School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Mirror as symbol in the art of Gordon Bennett

Scafidi, Chiara ( 2015)

The purpose of this dissertation is to locate and explore the use of the symbol of the mirror in the work of Gordon Bennett, and to define the period of its most prevalent use. Outcomes of this thesis include greater understanding of postcolonial critique in Bennett’s work and an addition to much needed scholarship on his 1993 work Mirror Line, made while he was Artist in Residence at the University of Melbourne. I seek to identify three forms that the mirror takes in Bennett’s work: the represented mirror, the mirror as inversion, and the physical mirror. I analyse the ways in which each form manifests meaning within art historical, psychoanalytic and postcolonial frameworks. I find that the mirror has multiple meanings and interchangeably may represent truth, narcissism and the colonial self/other binary and that ultimately the mirror is a key symbol in Bennett’s postcolonial critique of Australian historical narrative in the years 1987-1996.