Art Biennale in Nagoya, Japan in 1989. Many of her holographic works were shown at Virtual Encounters in her retrospective exhibitions at Macquarie University Gallery, Sydney and Newcastle Region Gallery, Newcastle in 2010 http://pauladawson.com/. Dawson’s 1999 PhD, dealing with the spatial and temporal properties of the concrete holographic image, led to major ARC funded research projects investigating the pictorial agents of darkness http://www.shadowyfigures.com, light and currently modelling light. Dawson’s bronze hologram mirror portrait projects, which combine aspects of early caryatid mirrors (Egyptian, Greek and Roman) with Chinese magic mirrors, are ongoing http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/collection_info.php?searchtype=basic&sea... . Dawson is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art, at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.