Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Theses

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Type: PhD thesis × Start date: 2020 × End date: 2021 × Author: Olmi, Leanora ×

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    From Tomb to Womb: How a Sensory Ethnographic Methodology can be Developed to Engage with Regional Communities and their Archives
    Olmi, Leanora ( 2020)
    This research creates a working methodology to engage with archives and communities in regional areas. Discussions on a community’s experience of their environment can be initiated through a sharing of personal archives and storytelling, touching on notions of memory, imaginings and change. My methodology is situated in a sensory ethnographic discipline. Through participation with communities, and my own photographic practice, I devise an applicable methodology for artists in regional environments. The research is developed through emplacement and community engagement, beginning with the Bring Your Own Archive event, and developing into an embedded approach that foregrounds listening and attention. It also expands upon discussions on the use and enquiry into the value of non-digital film material in a contemporary practice and as archival object, and considers what an archive image can tell us with regard to memory, histories and personal stories. Connecting to the notion of non-digital film, my own analogue practice explores place and history in Australian regional towns and this is developed as part of the research and the artwork. This research aims to show how an artist can participate in an active and honourable collaboration with regional towns, and engage in a re-imagination of their archives to create an interactive and lasting work that becomes an archive for the future. It also seeks to create a reflective space for the experiential histories in regional towns and a space for discussion on their future. The outcome of my research is entitled Glory Box. It is an interactive digital artwork that collages a series of archival reinterpretations into a new alternative archive of life in regional areas. It reimagines regional archives for future audiences. It connects my own experiential and dialogical methodology with my fine art photographic practice, commenting on the nature of film photography and on the position of the artist. The research proposes a progressive and experimental approach to archives through a sensory collecting of material, and a knowing or mindful handling of these tangible and intangible histories. A multiplicity of voices through a reauthoring of archive images manifests a contemplation of rituals and customs held within small regional towns today: a visual study on the local, unfolding into a wider reflection on the universal. It also uncovers delicate and indefinite contributions to a community’s connection to its archives that can reveal a deeply felt attachment.