Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemSpace is occurring( 2019)SPACE IS OCCURRING is a research project comprised of twelve public exhibitions spanning 2016-2019, including an examination exhibition presentation at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery from 5-16 December 2019, and a written dissertation. In this MFA, assessment is divided as: 75% creative practice and 25% written dissertation. The four-year research project has investigated attentiveness, and negotiations of attentiveness, within contexts that situate, exhibit, display, frame or present contemporary art. Professional opportunities to actualise exhibition works have been taken as resources for doing/thinking research. This set of exhibition works is understood as concurrent research and outcome: artistic decision-making systems, conceptual working questions and professional or ethical mitigations converge and overlap during this doing/thinking. The vocational context of exhibiting within existing visual arts institutions has been the main resource to apply and test research concerns. In addressing this methodology of doing/thinking in the dynamic in situ realm, the written dissertation proposes the concept of ‘infield’. The term ‘infield’, borrowed from its sporting context, is repurposed as means for understanding each specific exhibition context as a dynamic location that is always in an active state of play. The research draws from an engagement with Bulgarian/French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theories of ‘semiotic chora’ and ‘in-progress time’. These concepts support an engagement with the time-space of exhibitions as happening in motion, continuously beginning anew. The relation and interrelation of temporal and spatial experience within systems for making and experiencing art is the focus for an investigation into the writings of theorists including Andre Lepecki, as well as the practices of contemporary artists who work across at least two of the following: sculpture, sound, choreography and/or film. Specific works from artists John Cage, Simone Forti, Marco Fusinato, Douglas Gordon, Robert Morris, Ute Muller, Steve Paxton, Geoff Robinson and Daniel von Sturmer are included in this investigation into artistic strategies within this field. Exhibition works are developed and refined as projects that operate as systems for the spatial and temporal conditions and materials of each exhibition context. Within works, sculptural and filmic means are orchestrated as fields of interactions, and interferences, scored within the spatial and temporal conditions of exhibition context. Fixity and stasis – taken as a lingering museological construct of gallery spaces – are approached as problems to be disrupted, made evident, or a combination thereof. Often specific spatiotemporal overlay procedures develop, which may then be transferred upon (and reinformed by) subsequent professional exhibition opportunities, for different institutions. The application and potential reapplication of exhibition work systems – for different exhibition outcomes at different times – has allowed for a comparative analysis of the manner in which these operate with and within the contingencies of each specific exhibition context.
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ItemStrategies: an artist mother's maintenance manifesto( 2019)Becoming a mother is life-changing: it is well documented that it challenges the sense of self and identity. Maintaining an art practice while mothering could be defined as work. There is substantial literature to support the idea that mothering is a discipline just like art is. This involves ‘maternal thinking,’ a multiple-variable thought process used when caring for children. To support this notion, feminist theorists have developed the term matricentric or mother-centered feminism. This positions mothering more as a practice than an identity. This research paper is informed by matricentric feminist ideologies. Given these contributions to the current narrative surrounding motherhood, the idealised image of the ‘good’ mother still prevails in Western society. It appears that to be a ‘good mother’ a woman needs to put her children first. This is at the expense of her desires, passions, and interests. Based on personal first-hand experience as a mother, the widely accepted idea of the ‘good mother’ seems to stem from a patriarchal notion of motherhood that is disempowering and unrealistic. It is perceived that childrearing is gendered: men tend to generally be less involved in it while women are expected to be totally involved. How does one navigate these prevailing stereotypes and expectations surrounding the idea of the mother who is also an artist? Information on how to manage this conundrum remains an emergent field. Can matricentric feminism be present in an art practice in a seemingly patriarchal society? With practice-led research, informed by matricentric feminism, Strategies: An Artist Mother’s Maintenance Manifesto aims to investigate what kind of processes or strategies emerge from the labour expended when mothering and art making simultaneously. It seeks to validate the seemingly private nature of a mother’s work commonly associated with motherhood by devising four artistic strategies to connect the private to a public exhibition space. An autoethnographic methodology will be applied for this enquiry. Day-to-day personal experience as a mother and artist will be used as a reference, vis-a-vis the current discourse surrounding motherhood. This investigation seeks to contribute new narratives on the topic of motherhood and art. This will be achieved in part by applying the concept of trans/performance. The latter consists in connecting the work entailed in everyday mothering with the work involved in making artworks for an exhibition. In other words, trans/performance takes the work of a mother which has been commonly associated with the private and the domestic across into the public sphere where the art exhibition is held. The resulting creative outcomes or “strategies” emulate the works of the American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her art practice exposed through performance the invisible labour associated with motherhood in conjunction with other tasks associated with the maintenance of a city. It is suggested that an image of the ideal mother follows gendered conservative values. Framed around a matricentric feminist lens, the research reveals the complexity behind the responsibilities entailed in being both a mother and an artist, beyond societal expectations. An artist mother’s creative process is documented through personal diary entries, through descriptions of the major artworks and creative endeavors conducted for this research. To document this development are four installation works that investigate being a mother and an artist. These works manifest through sculpture, photography portraiture and video. The final outcome of this research is an installation in a gallery space. Over 200 sand-filled calico bags, with the word ‘MOTHER’ stenciled on them, are arranged in the space. Also secured on the gallery floor, walls and ceiling are a series of white wax and acrylic sculptures of the artist’s arm. A large, black and white photographic print is mounted on a wall. This work features a portrait of the artist holding both her children in her arms. Another work in the space is a video installation where the artist is seen in a series of clips cleaning sandbags and using sandbags to control water flooding into an outdoor landscape. The audio recording contains a combination of background noise and the artist’s voice in conversation.
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ItemHabitation procedures: adjusted dwelling space and sculpture practice in situ( 2019)This research project enquires into relations between sculpture practice, adjustments of space by inhabitants of dwellings and the siting of artworks as installation and intervention. It examines how acts of dwelling and making correspond as habitation procedures; as everyday processes of amending space and objects. Understood as a female will-to-identity they suggest new ways of constructing the experience of encountered sculpture and the passage of the domestic into public discourse. The research takes place through domestic sites and related exhibition activity, embodying experiences that overlay places of living and working, home and studio, residency and gallery. These include a Caravan mobile home in Narooma, NSW; a 1960s mud-brick residence, Birrarung House in Eltham, Victoria and a gallery residency in Bendigo, Victoria. Habitation procedures are practices of the dialogical; an interchange of voices that constitute new and compound meanings (Mikhail Bakhtin,1982), of in-betweeness and dialectical experience (Jane Rendell, 2006), of change through the experience of time and space (Massey, 2005) and of mediation. The communities of practice informing the project include the Womanhouse Project (1971), Lygia Clark, Andrea Zittel and Heide Bucher.