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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ItemTacking: a tacktical methodology for making art( 2021)This is a thesis-only practice-led PhD that presents the practice of tacking and the “tacktical methodology” that emerges out of it as my original contribution to knowledge. Tacking is a way of practising string figures differently, that is by practising them between two people, not passing one figure on to the other as in a cat’s cradle, but with one person using their left hand and the other person using their right hand. By drawing on the range of meanings of the word ‘tacking’ and its etymological relations and friends: ‘tacky’, ‘tack’, ‘tactic’, and ‘tact,’ I have constructed a tacktical methodology for thinking about and doing art differently. The inquiry that resulted in tacking and a tacktical methodology was one around race and privilege. As a contemporary artist I wanted to find a way of making contemporary art that did not reinforce or reproduce the status of privilege that automatically came with being a white, female artist in Naarm/Melbourne. The inquiry involved questioning contemporary art itself, the history it comes out of, who defines it and whose work is used to exemplify it. I find that contemporary art is already so steeped in a white and patriarchal paradigm it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how it could be otherwise. Tacking and a tacktical methodology are not contemporary art. They offer an alternative way of practising and thinking about art so that systems that sustain whiteness and patriarchy are not reproduced. To arrive at tacking and a tacktical methodology as a solution to the problem I posed myself I learned from paradigms that were different to the white, patriarchal paradigm of contemporary art. Specifically I learned from Indigenous and feminist philosophies of relationality and from other related philosophies that showed me how putting relation at the centre of a practice can diminish imbalanced power relations. Relation is both the material and the outcome of a tacktical methodology. A tacktical methodology maintains an oblique relationship to power. It is a way of moving against powerful forces and a way of bringing things—ideas, people, animals, anything—together.
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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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ItemImages and imagination of Adventure( 2020)“The Images and Imagination of Adventure” investigates the use of the narratives of adventure in contemporary art practices, and presents the research outcomes through an exhibition and a dissertation. The term “narratives of adventure” is used to describe the trope of adventure that is herein argued as being largely inherited from colonial history. The exhibition component of this thesis was exhibited at the VCA Art Space in July 2018. It comprised of eight works: Projected in Gallery One to the left of the entrance was the short film Victoire which emerged early in the project. This first work was influential to the PhD development and it later informed Victoire-Machine, a viewing device installation that further explored potential modalities of adventure. The First of The Last Crusade, Scope, Lost and Found and Traversant were also displayed with viewing devices and along with the installation Art’Venture, all were presented in the Gallery Two in the center of the VCA Art Space. The final work that was produced, Glowry, was developed specifically for the exhibition and installed in the small adjacent space to the right of the entrance in Gallery Three. The practice-led research has identified three strategies that exist in contemporary art practices in relation to the narratives of adventure. Each chapter presents a different strategy, articulates the creative work undertaken in the PhD, contextualises it within contemporary art practices, and analyses it with a range of key texts. The first chapter, ‘Killing Adventure’, presents the first of three strategies: the artist adopting a critical posture towards adventure, and thus claiming that the colonial trope of exploration is no longer valid in the 21st century. This political approach to the narratives of adventure is observed and described in the work of contemporary artists, and enunciated through the work of Okwui Enwesor, particularly his take on the intensification of proximities in a global context. A portion of the creative body of work produced in the context of this PhD can be retrospectively examined through the lens of ‘Killing Adventure’. The work is contextualised in this framework, and then examined in conversation with the creative practice of other visual artists. The second chapter, ‘Adventure never died’, argues that some art practices develop a Neo-Romantic relationship with adventure, thus embracing or disregarding its problematic dimension and inadequacy. Within those contemporary practices there is a claim for continuity, and an approach to adventure as primarily an exploration of the self. This chapter contextualises the field of contemporary art by looking at the work of Jorg Heiser and his understanding of today’s art practices as ‘Neo-Romantic’. Once again, the creative component of this research was examined retrospectively in reference to this strategy and some of the creative works which fit in this conversation about the continuity of adventure are presented. The third chapter, ‘Adventure is Dead – Long Live Adventure’, presents the last of the three strategies. It has a much more playful relationship with the narratives of adventure. There is an acknowledgement that the ‘Golden Age of Adventure’ though colonialism is over, but there is a desire to play, recycle and reenact the material of adventure. The world has been mapped, the stories have been told: but now scenarios of adventure are used as a drive for adventure. The artists whom adopt this posture, and the creative work produced during this PhD that borrows some of the characteristics of this strategy, are discussed in conversation with the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, and particularly with his essay ‘Postproduction’.
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ItemInfinite spaces of the Beloved( 2019)Infinite Spaces of the Beloved recuperates certain characteristics of Persian Sufi poetry and Farsi literature as contemporary artistic material. In exploring the relationship between the poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and his spiritual teacher and friend Shams-i-Tabrizi, this project attempts to experientially re-present certain aspects of Islamic mysticism through frameworks of contemporary post-conceptual art. More specifically, it will identify parallels and connections between these radically fictionalised, hypothetical and materially-infinite, as well as profoundly uncertain forms and contemporary experiences. Infinite Spaces of the Beloved articulates twenty-first century experiences of being through the creative possibilities located within hybrid cultural forms and languages. By activating meanings and nonsenses created through linguistic diasporas—using fragmented text and sound as a means of incarnating otherness, deterritorialisation and displacement—the research imagines utopic alternatives to the increasingly brutal and dystopic realities of twenty-first century existence.
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ItemBreaking Objects: Activating Artworks Toward New Modes of Thought( 2019)This research has emerged from the intersection between two ongoing preoccupations: how to exhibit spatiotemporal art practices in such a way that the artwork remains active as opposed to static or on display; and, an engagement with the knowledge that reductive thinking about things in the world—from complex and interrelated to simplified and separated out—is part of the human condition. In order to better understand these oppositional factors and how they operate both theoretically and practically, I have come to define a number of key terms that I use to describe different modes of thinking alongside our capacity to flip or switch between them. These terms—Object, broken Object, and an oscillation in thinking—also describe the research methodology I have used in my practice-based research. I have developed this methodology across my literature research and dissertation by looking closely at what factors contribute to a mode of perception where things in the world appear to be active, in motion or complex. I have reviewed how this mode of perception might relate to and operate within spatiotemporal artworks and exhibition contexts by considering the physiological, psychological and philosophical factors that contribute to how we perceive the world, and what we think is going on. However, I have also considered factors that influence a more abstract mode of thinking about the world; one whereby we reduce, condense or separate-out complex and interdependent phenomena. This abstract mode of thinking has philosophical, sociological and political as well as physiological bases; all of which influence the way we perceive the world around us. I have considered one particular mode of thinking, Object-Thinking as being dominant in the West, and throughout my dissertation I reflect upon the possible socio-political consequences of this. In my creative, practice-based research I have applied the methodology of making and breaking Objects as well as proposing methods that might facilitate an oscillation in thinking across several research outcomes including: Chair in Cooperation with Orange (Extended) (2015), The Possibility of Performance (2015), Work (in Progress) (2016), Cross-Section (2017), Tool-Things (2017), Set Elements (2019). My final practice-based outcome, No Single Thing (2019) was exhibited at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery between the 26th February and the 1st of March 2019.