Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemHolding space and taking time: locating quiet resistance through artistic practice( 2020)The research considers daily rituals, tactics and actions for artistically reimagining lived experience. Using a variety of distributed, site orientated and lens-based methods, I speculate upon ways that daily routines can be utilised as forms of restoration, resistance and care. In developing the creative outcomes, presented in conjunction with a dissertation, particular notions of feminism and postconceptual methodologies are drawn upon. These contribute to the imagining of ways in which artistic gestures of holding space and taking time might suggest more mindful and empathetic engagements with the world.
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ItemNew Prayers For Old Feelings: Weaving the world back together( 2019)This studio-based project asks: how might embodied textile processes offer a spiritual counterpoint to a fragmented, anxious and inattentive state of being? How can a textile-based studio practice develop an ethos of care and attention towards the self, others, and the environment? My research responds to the experience of living in a digital ‘attention economy’, in which we are largely disconnected from spiritual frameworks and from the natural world. In seeking to rekindle an ethos of care, attention and interconnectedness, I investigate the material and spiritual possibilities of ancient hand-processes such as weaving, fibre and dye. Through these repetitive and labour-intensive practices, I examine the way that attention can be redirected and reconstituted as a form of prayer and devotion. I draw on the writing of eminent Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers, which advocates for a return to materiality, as well as Indigenous epistemologies of interconnection articulated by botanist and Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer. The studio project encompasses several related bodies of work: an installation of knotted, braided and beaded fibres, a small-scale embroidery, two series of small tapestry weavings, and a site-specific installation produced in Kansas City, Missouri. Through these artworks I explore ways of acknowledging both anxiety and the sacred through textile practices that enact forms of wordless prayer, acknowledge history, record time and labour, are portable and thus present everywhere, and focus attention and care on the natural world. In creating and writing about these works, I seek to answer my research questions, and promote nurturing and healing new ways of being and making in the world. My research engages with a number of artists whose work intersects with repetition, craft, ecology and prayer. These include Chilean-born Cecilia Vicuna, whose thread-based installations intertwine prayer, language and the notion of the precarious; Polish-born, Chicago-based artist kg (Karolina Gnatowski), whose small-scale formal tapestries hold memory, identity and narrative; Perth-based Teelah George, who works with a laborious and prayer-like process of embroidery; American artist Liza Lou’s meticulous and transcendent bead-weavings; and the practice of Yindjibarndi Australian artist Katie West, whose work with plant-dyeing functions as a form of meditation, and a means of re-connecting, de-colonising, and Indigenising place. Woven through the thesis, these works articulate a range of approaches to materiality and process in response to uncertainties and the sacred.
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ItemTaskscape: Caring for Migrant Materials( 2019)This practice-led research examines concepts of value in art through the materiality of domestic space, and the personal experience of a migrant. The research locates the displaced or migrant entity – be it human or non-human – as a by-product of economic conditions related to standardisation, abstraction, invisible labour and the dematerialisation of the economy. The thesis and project are centred on this question: What diverse artistic methodologies, both in the studio and in the writing, can be pursued to counter standardisation, dematerialisation and revalue invisible labour? Through several projects initiated in the studio, my artistic exploration led me to adopt the concept of rematerialisation or material correspondence as care for materials: Rematerialisation is understood here as a method for revaluation and is tightly linked with the concept of a taskscape. Taskscape – a term borrowed from the anthropologist Tim Ingold – escapes the dichotomy between labour and leisure, and the separation of land from labour. The final outcome is a mixed media installation that counters economic abstraction and standardisation, creating parallels between the conditions of fragile economies and circulating invisible bodies. The text and the installation reflect the process of material correspondence that was developed in the studio. While the writing uses academic referencing, it is not in a pure academic style. Two chapters have been written in a fictional experimental style, which helps attune the writing to my concepts of rematerialisation as care and taskscape. It also establishes a correspondence between the studio and the writing. In chapter two, I write through the voice of a devalued coin, drawing on multiple sources related to theories of value, as well as literary examples. In chapter five, an industrialised pine wood pole comments on my studio practice. My research explores geographically dispersed artistic examples that present material processes of revaluation, rather than a mere critique of value. These examples are compared to twentieth-century artworks, which are considered critical of standardised value. Drawing on affect theories, that rematerialisation (through care and attention) may offer a “reparative” process that posits an alternative, in addition to exposing economic structures. Drawing parallels between the experience of the human body and objects (both in the studio and through the writing) my practice-led research led me to coin the term “migrant material.” This term is capable of embodying the devalued coin, the pine pole, my studio materials and my own experience as a migrant.