Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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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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ItemMiasmatic Performance: Carceral Atmospherics in the Theatre of Clean Break( 2020)In this practice-informed doctoral thesis, I investigate the aesthetics that allow Clean Break Theatre Company, who work with women in prison and women at risk in the United Kingdom, to plunge audiences into atmospheres of imprisonment, resilience and subversion at the theatre. Through an exploration of six plays made while I was a company member (2009-2015), I propose that concepts of prison and criminality in Clean Break’s theatre become porous, atmospheric events – miasmas, as I argue here – which both elicit, and simultaneously confound, a collective desire to attribute a clear function to prison in society. Instead of treating prison as a setting through which storylines of incarceration move, in these productions ‘prison’ becomes a carceral logic, organising the dramaturgical semantics, temporalities and atmospheres of the play, to signify the conditions of carceral society at large. I call this ‘miasmatic performance.’ Miasmatic performance, I suggest, conjures juridical atmospheres, policing atmospheres and contagious atmospheres within audiences at venues such as the Royal Court, Soho Theatre, or Almeida Theatre, the majority of whom do not have lived experience of the criminal justice system. Section One, ‘Miasmatic Aesthetics’, develops decomposition and secretion as two key aesthetics of miasmatic performance. Section Two, ‘Miasmatic Contagions’, theorises the capacity of the miasmatic performance register to simulate and critique concepts of ‘contagious crime’ and social contagion. Section Three, ‘Miasmatic Investigations’, explores activations of the carceral imaginary through casework at the theatre. A miasmatic register in these Clean Break productions becomes both hopeful, and encourages collective responsibility, as it provokes an affective experience of carceral power within audiences who are often only latently aware of their own participation in carceral society.
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ItemSpace is occurring( 2019)SPACE IS OCCURRING is a research project comprised of twelve public exhibitions spanning 2016-2019, including an examination exhibition presentation at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery from 5-16 December 2019, and a written dissertation. In this MFA, assessment is divided as: 75% creative practice and 25% written dissertation. The four-year research project has investigated attentiveness, and negotiations of attentiveness, within contexts that situate, exhibit, display, frame or present contemporary art. Professional opportunities to actualise exhibition works have been taken as resources for doing/thinking research. This set of exhibition works is understood as concurrent research and outcome: artistic decision-making systems, conceptual working questions and professional or ethical mitigations converge and overlap during this doing/thinking. The vocational context of exhibiting within existing visual arts institutions has been the main resource to apply and test research concerns. In addressing this methodology of doing/thinking in the dynamic in situ realm, the written dissertation proposes the concept of ‘infield’. The term ‘infield’, borrowed from its sporting context, is repurposed as means for understanding each specific exhibition context as a dynamic location that is always in an active state of play. The research draws from an engagement with Bulgarian/French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theories of ‘semiotic chora’ and ‘in-progress time’. These concepts support an engagement with the time-space of exhibitions as happening in motion, continuously beginning anew. The relation and interrelation of temporal and spatial experience within systems for making and experiencing art is the focus for an investigation into the writings of theorists including Andre Lepecki, as well as the practices of contemporary artists who work across at least two of the following: sculpture, sound, choreography and/or film. Specific works from artists John Cage, Simone Forti, Marco Fusinato, Douglas Gordon, Robert Morris, Ute Muller, Steve Paxton, Geoff Robinson and Daniel von Sturmer are included in this investigation into artistic strategies within this field. Exhibition works are developed and refined as projects that operate as systems for the spatial and temporal conditions and materials of each exhibition context. Within works, sculptural and filmic means are orchestrated as fields of interactions, and interferences, scored within the spatial and temporal conditions of exhibition context. Fixity and stasis – taken as a lingering museological construct of gallery spaces – are approached as problems to be disrupted, made evident, or a combination thereof. Often specific spatiotemporal overlay procedures develop, which may then be transferred upon (and reinformed by) subsequent professional exhibition opportunities, for different institutions. The application and potential reapplication of exhibition work systems – for different exhibition outcomes at different times – has allowed for a comparative analysis of the manner in which these operate with and within the contingencies of each specific exhibition context.
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ItemSomething's gotta give: Subjectivity and the everyday encounter, through the moving image( 2019)The break-up of my long-term relationship unintentionally guided my MFA project. Over the past two years I found myself in the position where I needed to respond to unexpected personal circumstances that caused trauma in my life. Without warning the intimate parameters that I had coexisted within became inaccessible to me. The state of dysfunction that ensued through this breakdown caused me to reconfigure my values as an artist and to find new ways of being productive. With the presence of immanent deadlines it was necessary for me to adapt the activities of my practice to align with my emotional circumstances. Through this reappraisal, I found that my artistic activities function in partnership with my personal life, and that to attempt to disentangle the two is essentially missing the point. The brokenness and dysfunction that began as setbacks, have intimately sewn together my work and life, and through this I inadvertently located the political concerns that orient my practice. The necessity of this bind has invested a new urgency in my work and raised the questions that form the pathway of this thesis. My research project stakes a claim for the value of subjectivity, through the vulnerability of the personal, and the artistic vitality of the historically repressed everyday environment. My video practice resonates through a feminist disposition, the subjective politics that underpins my work. Harnessing an evolving catalogue of lived experience I have gathered disparate sources, bringing them together in this thesis. My own personal experiences are used as primary figures in my work and it is through these subjects that my research has been shaped. I take a journey of questioning and reflection, with the company of artists and researchers who inspire my practice. I record fragments of my surroundings, daily minutiae, fleeting observations and temporal moments. Through structural filmic devices - the long take, fixed view and close-up magnifications - I hold these ephemeral encounters, repeatedly rewinding, pausing, and zooming in. I am interested in the subjective qualities that can be drawn out through filmic excavation. The outcome of my research project is a series of video recordings, projected at varying scales in the gallery. The images are pieces of my daily life and objects that were the focus of bored and empty stares while I lay in bed. Housed in the space of the gallery, these intimacies are brought into a field of public and private subjectivities, where they resonate through the embodiment of the viewer.