School of Art - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemA Vyrcanian story: materialising alternate histories and geographies( 2014)The works produced along with this dissertation and presented as the result of my MFA consist of a narrative video, set in a fictional land, tracing the downfall of a secret society. This is presented alongside a looped photorealistic moving image of genderless, angelic figures blinking, smiling, and intoning a hymn-like monotonous chorus. These two videos are projected on two large screens in a dark room in which there is bench seating which has been decorated in the style of the fictional land to which the work belongs. These video works and the furnishing exist as outcrops of a larger whole. As they function as punctual materialisations of a set of geographies and histories—the Vyrcanian Federation—that I had been devising occasionally and randomly since childhood in my head, on scribbled bits of paper and on my computer; but the bulk of which has been developed during this MFA as fully realised artworks. As the result of this research, I also will install “behind the scenes” videos, maps and images relating to the construction of the Vyrcanian Federation, located behind the projection screens. In the following dissertation I structure and expound the history of the Vyrcanian Federation, including the language in which the videos have been made; and I have composed this research following an encyclopaedic format. I include autobiographical details indicating the personal needs and proclivities that incited and guided to their creation, and discuss the cultural background inspiring them as well as the political questions they raise. For the latter I examine the works' roots in cartography, archaeology and the history of esotericism; and their relationship to the aesthetics of spirituality and of totalitarianism; and the films and artworks that have provided inspiration.
-
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.