School of Art - Theses

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Author: HAMILTON, EMMA JANE × End date: 2018 × Start date: 2010 × Subject: photography × Subject: sculpture ×

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    Through touch and sight: approaching enantiomorphism
    HAMILTON, EMMA JANE ( 2013)
    Can visual perception be formed through an encounter with touch? Investigations into the visual phenomena of mirror symmetry, the horizon line, and their relationship with the haptic. This research uses the near visual symmetry of the flat white landscapes of dry salt lakes as a context to examine the relationship between visual perception and touch. Throughout the Masters of Fine Art program I have undertaken several research trips to lakes in north-western Victoria, gathering material using photography, observation, and collecting salt from the sites. I have captured the space of the dry salt lakes through the camera viewfinder and inserted the photographs into my sculptural practice. Using light boxes and backlit projection, I have returned them to their mode of production: light. Light sources are a central material of the work, simultaneously illuminating the images and lighting the installation as a whole. The photographs are presented in dialogue with delicate salt crystal collages encased in Perspex®. These transparent Perspex objects act as apertures, standing in for the viewfinder, and simultaneously capture reflected light from the installation. The majority of the images printed in this dissertation are intended as documentation, however, due to the nature of my work with light, my installations are often difficult to photograph. The view of my work through the mediation of the camera lens has produced perspectives, lighting and cropping that cannot be seen with the human eye. This photographic documentation has become part of my research and I have reinserted it into the work. This thesis is broken down into three chapters, each addressing theoretical concerns I contemplated while walking on the salt crust of the lakes and working in my studio. This document exists in dialogue with my artwork, and seeks to locate my practice within a wider context. I examine my perceptual experiences at the dry salt lakes using the concepts of enantiomorphism (mirror symmetry) and inframince (Marcel Duchamp’s term describing fleeting moments of contact), which are linked by the mysterious fourth dimension. The notion of ‘touch’ is viewed from the philosophical perspectives of Jean-Luc Nancy, Johann Gottfried Herder, Andrew Benjamin and Laura Marks. In this discussion I explore the possibility of haptic visuality, particularly through the medium of light. I propose that the haptic gaze is present both in my perception of the landscape and my resultant installations. These perceptual instances reveal the inexactitude of the visual perception of optical phenomena such as the horizon line and the enantiomorphic space of the dry lakes. Duchamp’s inframince is examined as a temporal space akin to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the ‘now’. Within my research, inframince operates as a lens, a space, a measurement and sometimes a momentary reflection.