School of Art - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
ItemThe enchanted city: a study of the creative potential of the ‘incidental’ in the urban environment( 2012)Taking the form of drawing, text-based works and sculptural installation, my research seeks to re-inscribe the urban environment with fresh layers of meaning. In drawing focus upon overlooked aspects of the city’s material, textural and physical qualities, I encourage the viewer to consider alternative vistas within the fabric of their everyday surrounds. This project explores how, via a focus on ‘detail’ and an articulation of the decorative, we may invest the ‘incidental’ with symbolic significance. In providing a mechanism of connectivity that transforms our habitual relationship with the urban landscape, urban nature becomes a springboard for reflection and poetic association, with the potential to affect our perception of public space. Structured in line with the changing light of a single day, the written component of my research offers differing perspectives from which the practical work may be seen to imaginatively transform familiar, yet overlooked, aspects of the urban environment. Tracing a history developing from the psychogeographical practices of the Situationist’s, I examine the work of artists and writers seeking ways to both critique and creatively engage with the city. In this way I situate myself within an emerging field, tentatively termed, ‘Post Industrial Romanticism’. Through reference to J.R.R. Tolkein and Ernst Bloch’s theories on daydreaming and fairy tales, I identify ways in which our perception of the urban environment may be mediated through the employment of poetic constructs. I also explore how a detailed and obsessional working model, as well as a focus on ‘the decorative,’ might facilitate an emotive or sensorial connection between the subject, maker and viewer. This aspect of the research is contextualised with reference to the feminist theories of Rosalind Galt, in addition to a study of the potential for craft techniques to convey an emotive quality. Within this project I seek to ‘bring the outside in’ in such a way that might expand the resonance of the artwork beyond the gallery and back into the viewer’s experience at street level. The resolution I have arrived at is presented in the final exhibition and weaves together the themes explored throughout my research. In summary, in examining the micro-life that may exist in cracks, unobserved corners and discarded debris (amongst other source material) I argue that it is possible to experience an alternative form of reality on a simple walk around the city. Through a process of ‘re-enchantment’ the work offers the possibility of participating in a more expansive form of everyday experience.
-
ItemThe future, today: notes on a changing world( 2012)We live in a time where everything, everywhere seems to be happening simultaneously, and indeterminately. Worldwide events expose themselves to us 24/7, from the major issues to the trivial. Sociopolitical unrest, economic instability and natural disasters are part of our everyday, as are the daily updates of some US celebrity or a Burkina Fasoan in Ouagadougou. At the same time, the same technology also adds more diversions – in the form of nonstop entertainment – to lull and ease our anxieties away. The rate in which these come to us is astonishing in acceleration and quantity, and in their stroboscopic appearance, they often leave us in states of confusion and bewilderment. This research is a study on the current age that we live in: an age of confusion, of anxiety, of uncertainty. In examining the symptoms, the exegesis will employ a multidisciplinary approach – from information and social theory, to literary and cultural studies, to contemporary art discourse – primarily to highlight the interdependency of the issue. These are bound via a single framework known as the 'oscillation' – a characteristic of our current condition, where we constantly renegotiate and reorient ourselves (between modernist and postmodernist values, between hope and despair, between reality and illusion and so on) – as formulated by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. The studio practice aims to provide more than just a rhetoric to the dilemma. Highly self-conscious of itself in light of years of postmodern irony and skepticism, the series of drawings in this research allude to the aforementioned oscillation through using handwriting as their main visual code, done in a manner which blurs the distinction between writing and drawing. Ultimately, the work also endeavours – in all modesty – to serve as a reminder of art's redemptive potential.
-
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.