Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemWalking with Ghosts: The Utility of Independence in Painting( 2022-12)This research project comprises two creative components and the written dissertation. The creative components are a series of new paintings and their exhibition, titled Walking with Ghosts, held at VCA Artspace in June 2022, and the book titled Walking with Ghosts: Six Conversations about Painting. John Spiteri, Boedi Widjaja and Audrey Koh, Christoph Preussmann, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Moya McKenna, David Jolly. Talking with Jonathan Nichols, published in 2022. The research responds to a lacuna in contemporary painting: while much has happened in recent decades, in critical debate painting is still perceived as somewhat delinquent and bound-up with subject theory. In response to this dilemma, I deploy the notion of independence as a means to interrogate painting at a structural level (via its framework and exteriority) and at its painted surface (the interior of painting), to re-establish its basis and learning. I argue that the idea of a painter working independently is built into its very fabric and I examine how a painter’s knowledge and experience are crucial to what I refer to here as independence in painting. The research is practice-led. In part a memoir of practice and making new paintings, in part based on fieldwork in the form of conversations undertaken with painters, the project aligns and tests painting concepts and theories against the details of artists’ experience and knowledge. The research is informed by the art and writing of Pierre Klossowski. The dissertation provides a further written investigation of findings. The project identifies that independence in painting is distinguished by its utility and shaped by the specific activities and material traits of painting, as well as the character of an individual painter’s contact with the art world. I link the mimetic character of painting—established in the research as the procedure that animates a painting’s reflexivity and its subjectivity—to the notion of independence. I show that these are interdependent and that mimetic processes are, in fact, implicit in painterly independence. The research also establishes that an individual painter’s independence is key to the formation and activation of the collective shape of painting, where it functions as an institution in itself. Painterly independence infers two kinds of independence operating in parallel: the painter’s/artist’s independence and that of the collective institution of painting (which is itself independent of the artist).
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ItemFinal Fantasy( 2021)The central research focus of Final Fantasy is on the liminal realm of the digital image. This is examined through the lens of the virtual and encompasses the perspectival and visual metaphor of the window and frame. Exploring the space of the digital image through the medium of painting, Final Fantasy conceptualizes a glass-like transparent veil as parergonal surface, a site of tension between the inside and the outside. A threshold as both boundary and bridge. Oscillations between painting and the screen, transferral between virtual space and flatness, and their relationship to view and perspective are central elements of the research project; to examine the digital image within/against the idiom of painting, to tug at the veil between a flat plane and a virtual space is at the core of Final Fantasy.
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ItemThe Presence of Space: Embodiment, Vision, and Art( 2019)The dominant Western conception of space remains the Cartesian paradigm - despite many possible alternatives. This is further reinforced by ubiquity of perspectival space, and the dominance of photography, which reifies this paradigm. This project investigates the self’s relation to space by examining personal, artistic and social frameworks of experiential observation, in doing so, it seeks to evoke these broader conceptualizations of space. The research firstly establishes a framework of references related to the cosmos, the earth and the solar system, with concepts around locating the body in space, and notions of alignment, movement, distance, scale and pattern. The body of creative works which include site-specific installation, wall painting, drawing, photography and animation, are collectively titled the Gnomon Experiments, and explore various uses of the term ‘gnomon’ which refers to locating ones’ self in space, point-of-view, and alignment. The research also examines the reflexive nature of systems of representation of space such as linear perspective, photography, screen and optics in influencing the expression and experience of space, through the theories of Erwin Panofsky and Vilem Flusser who respectively examine these ‘learnt perceptions’ as ideologies encoded with complex symbols and metacodes. This research investigates the possible applications, implications and readings these ideologies might have in spatial arts practice and other works that engage the embodied experience of the viewer. Using various techniques of merging the appearance of two and three-dimensional space the artist endeavours to understand how photography influences spatial practice even in the absence of lens or print. Many of the works incorporate visual illusions and anamorphic distortions where movement and the embodied experience of the participant activates the work. The work questions how we come to feel located in space, and how we construct a sense of space not just around us, but from within us. The project culminates in a minimalist room scaled installation that embodies spatial experience. The percentage split of this research is 75% creative practice, and 25% written dissertation.