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.