Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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Item“Atlas of the Impossible”: emergent heterotopias and imaginary geography in painting( 2021)Atlas of the Impossible: emergent heterotopias and imaginary geography in painting is the product of three years’ studio research spent investigating, mapping and explicating the relationship between the heterotopia and my florid panoramic paintings. The heterotopia is a spatial theorisation devised by Michel Foucault in 1967, one that is capable of a “dazzling variety” of spatial and relational permutations. Using the heterotopia as a conceptual scaffolding has emboldened me to build paintings containing incongruous - and occasionally bizarre - spatial and pictorial combinations. Through this paper I investigate the ways in which my painting practice is founded in a desire to be transported through the act and experience of painting. I explore how this desire is connected to other practices, such as drawing, reading, and watching odd and fantastical films. In this paper I explore the relationship between visual and linguistic languages found in the work of theorists including Foucault, and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, as well as artists such as Jess Johnson, Julie Mehretu and Frank Stella. By examining the ways in which these artists toy with the geographies and topologies of invented space, I construct a speculative picture of what might be possible when making and viewing my own paintings. Threaded throughout this paper is an investigation of the ways in which these artists deploy or embody heterotopian approaches to space, and how this connects with - or differs from - the spatial possibilities explored in my own work. I explore the experiential potential of painting, questioning all the while what precisely the heterotopia might be - and what outcomes and experiences it can generate in relation to painting. This is explored over three chapters, Dropped Pins and “Fictional Topography”: In Search of the Pinnacle of Strangeness, From Brain to Brain: Co-conjuring “imaginary worlds”, and An “Imaginary Geography”: Painting and drawing as a form of fictional mapping. My studio research output encompasses paintings, drawings and collages, with a primary focus on painting. This includes the work shown at the upcoming 2021 VCA Graduate Exhibition. The body of work I have built over the past three years has led this dissertation, enabling me to explore and experiment with the theoretical and fictional underpinnings of my project while stuck in the gloriously colourful, unctuous, painterly muck and mire of making.
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ItemTraces, fantastical futures and the crystalline( 2020)Traces, Fantastical Futures and the Crystalline employs digital modelling and analogue drawing process to propose speculative utopian architectures. The thesis examines the relationship of the creative works to the German Expressionist and Crystalline movement that arose in the early 20th Century. Key figures like the architects and artists Bruno Taut and Wenzel Hablik, envisioned crystalline cities and architectures and proposed societal transformation through the use of glass in architecture to create utopian cities and buildings. The presented multi-discipline work exploits and interrogates the interplay between the physical and non-physical and postulates a biography and abstraction of the body beyond materiality through the generative constructive art process. Drawing upon a variety of precedent strategies, the creative work ultimately presents a speculative, fantastical, crystalline architecture as a digital projection of virtual space in an actual installation.
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ItemSatisfaction and Doubt: Working in and on the Grid( 2019)This studio-based research project illustrates an investigation into personal motivation and doubt through the practice of expanded drawing. Using shading, scratching and cutting, I intervene with the surface of space in response to the architectural propositions at hand. During this process, I have found myself trying to make sense of these actions, particularly with regards to the influence that drives them, and account for whether they align with a non-hierarchical, fluid theory of gender. At the centre of this research is the perception that geometry, as it is commonly spoken of and received in art discourse, is binary in its correspondence with gender. Research into this discourse has largely been led by a community of artists and art critics who collect around the grid. I am concerned with the social and material politics that surround the grid and frequently return to this structure as a resource for clarity, whilst also approaching it with a certain degree of scepticism. In the written dissertation that follows, I attempt to unpack this drawing practice, understand why it looks to the grid as an anchor and why this, in turn, generates doubt about my actions in the studio.