School of Art - Theses
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ItemEach copy may perish individually( 2013)Today when the digital image is but an instance existing in multiple versions, the aim in this paper is to investigate how each instance may differentiate. In the research that follows it is suggested that it may not be possible to fully gauge the implications of a digital image at the moment of its production or through the sharing of its popularity in transmission – this may in fact only emerge some time later. This measure may be introduced as a material durability, yet a central issue arises in that it is only by assumption that this can be known, given that the digital age is relatively recent. In the absence of any substantial digital history, we can only postulate what digital duration may be. It is to this end that my work and research is focused. The final body of creative work in the graduate exhibition has been produced in a manner that oscillates from screen to print and back again, across a range of objects using artistic and commercial services. A digital painting is printed in multiple outcomes, stratified across a host of surfaces and sites. It is with humor that a game situation is invoked, where each instance must silently compete against the others through time. The game is not just about which one lasts longest, but most beautifully, faithfully, or poorly. A website has been established to document the digitized versions of the work. It is hoped that this exhibition may go some way to exploring the ways in which an image belongs to a network.
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ItemHilda Rix Nicholas: a catalogue raisonne( 1994)This thesis is a study of the art of Hilda Rix Nicholas, an Australian painter who constructed what appeared to be a successful career in the period between the wars. Her achievements were impressive: she held several solo exhibitions and showed her work in a large number of group shows, and in 1926 became an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Despite her accomplishments, however, Rix Nicholas has been virtually ignored by art historians. Often mentioned, but rarely discussed, her work, like that of a number of women artists, has been excluded from and marginalised in the writing of Australian art history. In seeking to account for the reasons why Rix Nicholas's work failed to achieve any lasting recognition in Australia the thesis examines the ways in which she constructed her career. In Paris, before World War 1 she attuned her art to the standards of the Salon, appropriating its genres, particularly the French peasant tradition, as models of artistic excellence, models which underpinned the emergence of her distinctive Australian imagery in the early 1920s. In Australia, Rix Nicholas conscientiously set out to represent the national landscape in her work. Describing herself as 'the man for the job' she attempted to establish her career within a milieu where the rules of representation were controlled by men. In doing so, she challenged the masculinist framework of the cultural and artistic establishment, as well as the idea that the representation of the nation was the exclusive domain of male painters like Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen. Furthermore, Rix Nicholas painted several pictures of women in the bush, and dared to suggest that women had been equal partners in the formation of the imagined community of the nation. Refusing to acknowledge the gendered boundaries of the Australian art world, she constructed a position for herself that was at odds with the prescribed role of a woman painter, a role which was acknowledged by most women artists working in Australia. Like her male colleagues, Rix Nicholas distrusted the modern movement and was sceptical about the involvement of women artists in it. As far as she could see women modernists had accepted a subordinate position within the artistic hierarchy, a position Rix Nicholas was not prepared to recognize. Her assertive affirmation of her rights meant that her artistic practice occupied a difficult and ambivalent position. Existing outside the mainstream of both male and female representation she challenged the establishment on too many levels, making it virtually impossible for her to achieve any lasting recognition in Australia.
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ItemThe collapsible landscape( 2013)This MFA project draws upon imagery of the natural environment, primarily geological, to construct imaginary landscapes. These landscapes resist the depiction of any actual site, and instead flex between constructed spatial binaries as seen to exist in nature, focusing on the division (and connection) between terrestrial and cosmic space. With a phenomenological underpinning, processes of assemblage pertinent to painting and drawing reinterpret the generic landscape formation to encourage a holistic vision of the environment. In turn, this project questions how constructing a landscape image ‘collapses’ its natural referent. Considering the ‘wilderness’ as a pre- or post-apocalyptic site, landscape without a figurative presence becomes the setting for a re-evaluated sublime experience. Here, potential environmental collapse threatens the terrestrial world (as in Jonathon Bordo’s ‘ecological sublime’), expanding our ‘natural’ position into a cosmic field. From this location, internal and external spaces are seen as interconnected. It is therefore through a geological metaphor or ‘mythologem’ that mountains, crystals and minerals are defined as subjects that create connections between these spatial zones. From this analysis derives a practice that expands and subsides the generic landscape formation through assemblage processes. This is presented in a series of studio investigations (drawing, photographic, sculptural), which pay particular attention to a separation of landscape elements, framing devises and collage techniques. Consequently, these experiments have encouraged a more open and propositional painting practice. In reference to Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Baroque Fold, the work of Per Kirkeby and Laura Owens (among others) reveal a similarly fragmented approach to image making that conjures a flexible pictorial site or threshold. In summary, the construction of a landscape image subjectifies the natural world, transforming the tangible environment into a vision. From studio experiments, theoretical engagement and visual analysis, this project considers mechanisms for collapsing the natural referent of a landscape image. The fundamental technique utilised in this ‘collapse’ is assemblage: a fragmentary and connective visual process that enables the natural world to be envisioned as ‘siteless’.
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ItemTasmania's toy box: exploring loss of innocence through art( 2012)This thesis enters into contemporary debates concerning the cultural investment in innocence. Drawing on my own childhood in Tasmania, this project is driven by the awareness that there are children burdened with knowledge many adults are shielded from. I am seeking, in painting, the means to express this reassignment of roles, using imagery chosen for its capacity to provoke ambivalent responses in the viewer. This is less an argumentative essay than a meditation on the theme of lost innocence. It will examine innocence as an enclosed or guarded space imminently endangered by that which might disrupt the picture, demonstrated through the territorial limits created by the framing of narrative landscape. I will discuss my painting depicting a fire within a Hobart landscape, drawing influence from Colonial paintings of Tasmania - the unease of these images and their contentious relationship to history providing a backdrop for considering less visible manifestations of violence in art. I will also offer a reflection upon language, and in turn the mute subjectivities of animals and children as marginalized in relation to humanity. In this context I will also consider the ethical importance of the face in philosophical discourse, while discussing my paintings of Tasmanian Devils. The mythology attached to this species’ name also provides a platform for speculation as to complex cultural investment in innocence. This thesis aims to provide a poetic and philosophical framework for an investigation into the subject of innocence, which will complement my series of paintings produced in the context of this research. The project hinges upon time - as introduced by the figure of the horologe in a shopping arcade, the enigmatic temporality of childhood acts as a filter through which various ideas and theories are examined. The present day arcade returns the reader to the temporality of childhood – the ever-present dimension of “once upon a time…” - where the silent figures of animal and child are brought together through the emblem of the toy. This dissertation accompanies my studio practice, which takes the form of a series of paintings that are in dialogue with current painting trends and concerns. The paintings presented will reflect three main ways of exploring loss of innocence, which are nevertheless linked through the filter of childhood memory, knowledge and location. My paintings are situated in a contemporary context through a process of engagement and comparison with present day expectations of painting styles and images, variously by their differentiation and similarities. Artists and writers discussed in this thesis are those whose works deal with power relations and violence, and their representation. They include Rodney Pople’s painting Port Arthur, and Degas’s Night exhibition, Adam Cullen’s paintings of Tasmanian Devils, and Yvonne Kendall’s sculptures utilizing toys. I will discuss Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, and will draw on a number of philosophical and scholarly texts, those by Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Joanne Faulkner among others.
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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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ItemPainting in a digital landscape( 2011)This thesis, titled Painting in a Digital Landscape, encompasses research conducted in 2010 and 2011 in the Victorian College of the Arts Masters of Fine Arts Course. The research explores the ways in which the form, process and materials of painting have been affected by new digital media screen technology, particularly through the Internet. The studio practice is based mostly around painting that floats between abstraction and realism. There is also an element of the studio practice that is focuses on the use of digital technology and experimentation with digital print encompassing immersive installation. This serves to amalgamate the virtual experience of digital technology with the tangible experience of walking into an actual gallery space. The supporting exegesis looks at the artists, processes and concepts that influence the studio practice, and follows the history of changes in technology and consequent changes of certain periods in painting.
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ItemRain skating( 2009)In the Twenty First Century, cheap digital video has challenged the photograph for the distribution of visual ideas. Clip sharing sites such as YouTube now receive up to two hundred thousand uploads per week shared by one hundred million users worldwide. This exegesis and its accompanying exhibition, discusses the painting of the ordinary and banal in relation to this recent emergence. It consists of 6 oil paintings depicting skateboarding; all reconfigured from low resolution digital stills found on clip sharing sites, exhibiting many of the signs of degradation and artifacts that are characteristic of digital images. Representation of the day to day in painting has its own discreet history, extending back to French Realism in the 19th century. Numerous artists of this time, in the spirit of the flâneur, made popular by French writer Charles Baudelaire, explored the streets, boulevards and lanes for those encounters that would become paintings. By the 1960’s the painting of everyday life had also shifted to the direct representation of photographic material from personal snapshots to images circulating in the mass media. Today, an artist following these same interests is also likely to make these searches online. For scenes capturing the ebb and flow of humanity, YouTube has become the virtual boulevard for the digital flâneur, a conceptualization of contemporary browsing that mirrors the casual stroller of the physical city in search of fresh experiences. What this shift signifies, is the fact that much of everyday life is now subsumed to the digital. Painting is important in realizing the significance of this fact, due to its ability to reveal the scope of which the formats of popular media act as a go between in a viewer’s experiences, and its long and extensive tradition in documenting the events of the everyday.