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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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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Item'Help a sculpture' and other abfunctional potentials( 2016)This practice-led research investigates the relationship between sculpture and concepts of function in contemporary art. Since the Enlightenment, art and function have commonly been understood as mutually exclusive concepts. Associated with everyday life, function is considered outside the sphere of art, where the art object is predominantly positioned as “functionless” and hence “autonomous” from the everyday prerequisites of living. In the instances where art has incorporated function, this has frequently been framed in terms of dysfunction, “dissolving art into life,” or as an alternative strategy in the “dematerialisation of the art object.” Yet, a neologism that emerged from my own art practice – “abfunction,” meaning to move away from function – implies that function is implicit within art itself, suggesting that the neat separation between art and function is not so clear cut. This thesis, includes the artwork produced for the Help a Sculpture exhibition at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA in July 2016 and the written dissertation. The project asks: in what ways can the neologism abfunction reveal and divert the role of function within the production and end-effect of the contemporary artwork? Three bodies of artworks were produced for the project and have been used as case studies within the written dissertation. They are: How long (2008-ongoing), Houses that are happy to help with at least one of the possible problems of art (2010-ongoing) and the Hold UP series (2013-ongoing). These artworks comprise: video, photographic installations, photo-sculptures and sculptural assemblies. The written dissertation establishes a foundation for abfunction within contemporary art. Part I seeks to define “function” that abfunction maybe moving away from within the artwork. Given art is considered to be functionless, concepts of function are investigated by Aristotle, early modernist architectural discourse, and those involved in function theory, such as Beth Preston and Ruth Millikan. It is proposed that function can be understood from two points of view. I have termed this as, “use-ready” function (what something is for), and function as “forming” of an object or thing (summarised by the adage: “form follows function”). Part II of the written thesis investigates how these two roles of function occur within art. The Russian and Polish avant-garde from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, provides an uncharacteristic example of artists and theorists activating the role of function in art. Discussed in this written component of the thesis, are artworks and theories from the Russian Constructivists and Productivists, including artists Alexandr Rodchenko, and Karl Ioganson and theorist Boris Arvatov, in addition to the Polish Unists: sculptor Katarzyna Kobro and her husband, painter Władysław Strzemiński. Part III applies the understanding of the role of function in the artwork to investigate how abfunction both reveals and departs from function in the artwork case studies produced for the project. Abfunction represents a significant opportunity for a more complex understanding of how function might operate with the artwork. Its meaning in relation to art is not encompassed by existing terms of function including, functionless, dysfunction, malfunction and the lesser known term para-functional. Moreover, in describing a deviation away from the end expectations of function, abfunction also acknowledges the alternative materialisation of objects and things produced through this method which the terminology associated with the “dematerialised” object fails to do. This research project draws to a conclusion with the argument that abfunction offers a new insight into processes within the production of art. Revelatory in its reveal of the pervasive role of function that it generatively departs from, abfunction accounts for the alternative unimagined outcomes produced in art beyond the teleological grip of function.
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ItemSigns of life: the art of artificial animism( 2012)Using drawing, painting and sculpture, specifically casting and mould-making techniques, this project involves the visual conflation of dualisms such as subject and object, natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, therefore destabilizing these polarizations by intentionally reconfiguring them. Through visual motifs derived from a variety of discourses, including animism, metamorphosis, and fantasy narratives, my work posits an investigation of non-human subjectivity by ascribing a sense of agency to all natural and unnatural phenomena.