Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemSpectral Permutations: Indelible Apparitions, Myopia and Phantom Interlocutors( 2022)This research explores the indeterminate and spectral realms that germinate from attempts at knowing and corresponding with the world. This project comprises a series of sculptural installations that centre around narrative as an allegorical device and an accompanying exegesis. Over three years, this research has investigated the discourse of hauntology through a range of artmaking practices such as writing, drawing, video, photography and assemblage. The final outcome of this research utilises video and installation practices to recount intertwined narratives in order to investigate bewildering and illusory spaces. Works developed for the research recount failed searches for unseen presences to ponder the ways in which we try to make sense of the world. The exegesis aims to build a practice-led definition of the discourse of hauntology. My research uses this definition to pose the question: can hauntology as a practice-led research methodology conceive a hauntological encounter within a body of artwork? This exegesis briefly defines the field of hauntology before locating how the project departs from philosopher Jacques Derrida’s original term in order to build a practice-led definition. The exegesis then unpacks how individual works construct speculative fictions as a strategy to explore fissures and failed encounters that arise from attempts to know and understand the world. Finally, the exegesis examines how hauntology might be used as a methodology, using the work generated from these speculations to discuss the ways that a hauntological encounter might be evoked in an exhibition context.
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ItemThe Submissive Sculpture( 2021)The Submissive Sculpture explores the psychological states experienced by ‘Submissives’ in BDSM practices and asks, how might the idea and subjective experience of submission in an erotic exchange inform an expanded artistic methodology for the creation of new sculptural works? Through a series of performative actions and staged scenarios, this research project seeks to fuse a certain erotic order onto my artistic practice. In doing so it aims to test how materials within a sculptural practice might operate as a site and document of erotic exchange and how BDSM practices of submission and ‘subspace’ might be utilised as creative stratagems to inform studio processes. The practice led research maps how exchanges of erotic power are articulated through the artists’ body and utilised as a biographical lens through which broader narratives of queer desire can be encountered and recalibrated through sculpture. The artworks, The Submissive Sculpture Series and Dithyramb, which are composed of performance, clay, photographs, costumes and video, drive the inquiry of this paper. Reflected upon in chronological order this dissertation contextualises these works within contemporary art practices, BDSM theory and art history. Throughout, BDSM methods are put in direct dialogue with sculptural methods. A key relationship that emerges from this conversation is the temporal and spatial ambiguities that both fields share. The Submissive Sculpture is a playful and candid exploration of how libidinal and material ways of knowing might intersect, and the artworks that can result in the process.