School of Art - Theses
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ItemSupercharged paintings move towards light and space( 2018)This project considers certain connections between the so-called art world and global social mobility. Is the ubiquity of some universal aesthetic frameworks implicitly promoting the ever-expanding cultural class to become even more seduced by the forces of late-capitalism? The thesis, which comprises a dissertation presented in conjunction with a studio-based investigation, is centred around three distinct, but inter-related templates for display: the generic living room TV wall unit; the painted canvas; and the gallery. I consider how each format conditions our reception of cultural information by influencing our sense of individuality, whilst as the same time signalling our inclusion in a unified non-culturally specific world view that is rooted in western modernism. Significantly, these three selected display arenas all convey a sense of universality—not necessarily through specific content, but rather through their inherent structures. I argue that these successful systems of display potentially mask otherwise visible signs of power through implicit democratic ideologies disseminated via inspirational design trends. Considered together, I demonstrate that all three offer insights into the underlying function of international systems of cultural exchange. A substantial part of this research considers the homogenising effect of Internet image-searching, especially in relation to notions of class and sophistication at a time characterised by a global democratisation of desire and appreciation for ‘good’ design principles. The artworks I have produced in conjunction with this dissertation are designed to critically engage and antagonise the already fuzzy intersection of art, architecture and design. Accordingly, I have sought to produce works that are less distinguished by traditional art-making decisions but rather emphasise compositions, materials, and principles associated within modernist and minimalist infused trends in design and architecture. This strategy seeks to recode the sublime grandeur of late-formalist abstract paintings as a kind-of banal realism perhaps more associated with marketing and pop consumerism. The physical creation of individual artworks has taken place in accordance with two predominate modes of production. Firstly, and in reference to painting, wall mounted sculptural relief works incorporating materials such as Formica composite wood panelling, plywood, hardwood, acrylic paint, enamel paint, glass, vinyl flooring, composite stone samples, imitation plants, real-plants, pots, fluorescent lights, and found objects, were produced. The second mode of production is in the digital realm, and includes digital photographic montages (combining online images with my own photography), video (using online content and making interventions within it) and creating audio tracks (to accompany the video works). Considered together, these modes of production are used as tools to psychologically position the viewer in a space in which materials, surfaces and compositions, might trigger considerations of social mobility, our relationships to design, and finally, notions of personal intimacy and memory that are activated through smart-screen technologies.
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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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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.
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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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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.