School of Art - Theses
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ItemThe telepathy project( 2012)The thesis comprises two interrelated parts: An exhibition of artwork generated by and in response to telepathic prompts and processes, including telepathic events made with people from around the world at varying physical distances and degrees of intimacy. These attempts/events manifest as curatorial projects, performances, conversations, lectures, photographic tableaux, drawings, paintings, dream interventions and group wall drawings. The second part of the thesis comprises a written dissertation that responds to and expands on the practice led research by introducing a range of thinkers, writers and artists who approach telepathy in their work. In particular it is concerned with the ways Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida apprehended and deployed telepathy in their writing. The text proceeds via a logic of association and assemblage – a telepathic writing – finding its precedent in Derrida’s Telepathe. Emerging out of this research is a discussion and performance of some of the anxieties generated in the practice and contained in the literature and current knowledge surrounding the questions telepathy poses for subjectivity, interpretation and meaning making. This has been achieved by shifting some of the questions telepathy posed to Freud and Derrida et al. to a contemporary art practice. This shift has allowed new nuances in the discourse around telepathy to emerge and it is this that comprises the research’s original contribution to knowledge.
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ItemFraming the spectacle( 2011)My project Framing the Spectacle focuses on examining the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the representation of crowd scenes. The aim of the project is to represent, through photography, a common humanity that knows no borders and presents no stereotypes of racial, sexual and religious division. In the paper I reflect on the influences that resonate in my work and which were formed by my experience in growing up in Poland. Formal and conceptual aspects of crowd scenes were investigated in the photographic material taken in a variety of confined and open spaces in Melbourne, Hong Kong and Macau. The crowds are unified by the urban context and their desire for entertainment - to escape from the everyday. This series arose in part from my initial interest in the abstract character of my carpet designs. The images of the crowds, in their very structure, in their ‘grids’, draw upon the notion of singularity within the mass, as well as continuity and the idea of ‘infiniteness’. In the works I attempt to refer to humanity that extends not only to the present but embraces as well the past; the absent crowd. In this thesis I have discussed the theoretical ideas of Rosalind Krauss1 and the notion of the grid within the context of my past artistic practice and the current photographic work. I examined how the grid evolved from the simple carpet designs and later, in the structure of the woven object to the more complex digitalized form of grid-matrix. The digital camera and the telephoto lens are critical to the development and to the visual character of my images. The final image is constructed out of a limited number of shots. It is flattened and abstracted; it moves away from the ‘reality’ to a constructed reality in which there is no hierarchy, and like the grid structure, has no beginning, no middle and no end. There are a number of Polish artists working across different media; film, theatre and sculpture, whose work has been influential in my development as an artist. Amongst them: film director Andrzej Wajda, sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. Some of the contemporary photographers whose work I found useful to reflect on in my own work are: Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Large, panoramic format digitally based prints were made in the studio. Digital marks were woven into the photographic surface of the printed canvas.
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ItemSigns of life: the art of artificial animism( 2012)Using drawing, painting and sculpture, specifically casting and mould-making techniques, this project involves the visual conflation of dualisms such as subject and object, natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, therefore destabilizing these polarizations by intentionally reconfiguring them. Through visual motifs derived from a variety of discourses, including animism, metamorphosis, and fantasy narratives, my work posits an investigation of non-human subjectivity by ascribing a sense of agency to all natural and unnatural phenomena.
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ItemSalt-water-art-science( 2010)Salt-Water-Art-Science is a practice-led research project in which art making and writing are equal partners. The thesis is made up of an installation and a paper. The installation is comprised of many elements, which operate as a total system. The installation Salt-Water-Art-Science will be exhibited for one week at the VCA studios, starting on the 6th December 2010. Contained within the paper and on the accompanied DVD are images of the components, which constitute the installation. I have chosen to separate this work into is elements. By discussing each element I can assist the reader in understanding the complexity of the installation, how each part relates to the other and the final presentation. The paper provides an insight into my research, focused on Salt-Water-Art-Science. It explains in detail what has arisen through the combination of both writing and art production. The paper is a reflective account and critical analysis of my practice within which my installation is situated. The meanings that surface from the research are compiled in four sections: the Historical Influences, the Repercussions/Problems, Artists that bridge the Discipline’s and the final installation, Salt-Water-Art-Science.
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ItemI thought you were her sister...I thought you were your sister( 2010)'I thought you were her sister…I thought you were your sister' is an art-based research investigation into my biological identity as a twin. I undertook this method of examination to explore twin idiosyncrasies, shared thoughts and experiences, blurred memories and uncertainties relative to the twinned appearance of sameness that ultimately produces difference. Creative strategies of mechanical twinning and observations of biological twinning were applied as techniques of re-editing and manipulating found family footage, of my twin and I, to conceptualise twin identity as abstract visual forms that are then spatially installed to construct an environment relative to the viewer’s experience of twins.
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ItemLandscape: interwoven knowledges( 2010)My project presents an analytical and intuitive consideration of ways in which the epistemology of Western Modernity frames my perception of landscape. Through the research I have begun to develop a more emergent and ecologically interrelated cognition within my practice. This has been facilitated by discussion of the dualistic thinking by which modern knowledge is produced, opening towards an understanding of non-dualistic knowledge formed within landscape. Weaving has precipitated this investigation and has become a sculptural and conceptual methodology that affords a comprehension of different knowledges co-existing as strands of vision contributing to this body of work.