School of Art - Theses
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ItemAesthetic Systems of Participatory Painting: communicating in Third Space and mental wellbeing in Tonga( 2017)This thesis builds upon Homi Bhabha’s concept of Third Space to frame social connection and self-determination in a socially-engaged collaborative painting practice. Developed in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga with On the Spot Arts Initiative (OTS) and involving diverse groups including patients from the Vaiola Hospital Psychiatric Ward, this research offers a new approach to collaborative painting and provides a framework to support mental health and wellbeing. I have theorised this methodology and titled it the Aesthetic System of Participatory Painting (ASOPP). Integrating mental health and contemporary art frameworks, this hybrid model promotes individual autonomy and critical thinking by supporting both harmony and difference, creating a generative space. This research argues that by expanding modernist, individualised aesthetic systems to accommodate a social application, ASOPP projects provide opportunities for local communities to critique social structures and self-represent. This can assist in empowering participants and destabilising pre-established cultural hierarchies that hold power and often determine cultural standards. ASOPP has also informed the accompanying documentary video used to account for the research, providing an accessible research outcome and an opportunity to self-represent for collaborative partners and participants.
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ItemGeometric garden: mapping a holistic worldview through drawing( 2015)Building on the utopian language of geometry, my research project explores the potential for abstract drawing installations and immersive wall drawings to construct a holistic vision of the world. Both Japanese gardens and maps are deployed as unifying visual metaphors to conflate diverse geometric patterns and symbols. The forms that appear in my work derive from scientific illustrations and diagrams, esoteric symbolism, and religious architecture and decoration across cultures. They also reference the history of abstract painting. My work imagines a metaphysical harmony in which visual elements of science and religion, and nature and culture, are non-hierarchically combined to create a contemplative space. In other words, my research project interrogates how it might be possible for contemporary abstraction to visualise a worldview that encompasses and integrates diverse modes of knowledge for interpreting the world around us. In this written dissertation, I advocate for the metaphysical and utopian implications of geometric images through some historical examples. I also reveal the limits of the conventional tendency of geometric abstraction towards absolutism. Through the lens of post-structuralism, I problematise fixed, hierarchical and divisive ways of picturing the world characterised by binary modes of seeing. I chart the contemporary revival of abstraction by examining artists who reevaluate geometry's potential to construct more complex worldviews encompassing social, political, and religious themes. They include Emily Floyd, Julie Mehretu, Eugene Carchesio, Haleh Redjaian and Jess Johnson. I also consider how the arbitrary and mediating qualities of abstraction in my own work, embodied through the fluidity and translucency of an aqueous medium, unified colour schemes, and subtle fluctuations of hand-drawn lines, might extend this dialogue. Within the analysis around my unfolding bodies of work, I address how motifs derived from nature, maps, and gardens operate as connective devices between worldviews that are usually separated. As such, my project explores abstraction's potential to generate a more inclusive, complex, and open-ended cultural imaginary.
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ItemAsking for trouble: collaboration and constraint as a generative method( 2014)This research project is a practice-led exploration of the employment of collaborative and constrained working methods as a strategy for producing paintings. Taking cues from the approach deployed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth in the 2003 documentary film The Five Obstructions, as well as methods invented and adopted by members of the French literary group the Oulipo; this research investigates the utility of collaboration and generative constraints for the teasing out of new possibilities from the conventions of painting. The core studio project is a series of still-life paintings for which collaborators were enlisted to create objects that became the subject matter of each painting. I aim to draw upon the experience of tackling each of these specifically restricted projects to elucidate the value of this working method as well as the ramifications for the reception and interpretation of paintings made in this way. This research applies to painting the Oulipian idea that arbitrary constraints can stand in for a traditional concept of inspiration and posits that they also have an inherent capacity to add unpredictability to the results. This written dissertation will situate the work within the broader context of collaborative and constrained art making and consider the implications of such methodologies on the concepts of authorship and interpretation. An exhibition of paintings will represent the component of the research undertaken in the studio. The paintings will be in oil and acrylic on aluminium composite panel and will be the results of the collaborative and constrained working methods elaborated upon in the dissertation.