School of Art - Theses
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ItemObjects on the edge of awareness: reframing peripheral objects in a sculptural field( 2018)This research considers the potential of peripheral objects in a process-driven sculptural and spatial practice. The peripheral object is something that goes largely unconsidered, but whose necessity to the centre, and whose lack of stability give it incredible potential. The peripheral object forms a relation between states, sites and objects, and this research posits that it lends those things that it links identity and structure. Here peripheral objects are drawn from architecture and construction sites and are elements that support, facilitate and frame, such as scaffolding, architectural surfaces and apertures. Linking peripheral objects to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of The Parergon and Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures, peripheral objects are established as inherently supportive, as the connector between, as always in-relation-to another, and as intimate, touching the objects that they surround. I speculate that peripheral objects, as things that often go unnoticed, or that appear to be incomplete, are not perceived as objects. This notion is discussed through the perceptual functions within the apprehension of Michael Fried’s concept of objecthood. The qualities that are essential to the object are established in reference to Robert Morris’ series of essays Notes of Sculpture Parts 1-4. The notion of the contact-boundary brings the operations of the surface into focus, and I link this to sculptural and material potential to express objecthood. The intimacy of touch and its implications in a sculptural practice are drawn out in a discussion of casting processes and performance in the work of Isa Genzken and Bruce Nauman. The outcomes of this research are a written dissertation and an installation of sculptural artworks. Through investigations into casting and re-engineering peripheral objects, my process-driven practice has discovered the functions, necessity and potential within them. This research brings focus to what is often considered outside our view and bodily experience. This work enacts the edges of spaces and forms; it does not bring them to the centre but sees the edge.
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ItemCasting an ensemble of objects: producing objects within a post-medium specific 'photographic' logic( 2012)This practice-led research project investigates the potential of an evolving relationship between photography and sculpture. The aim is to expand photographic discourse through the production of a cast ensemble of objects, within a post-medium specific ‘photographic’ logic. That is, a post-medium specific understanding of ‘photography’ that is not solely contingent on a photograph, as a material host, but rather, generative of sculptural objects in relation to images. The paper explicates a series of conditions or relationships, which can be seen as ‘photographic’, based on the photographic mediums facilities to reproduce, copy and multiply – as the principal impetus in not only the production, but also the presentation and perception of objects within the gallery space. A trajectory that originated from correlations made between the sculptural technique of moulding and casting to the technical production of photographic images. A lineage is drawn through a culture of copying pictures and images, commonly associated with appropriation art, and more specifically, the ‘Pictures Generation’, as a means to position the production of cast replica objects within a ‘photographic’ logic. Subsequently, links are made between the presentation and display of ‘sculpture’ within framing mechanisms, which includes the gallery space as a framing device, as a process of ‘image’ production and composition. And lastly, the paper considers our perception of everyday objects, in relation to images of the mind or memories as ‘psychologised objects’. Positioning replica objects as physical ‘ghosts’, which embody the absent object, they were reproduced from – as a conflated object image. The paper contextualises these processes, which form the parameters for the practice-led research, within a theoretical argument, leaving the greater ‘meaning’ of the work open-ended. The exhibition presents a series of recognisably commonplace replica objects, as a cast ensemble of interrelated yet discrete sculptural objects. The works are arranged and displayed predominantly on the floor of the gallery space, or on other objects, which act as host structures for display.
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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.