Peg’s History of Expressive Politics in Brief

Alongside her academic professorial roles, doctoral degrees (medical-anthropology/psychology/genocide-torture studies) and published works, movement and art sustain life force for Peg — from classical ballet to sculpting to performing art. Born in New York and grateful for her childhood roaming in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual neighbourhood, Peg migrated to Australia in the late 1980s for an academic post and chance to live in a non-nuclear zone. She calls Melbourne her permanent home base.    

I choreograph my sculptures so that they cast shadows that animate the eerie — the macabre.  

Beginning as a raku potter in the late 70s-early 80s, she used classic firing methods and wax relief, while  sculpting body parts that pushed out of her vessels. Peg evolved her figurative images across time and place — Virginia, Seattle, Miyazaki & Kyoto, Japan, Victoria & Tasmania, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand. While working as an professor and clinician in Japan, she immersed herself in Zen, Jazz, and Classic Morita Therapy, and explored the relationship between negative space and paradox across tanka and haiku.    

Overall, Peg’s sculptures (Gallery) reveal The Politics of Human Cruelty threaded across decades: The VietNam war of her youth, colluding Forces in Afghanistan, the Rohingya ritualcide and genocide, the recent DR of Congo’s “Coltan Mine Deals for Peace” by US Government, specialist to Aboriginal children in detention, and psychological torture to children in Gaza — and  ecocides under Scorched-Earth Wars pounding down every single day.  Having given expert witness at the ECCC (UN engaged Khmer Rouge Tribunal) on medical experiments to pregnant women and mass marriages under the regime — she illustrated narratives through bronze figurative sculptures.

Raku’s blackened method of firing was an easy transition for casting in bronze. For her, it’s about the unpredictability and intensity of wax, molten metal, and fire. Appreciating the classics, she maintains traditional methods while using hand tools in her relationships with alabaster and limestone.

Peg gathered her confidence as a bronze sculptor during the casting course at the University of Tasmania (2008). She took quickly to alabaster during her studio carving mentorship in Culver City, Los Angeles (2017), when she was the Inaugural Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Genocide Studies, USC.  Later, she discovered fossilised creatures embedded in the Ōamaru limestone of New Zealand (2018) and is careful to carve around them.

As for me, Peg says, the macabre bleeds into the sensual akin to clay and bronze bodies tinged by fire. Raku firing offers predictable-unpredictability — some make it through fire and some don’t. Meanwhile, clay bodies that survive are rendered more vulnerable through their porous transition. When tapped, raku-fired clay sounds flat while blackened hues get tinged in turquoise, which are breathtaking. 

Select Exhibited & Published Works

 Some Exhibitions

Chicago (Art in Response to Violence) Inaugural Keynote.

Phnom Penh (The Goethe Institute) Graceful Yet Stiff  (Jointly with Sayon Syprasoeuth).

Laos: Child victims of sex-trafficking (AFISIP, director Dr Didier Bertrand); figurative sculpting project with exhibition of children’s sculptures made with local clay and fired in hillside kilns.

Forever Landmines - Forever Gone Body Parts (Handicap International project under Dr Didier Bertrand). Lying Still, millions of UXOs are uncleared in Laos.

Melbourne (Monash Asia Institute): Sculpture-illustrated Academic Seminar from her book,  ‘Love and Dread in Cambodia’.

Los Angeles (performance art) at the International Genocide Conference — and elsewhere.

Some Books

Classic Morita Therapy: Consciousness, Justice and Trauma (Routledge Press, London, 2018) [See: moritatherapy.net]

Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm Under the Khmer Rouge (University of Chicago Press, 2010). [Sculptural plates published alongside case studies]. This 7-year film ethnographic research in SE Asia coined the term Ritualcide in the genocide literature (see Wikipedia). Peg gave exert witness at the ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Cambodia).  Her sculptures depict traditions and protective spirit agents — as captured in her alabaster ‘Garuda’, and bronze depicting medical experiments done to women under the Khmer Rouge. (Bronze preparing for a memorial site). 

Morita Therapy: Treatment for Anxiety-Based Disorder (Shinkeishitsu). Morita, S. (1998) (original text from 1928), LeVine, P. (Ed), Kondo, A. (Trans). State University of New York Press.

Some Chapters that Unframe Cruelty

LeVine, P. (2022). Ritualcide Under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia: Animism, Genocide and War Crimes.  The Routledge Handbook of Religion Mass Atrocities, and Genocide (Stephen Smith & Sara Brown, Eds), Routledge, London.

LeVine, P. (2017). Mass as Testimonial: Ron Mueck Unframes Genocide. Inaugural Triennial. National Gallery of Victoria. 66-15.

Some Articles on Fallout

LeVine, Peg (May 2025). Trajectory of a Murderous Regime: Fifty years since the Khmer Rouge. John Menadue Public Policy Journal (online journal). [https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/04/trajectory-of-a-murderous-regime-fifty-years-since-the-khmer-rouge/]

LeVine, Peg (2023). Psychological Torture to Children in Gaza. John Menadue Public Policy Journal (online). (21 December 2023 in Pearls and Irritations).

LeVine, P. (2020). Morita Therapy according to Morita: Dwelling in the tension between hardy and fragile life. The International Journal of Ecotherapy: Special Edition on the Coronavirus.

The Guardian (X-Indigenous) Interview with/by Jack Latimore: https://indigenousx.com.au/jack-latimore-peg-levine-forced-sedation-an-assimilation-policy-of-the-commonwealths-mental-health-project-for-indigenous-people/