School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemLooking back: contemporary feminist art in Australia and New Zealand( 2016)This thesis sets out to examine the ways in which feminism manifests itself in contemporary art, focusing in particular on Australia and New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with practicing contemporary artists Kelly Doley, FANTASING (Bek Coogan, Claire Harris, Sarah-Jane Parton, Gemma Syme), Deborah Kelly, Jill Orr and Hannah Raisin. During these interviews, a number of key themes emerged which form the integral structure of the thesis. A combination of information drawn from interviews, close reading of art works, and key theoretical texts is used to position contemporary feminist art in relation to its recent history. I will argue that the continuation of feminist practices and devices in contemporary practice points to a circular pattern of repetition in feminist art, which resists a linear teleology of art historical progress. The relationship between feminism and contemporary art lies in the way that current practices revisit crucial issues which continue to cycle through the lived experience of femininity, such as the relationship to the body, to labour and capital, to the environment, and to structures of power. By acknowledging that these issues are not tied to a specific historical period, I argue that feminist art does not constitute a short moment of prolific production in the last few decades of the twentieth century, but is a sustained movement which continually adapts and shifts in order to remain abreast of contemporary issues.
-
Item'Unlocked Doors': correspondence as female-centric writing practice( 2017)The aim of this thesis is to investigate, through critical analysis and creative work, the notion of a female-centric writing practice that not only accommodates but incorporates motherhood. By dismantling the central tenets of the nineteenth century androcentric Romantic myth of creativity, this thesis begins to imagine what a female-centric creative practice, built around women’s experiences, might look like. To do so, it investigates correspondence as a writing form commonly and traditionally practised by women that subverts the approach, value systems and goals of an androcentric model of literary production. I contend that correspondence has been overlooked as a feminist model for writing practice, and that it provides a blueprint for a female-centric model of creative process — a writing practice structured around a woman’s reality that does not insist upon a ‘room of one’s own’ with ‘a lock on the door’ as proposed by Virginia Woolf in 1929. This model would not be antithetical to the realities of motherhood, but would go so far as to acknowledge the benefits motherhood can bring to a writing practice. I hypothesise that in correspondence a tradition of ‘writing in the midst of life’ can be found that enables mother-writers to differently conceptualise the how of writing, freeing them from age-old conflicts between creativity and mothering. Specifically, this thesis uses a gynocritical analysis of the correspondence of successful mid-century Australian female poet Gwen Harwood to hypothesise the potential of correspondence as a model for a female-centric creative practice.