Centre for Ideas - Theses
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ItemInvisible words: the semaphore of skin( 2017)In 2003, upon the death of my father, I found four letters. Three were written by my grandmother – a woman I never knew and who was rarely spoken about – and the other recounted the events that led to her deportation and death in a Soviet work camp in Siberia in the 1940s. Viewed as correspondence, as depositories of memory, as suppressed herstories, these inherited artefacts invite questions concerning language, words and images – their ability to at once reveal and obscure meaning, their power to manipulate or be manipulated by both creator and spectator. Perhaps more significantly, these artefacts, like some enigmatic umbilical cord, some sinewed, ancestral thread, urge an unforgetting and reshaping, a giving voice and material expression to that which had been previously silenced and concealed. ‘Invisible Words: the semaphore of skin’ draws on cross-disciplinary practices to articulate the impact of an inherited trauma and silenced memory. The project has at its origins these once-hidden letters, and the several photographs that accompanied them. Although these artefacts clearly expose themselves as narratives of trauma, they also reveal, in what they don’t say, a multilayered censorship. As custodial progeny of this embodied trauma, this thesis and the creative works developed seek to translate beyond the written and argue for an inhabitation of the liminal in order to articulate the impact of a previously silenced and concealed trauma. The creative component of this project has involved both studio- and field-based research and utilises the mediums of photography, video, installation, play-writing and ‘skin’ – a practice situated on the traumatic periphery inhabited by roadkill – to give material form, voice and expression to this sensorial and familial wound.
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ItemThe untranslatable, a poetic place( 2017)This research project is concerned with ‘the untranslatable', which I identify as that which, in art, resists translation into everyday language yet touches me lovingly and truthfully. Through a manner of ‘poetic translation’ that is experiential and reflective as well as semantic and material, and by questioning how an artwork can embody the untranslatable, the project develops concepts to think about the untranslatable and to articulate its presence within an installation artwork that allows for new meanings to enter through audiences’ engagement with the work. Informed by philosophical, theoretical and artistic works that share concerns with the oppositional and draw our awareness towards neutral, subtle and nuanced appearances and understandings of the world, the research investigates the poetic works of art that liberate and provoke our perception and sense of being in this life-world. The research is undertaken through my experiencing and reflecting on these elements: my grandmother’s poetic enunciation about Mt. Aso, shifting shadows of an acrylic cube (a remnant), and Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of chora and ma as a place for ranslation/transference, which is untranslatable. This process, which in turn draws resonant voices from various disciplines, not limited to either Western or Eastern knowledge, to ancient or contemporary time, to one side or one sex, is manifested in my art-making and thesis writing; my artworks inspire and test my thesis, together investigating these five key concepts: ‘Pure Language’, the ‘Poetic’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Transference’ and ‘Embodiment’. As anyone struggles with that which resists translation in art, The Untranslatable, a Poetic Place, is written for both artists and audiences. Within the context of this thesis, ‘the untranslatable’ can be best defined as the life that drifts as it metamorphoses and transforms our experience in and reflection on the world in a more rich and poetic manner. As it ‘transfers’ in variant ways, it can only be embodied temporarily by the poetic work of art; in a poetic language that contains ‘fertile silence’, an architectural body that internalises emptiness/hollowness, or an enduring form of love that longs for motherhood. This embodiment is perceived and experienced as ‘shadow light’ (as truthful, an aid to knowledge) that shifts; an ambiguous image that shimmers; a nuance of love that trembles; or a poetic place that opens.