School of Art - Theses
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ItemFabricated country: re-imagining landscape( 2018)Faced with fundamental redrawing of human relationships to the global and local environment, a shift in ways of viewing landscape has precipitated. Broad awareness of biodiversity collapse, urbanization, global warming and the advent of genetic engineering and advances in biological technology has inverted many notions and definitions about the word nature. This, underlined by a revisited pre-colonial historical narrative, particularly across Australia, sustains landscape and nature as urgent topics that need to be dealt with and re-viewed. This practice-led research project investigates the intersections of ecological and cultural environments and how this interrelation can be expounded through the act of painting. The investigation is based largely within a local context of Australian visual art and regional terrains, employing a methodology located at the intersection of postcolonial and post-digital frameworks. Within these frameworks the project interrogates and re-interprets actual and combined landscapes. The project elucidates a contemporary re-imagining of landscape enacted through painting. The final research outcomes are composed of a written dissertation and installation of drawings, painting and spatial work. The work comprising the installation is a direct manifestation of the practice-led research. It is expanded upon in the exegesis section of the dissertation. This set of creative works form part of the argument attending to the central question of my thesis. Combining post-digital and established modes of production, this work seeks to open up a layered space, a visual methodology for re-viewing landscape.
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ItemInstalling and unsettling imaginaries: rehearsing the social within the self( 2018)The practice-led research outlined here explores ways of bringing attention to the mutual contingency of the self and the social through self-portraiture, culminating in a large multichannel projection and sound installation titled How to Deal with Difference (2018). In this thesis I discuss some of the formative influences on this work from various threads of social theory and contemporary installation practice. What we recognise as ourselves is deeply embedded in the social institutions we exist within. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis and others, I will use the term 'imaginary' as an articulation of the social constructions that both form and are formed by the individual. I also refer to the artworks created through this research as 'imaginaries', and through their installation have attempted to unsettle the solidity of various perceptions of the self, and the social. My studio practice is situated through analysis of related works by prominent contemporary artists, noting some of the similarities and differences to the approach I have taken. Works by William Kentridge, Camille Henrot, Pipliotti Rist and Lisa Reihana are discussed in some detail, my purpose here being both to acknowledge their influence and to articulate something of what is distinctive in the work I have created. Partly inspired by Judith Butler's account of performative identity and self-poesis, I filmed myself performing many varying and contradictory 'selves', in an exploration of my own relationality and self-formation. In imagining, performing and arranging these characters, I drew from social imaginaries I am implicitly involved in. By digitally compiling the footage, I composited myself into plural existence to disrupt the sense of singular coherence, although it is obvious that all characters are performed by me. I have positioned the performances as 'rehearsals' – they are not polished or complete, but iterative and partial. By trying on characters I do not think of as me, I seek to explore, through rehearsal, the social within myself. The result is an agonistic portrait of my own socially situated self, which is intended to allow multiple modes of engagement and space for self-reflection.
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ItemResisting representation: photographing diffractively( 2017)This research project begins by asking, “can a photograph resist its representationalist apparatus?” It proposes that if the mechanisms of photographic representation could be used against photography’s inherent representationalism, an alternative way of seeing and being in the world may be revealed. This question is approached through a material engagement with photographic processes that encompass studio and gallery situations. When difficulties were encountered attempting to overturn entrenched photographic representation, research led the project to adopt a diffractive methodology. First articulated by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, a diffractive methodology is used to work with, instead of against, differences across disciplines. Key to this is an understanding of the constitutive role of the apparatus in the creation of knowledge including the performative role of the artist and viewer. Using the principles of this methodology I have devised a series of techniques aimed at disrupting and dispersing a photograph’s representational apparatus so that an alternative to representationalism may be revealed. These techniques are applied to the processes of studio based making as well as the presentation of photographs in a gallery.
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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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ItemA study in entropy: research into the potentials for digital abstraction by the replication and decomposition of information( 2016)This research examines how the information that accumulatively forms the image can be extracted, disseminated and recycled to be recomposed into new abstract forms. It further observes how the organic nature of the process of constraints and deviations is reflected in these new forms, and in the creation of spatial environments and maps of narrative experience. Using digital printing on transparent acrylic sheeting and other materials, the components of the image are abstracted using digital replication. Systemic processes and formulas direct the flow of a path that exposes the image’s information. Manifestation by printing on layered transparencies forms the structure of visual analogies of entropic systems. At its core this research is concerned with the basic source and to extrapolate from that, in a way that reflects entropy and movement. I have utilised the capabilities of digital reproduction to replicate information on a pixel-level. These pixels then gain metaphorical ‘agency’ as they are copied and replicated, theoretically ad infinitum, producing intricate outcomes from slight variable deviations. In practical terms, the method that I used expresses a complex visual structure from simple replication and deviation. The writings of Erwin Panofsky and Henri Lefebvre informed the relationship that has developed between the method of abstraction and the formation of ‘space’. The spatial qualities inherent in the abstract forms allude to a meta-narrative of collective interaction. The implication of this shows that systems of variable deviation have a natural tendency to depict a space that has a metaphorical resonance. Potentially, a map of universal movement, such as the habitus, itself a representation of social interaction and causal influence. Ultimately, it has been the manifestation of these visual processes into an object within the space of the gallery that has raised important questions demanding answers. The necessity of choice becomes significant, as the need to finish the process negates the implication of perpetuity. From the image we can draw out this information, and from this information we can abstract it, take it on a path and observe how it reacts with systems and deviations. In doing so there is a visualisation of abstract forces creating figurative environments and observable spaces. These structures, where the components coalesce and deviate, provide, for me, a way to express an internal understanding of experience and existence.
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ItemThe Rigid and the Slack: photographic process in the pursuit of familial intimacy( 2016)The Rigid and the Slack: Photographic Process in the Pursuit of Familial Intimacy uses conditions of the photographic process, from the alchemical to Barthes’s ‘violence of capturing’ to pursue intimacy in familial relations - contained, measured and contingent upon ‘the everyday’ - to examine how a body of artwork may bridge the distancing paradox inherent in the photographic process to pull the subject close. My approach has been to visually and conceptually map the trace of the familial subject in their haptic actions and low-fi everyday setting alongside photographic picture making tools and approaches that aspire to ideal and hi-end production as a method to reflect both as intricately and intimately entwined and woven into the fabric of the artwork. My domestic setting is the studio and site where - as wife and mother - I experiment in the zone between control and disorder. The Rigid and the Slack: Photographic Process in the Pursuit of Familial Intimacy is informed by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida alongside; Sally Mann’s approach to photography and her memoir Hold Still: a Memoir with Photographs and; Carol Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour. The creative work comprises two projected videos and seven photographic prints, three of which are diptychs. Images of examined works are included in the appendix and two separate video files are available for viewing.
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ItemPulse, chance, flux: the energetic image( 2015)Pulse, chance, flux: the energetic image is a practice-led research project which investigates the possibilities for extending analogue film and digital video projection beyond mere image reproduction, to become a transmission of embodied energy. The project is broken down into three key areas of investigation: pulse (vibration; frequency), chance (indeterminacy; synchronicity) and flux (the flow and transduction of energy). This project argues for the existence of a fundamental pulse to the world, or rather for millions of pulses, overlapping each other. From the addition of a multitude of pulses of information arises interference: the complexity of the world. Key works of vibration by Alvin Lucier, Tony Conrad and Bridget Riley are discussed. Artistic strategies of chance are investigated as a means to imbue works with the complex- ity of interference and to question how deeply relation really goes. Key time-based works by John Cage and David Tudor are compared for their strategic attempts to model the indeterminacy of the world in their very form. Flux is articulated as being the flow of energy. Douglas Kahn’s concept of the Aelectrosonic (the always-moving electromagnetic) is discussed and an argument is raised for its extension from sonic practices to include the luminous. In thinking about Kahn’s idea of transduction as the ‘locating moment’ of energy, a fundamental technical difficulty in working with light energy versus sound can be accounted for by abandoning literal transductions, instead turning to allusions. Three projection installation works, Modulations (2012–2015), Black Noise (2012) and Dark Matter (2015), were created, each comprising arrangements of projection devices, objects and images in relation. Flicker was used as a tactic to transmit an apparent embodied energy via the projection to the visitor. Decentralisation and dislocation were used strategically to continually shift attention from object to image to space to experience. The marriage of these theories and tactics is intended to create an energetic ‘noise’ in the space, in the projection machines and in the neurophysical of the viewer.
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ItemWhat lies buried will rise: exploring a story of violent crime, retribution and colonial memory( 2015)This thesis explores historical connections between colonial violence, memory and representations through art. It examines archival documentation and oral histories of an 1839 murder case in York; Sarah Cook and the hanging of Aboriginal men, Barrabong and Doodjeep. This case was the catalyst for the some of the worst massacres in WA. As an Aboriginal woman from York, I examine how art engages with story telling to investigate critical events in colonisation and imagine how what lies buried might rise.
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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.
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ItemNoise & mischief( 2013)Noise and Mischief is the culmination of two-years of research on the inherent negativity towards noise. The connotation of noise arrives as being immediately an undesired excess material. The political economy of noise anticipates a reception of hostility. Given its etymology of the Latin nausea, and associations with obstruction and interruption, this is not surprising. While mischievous behaviour functions with a similar anti-aesthetic and necessity for resistance, its reception is much less offensive and often even likeable. Throughout this project the application of noise is partnered with a mischievous demeanour in order to incite a thrill-seeking experience that may flirt with trouble, danger and pleasure. Incorporating mischief to noise reduces the hostile reception. This is imperative to make the work more accessible to the viewer. Introducing fundamental aspects of play liberates noise from pure obstruction, interruption and chaos. This enables a broader pallet of noise, incorporating elements of nuisance, pest and annoyance as well as humour. Kinetic, sound-based sculpture is the vehicle used in order to deliver this expanded outcome.