School of Art - Theses
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ItemSupercharged paintings move towards light and space( 2018)This project considers certain connections between the so-called art world and global social mobility. Is the ubiquity of some universal aesthetic frameworks implicitly promoting the ever-expanding cultural class to become even more seduced by the forces of late-capitalism? The thesis, which comprises a dissertation presented in conjunction with a studio-based investigation, is centred around three distinct, but inter-related templates for display: the generic living room TV wall unit; the painted canvas; and the gallery. I consider how each format conditions our reception of cultural information by influencing our sense of individuality, whilst as the same time signalling our inclusion in a unified non-culturally specific world view that is rooted in western modernism. Significantly, these three selected display arenas all convey a sense of universality—not necessarily through specific content, but rather through their inherent structures. I argue that these successful systems of display potentially mask otherwise visible signs of power through implicit democratic ideologies disseminated via inspirational design trends. Considered together, I demonstrate that all three offer insights into the underlying function of international systems of cultural exchange. A substantial part of this research considers the homogenising effect of Internet image-searching, especially in relation to notions of class and sophistication at a time characterised by a global democratisation of desire and appreciation for ‘good’ design principles. The artworks I have produced in conjunction with this dissertation are designed to critically engage and antagonise the already fuzzy intersection of art, architecture and design. Accordingly, I have sought to produce works that are less distinguished by traditional art-making decisions but rather emphasise compositions, materials, and principles associated within modernist and minimalist infused trends in design and architecture. This strategy seeks to recode the sublime grandeur of late-formalist abstract paintings as a kind-of banal realism perhaps more associated with marketing and pop consumerism. The physical creation of individual artworks has taken place in accordance with two predominate modes of production. Firstly, and in reference to painting, wall mounted sculptural relief works incorporating materials such as Formica composite wood panelling, plywood, hardwood, acrylic paint, enamel paint, glass, vinyl flooring, composite stone samples, imitation plants, real-plants, pots, fluorescent lights, and found objects, were produced. The second mode of production is in the digital realm, and includes digital photographic montages (combining online images with my own photography), video (using online content and making interventions within it) and creating audio tracks (to accompany the video works). Considered together, these modes of production are used as tools to psychologically position the viewer in a space in which materials, surfaces and compositions, might trigger considerations of social mobility, our relationships to design, and finally, notions of personal intimacy and memory that are activated through smart-screen technologies.
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ItemFabricated country: re-imagining landscape( 2018)Faced with fundamental redrawing of human relationships to the global and local environment, a shift in ways of viewing landscape has precipitated. Broad awareness of biodiversity collapse, urbanization, global warming and the advent of genetic engineering and advances in biological technology has inverted many notions and definitions about the word nature. This, underlined by a revisited pre-colonial historical narrative, particularly across Australia, sustains landscape and nature as urgent topics that need to be dealt with and re-viewed. This practice-led research project investigates the intersections of ecological and cultural environments and how this interrelation can be expounded through the act of painting. The investigation is based largely within a local context of Australian visual art and regional terrains, employing a methodology located at the intersection of postcolonial and post-digital frameworks. Within these frameworks the project interrogates and re-interprets actual and combined landscapes. The project elucidates a contemporary re-imagining of landscape enacted through painting. The final research outcomes are composed of a written dissertation and installation of drawings, painting and spatial work. The work comprising the installation is a direct manifestation of the practice-led research. It is expanded upon in the exegesis section of the dissertation. This set of creative works form part of the argument attending to the central question of my thesis. Combining post-digital and established modes of production, this work seeks to open up a layered space, a visual methodology for re-viewing landscape.
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ItemObjects on the edge of awareness: reframing peripheral objects in a sculptural field( 2018)This research considers the potential of peripheral objects in a process-driven sculptural and spatial practice. The peripheral object is something that goes largely unconsidered, but whose necessity to the centre, and whose lack of stability give it incredible potential. The peripheral object forms a relation between states, sites and objects, and this research posits that it lends those things that it links identity and structure. Here peripheral objects are drawn from architecture and construction sites and are elements that support, facilitate and frame, such as scaffolding, architectural surfaces and apertures. Linking peripheral objects to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of The Parergon and Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures, peripheral objects are established as inherently supportive, as the connector between, as always in-relation-to another, and as intimate, touching the objects that they surround. I speculate that peripheral objects, as things that often go unnoticed, or that appear to be incomplete, are not perceived as objects. This notion is discussed through the perceptual functions within the apprehension of Michael Fried’s concept of objecthood. The qualities that are essential to the object are established in reference to Robert Morris’ series of essays Notes of Sculpture Parts 1-4. The notion of the contact-boundary brings the operations of the surface into focus, and I link this to sculptural and material potential to express objecthood. The intimacy of touch and its implications in a sculptural practice are drawn out in a discussion of casting processes and performance in the work of Isa Genzken and Bruce Nauman. The outcomes of this research are a written dissertation and an installation of sculptural artworks. Through investigations into casting and re-engineering peripheral objects, my process-driven practice has discovered the functions, necessity and potential within them. This research brings focus to what is often considered outside our view and bodily experience. This work enacts the edges of spaces and forms; it does not bring them to the centre but sees the edge.
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ItemThe refigured fragment: provocations in experience and landscape( 2017)"The Refigured Fragment: provocations in experience and landscape" examines how a site-responsive sculptural practice can create alternative narrative pathways towards the understanding of a place. In the first instance, this is a research project that plays out through the apparatus of moulding and casting, audio documentation, photography and written provocation. Through installation-based artworks and the accompanying dissertation, this practice explores ways of engaging with and imagining specific sites encountered by the artist throughout the project. Material collected from these locations is reworked and rethought through sculptural, photographic and narrative processes to generate new spatial artistic outcomes. Poetic strategy is at the core of this enquiry and practitioners such as Jeffery Jerome Cohen, Paul Carter and OSW (Open Spatial Workshop) situate this work in a field of site-responsive work that resists quantitative methods. Unpacking the relationship between "site" and "capture", this project also considers the resonances between contemporary photography and the site-specific moulding techniques employed. The transformative potential of moulding and casting is applied and expanded to articulate instances where experience, recollection and landscape intersect. Reworked in the studio and composed in the gallery, spatial compositions of these impressions and cast models traverse the connections between geology, memory, narrative and the relentless progression of time. Rather than setting out for literal depictions of site, this project examines how a poetic and tactile practice-led studio methodology can transgress quantitative assumptions concerning the landscape and generate alternative pathways towards how it is understood.
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ItemPhotographic interpretation through slippage( 2016)This research asks the question; can photography provide a framework to be both understood and be formed through a series of cultural and linguistic misinterpretations? Through the creation and development of two distinct methodologies of practice - functional parallelism and formation through dislocation - three bodies of work were created. Each body of work centers on a recognition of cultural and linguistic slippage that I have experience as a Japanese person living in Australia that alerted me to a possible way of reinterpreting and subsequently making photographs. It is what I have come to term a ‘roundabout way’ of interacting with the image where the viewer to see the state of the photograph occurring from the relationship among subjects as images. This thesis is accompanied by demonstrations of photographic works and interpretations forming in each stage through the slippage.
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ItemGeometric garden: mapping a holistic worldview through drawing( 2015)Building on the utopian language of geometry, my research project explores the potential for abstract drawing installations and immersive wall drawings to construct a holistic vision of the world. Both Japanese gardens and maps are deployed as unifying visual metaphors to conflate diverse geometric patterns and symbols. The forms that appear in my work derive from scientific illustrations and diagrams, esoteric symbolism, and religious architecture and decoration across cultures. They also reference the history of abstract painting. My work imagines a metaphysical harmony in which visual elements of science and religion, and nature and culture, are non-hierarchically combined to create a contemplative space. In other words, my research project interrogates how it might be possible for contemporary abstraction to visualise a worldview that encompasses and integrates diverse modes of knowledge for interpreting the world around us. In this written dissertation, I advocate for the metaphysical and utopian implications of geometric images through some historical examples. I also reveal the limits of the conventional tendency of geometric abstraction towards absolutism. Through the lens of post-structuralism, I problematise fixed, hierarchical and divisive ways of picturing the world characterised by binary modes of seeing. I chart the contemporary revival of abstraction by examining artists who reevaluate geometry's potential to construct more complex worldviews encompassing social, political, and religious themes. They include Emily Floyd, Julie Mehretu, Eugene Carchesio, Haleh Redjaian and Jess Johnson. I also consider how the arbitrary and mediating qualities of abstraction in my own work, embodied through the fluidity and translucency of an aqueous medium, unified colour schemes, and subtle fluctuations of hand-drawn lines, might extend this dialogue. Within the analysis around my unfolding bodies of work, I address how motifs derived from nature, maps, and gardens operate as connective devices between worldviews that are usually separated. As such, my project explores abstraction's potential to generate a more inclusive, complex, and open-ended cultural imaginary.
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ItemOh the humanity! Humour and performance in a contemporary art practice( 2013)This Masters project discusses humour and performance through the use and presentation of a number of video and photographic artworks. Humour can be derived from the ability to imaginatively juxtapose imagery and ideas to create unexpected relationships and outcomes. Art and creativity can function in a similar manner. This MFA seeks to examine and develop a contemporary art practice, through contrasting imagery and ideas in a performative and humourous way. The project draws parallels between the strategies and functions of humour and art, exploring the possible relationships between the two. The thesis explores questions arising from the artworks produced resulting from an investigation of specific historical and contemporary artworks and a discourse around performance. Through consideration of art historical examples, some linages and links to ways of conceiving, thinking and discussing performance and humour are made. The research acknowledges the problems of taste and subjectivity as it applies to humour, in concert with art. The project reflects upon the role of the artist, his motivations and takes excursions into formal and material concerns of photography and performance to clarify their relevance and significance to contemporary art practice and this project. Themes and ideas brought to the surface are used as foils, something to defend or push against and experiment with. They sometimes act as shadowy motivations that assist in the production of artwork. These themes include mans’ relationship to the landscape, personal histories, digital and analogue photography in the age of technological convergence, the image, self and representation, notions of personhood, contemporary performance and art. Through discussion and uncovering the toil of artwork and ideas engaged with, the humanity of the project is revealed.
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ItemCrossing between cultures and self-portraiture( 2012)My journeys have forced me to analyse the movements of contemporary art and the traditional ways of using the languages of painting to carry personal perceptions that generate memory. A single, personal story develops into a global story from the awareness of the particularity of migrant backgrounds and foreigners’ points of view. The story transforms into the body of work where thought processes are determined through physical engagement with the materialities of painting. Through painting the process of juxtaposed journeys is not only remembered, they are discovered. Through gesture and layers, forms interact with thought making a metaphoric suggestion of something like the topographical mapping of experience.
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ItemTasmania's toy box: exploring loss of innocence through art( 2012)This thesis enters into contemporary debates concerning the cultural investment in innocence. Drawing on my own childhood in Tasmania, this project is driven by the awareness that there are children burdened with knowledge many adults are shielded from. I am seeking, in painting, the means to express this reassignment of roles, using imagery chosen for its capacity to provoke ambivalent responses in the viewer. This is less an argumentative essay than a meditation on the theme of lost innocence. It will examine innocence as an enclosed or guarded space imminently endangered by that which might disrupt the picture, demonstrated through the territorial limits created by the framing of narrative landscape. I will discuss my painting depicting a fire within a Hobart landscape, drawing influence from Colonial paintings of Tasmania - the unease of these images and their contentious relationship to history providing a backdrop for considering less visible manifestations of violence in art. I will also offer a reflection upon language, and in turn the mute subjectivities of animals and children as marginalized in relation to humanity. In this context I will also consider the ethical importance of the face in philosophical discourse, while discussing my paintings of Tasmanian Devils. The mythology attached to this species’ name also provides a platform for speculation as to complex cultural investment in innocence. This thesis aims to provide a poetic and philosophical framework for an investigation into the subject of innocence, which will complement my series of paintings produced in the context of this research. The project hinges upon time - as introduced by the figure of the horologe in a shopping arcade, the enigmatic temporality of childhood acts as a filter through which various ideas and theories are examined. The present day arcade returns the reader to the temporality of childhood – the ever-present dimension of “once upon a time…” - where the silent figures of animal and child are brought together through the emblem of the toy. This dissertation accompanies my studio practice, which takes the form of a series of paintings that are in dialogue with current painting trends and concerns. The paintings presented will reflect three main ways of exploring loss of innocence, which are nevertheless linked through the filter of childhood memory, knowledge and location. My paintings are situated in a contemporary context through a process of engagement and comparison with present day expectations of painting styles and images, variously by their differentiation and similarities. Artists and writers discussed in this thesis are those whose works deal with power relations and violence, and their representation. They include Rodney Pople’s painting Port Arthur, and Degas’s Night exhibition, Adam Cullen’s paintings of Tasmanian Devils, and Yvonne Kendall’s sculptures utilizing toys. I will discuss Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, and will draw on a number of philosophical and scholarly texts, those by Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Joanne Faulkner among others.
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ItemEmbodied practice, experience and intuition( 2012)This thesis presents an account of the means by which I have attempted to overcome a time of major crisis for me as an artist where I have not enjoyed ‘the making’ aspect of my practice. Practice has led me to this research, and it is imperative that research revitalizes and rejuvenates my practice in turn. Three kinds of movement guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: rehabilitative exercises as an extension and continuation of my ‘making’ practice. Secondly: pedalling a bicycle as a conceptual model for a sustainable practice where ‘the thinking and the making coax each other into being.’ Thirdly: standstill, in which my studio practice becomes concerned with the particularity of this time, when the artist, ‘despite the urgency of the situation … [is] haunted by the question, one worth of the idiot: we [artists], what are we?’ These movements in turn propel discussion in the four subsequent chapters: the framing of embodied practice, the harnessing of the potential of experience, the philosophical critiques of the position given to the artist in the production of the readymade, and the notions of abstraction, relation and intuition and their role in material practices. Through examining writings by Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Boris Groys, Agnes Martin and Isabelle Stengers and others, as well as other modes of production such as cooking and football, this thesis explores my approaches to my ‘making’ body’s state of crisis and how new ways of generating movement may become possible for that body. This thesis is accompanied by a presentation of a body of artistic work comprising of a sculptural installation titled Enquiry on Porosity.