School of Art - Theses
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ItemThrough touch and sight: approaching enantiomorphism( 2013)Can visual perception be formed through an encounter with touch? Investigations into the visual phenomena of mirror symmetry, the horizon line, and their relationship with the haptic. This research uses the near visual symmetry of the flat white landscapes of dry salt lakes as a context to examine the relationship between visual perception and touch. Throughout the Masters of Fine Art program I have undertaken several research trips to lakes in north-western Victoria, gathering material using photography, observation, and collecting salt from the sites. I have captured the space of the dry salt lakes through the camera viewfinder and inserted the photographs into my sculptural practice. Using light boxes and backlit projection, I have returned them to their mode of production: light. Light sources are a central material of the work, simultaneously illuminating the images and lighting the installation as a whole. The photographs are presented in dialogue with delicate salt crystal collages encased in Perspex®. These transparent Perspex objects act as apertures, standing in for the viewfinder, and simultaneously capture reflected light from the installation. The majority of the images printed in this dissertation are intended as documentation, however, due to the nature of my work with light, my installations are often difficult to photograph. The view of my work through the mediation of the camera lens has produced perspectives, lighting and cropping that cannot be seen with the human eye. This photographic documentation has become part of my research and I have reinserted it into the work. This thesis is broken down into three chapters, each addressing theoretical concerns I contemplated while walking on the salt crust of the lakes and working in my studio. This document exists in dialogue with my artwork, and seeks to locate my practice within a wider context. I examine my perceptual experiences at the dry salt lakes using the concepts of enantiomorphism (mirror symmetry) and inframince (Marcel Duchamp’s term describing fleeting moments of contact), which are linked by the mysterious fourth dimension. The notion of ‘touch’ is viewed from the philosophical perspectives of Jean-Luc Nancy, Johann Gottfried Herder, Andrew Benjamin and Laura Marks. In this discussion I explore the possibility of haptic visuality, particularly through the medium of light. I propose that the haptic gaze is present both in my perception of the landscape and my resultant installations. These perceptual instances reveal the inexactitude of the visual perception of optical phenomena such as the horizon line and the enantiomorphic space of the dry lakes. Duchamp’s inframince is examined as a temporal space akin to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the ‘now’. Within my research, inframince operates as a lens, a space, a measurement and sometimes a momentary reflection.
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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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ItemConstructing absence: perceptual destablisation and language( 2011)This research began by looking into the phenomenon of hallways and their metaphorical impact, a motif that has long been central to my practice. During my enquiry I noticed that I wanted to gain specific understanding of what was most elusive, that is ‘the constant flickering of presence and absence’ of meaning within the work I was making. This search was provoked by what I was encountering as a particular view of language centered on Jacques Lacan’s concept of the ‘mirror phase’, Jacques Derrida’s use of 'différance' and ‘trace’, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘seduction’ and lastly, Zen Buddhism. I became aware that absence is never absence, and that in fact absence is a specific kind of presence. This then became the juggernaut of my research. The now articulated subject of “the presence of absence” was explored in spiritual spaces, the concept of ‘the other’ and an enquiry into language itself. Along the way, a number of other concerns presented as the nature of the work changed and the research influenced the evolution of the work made. The concept of ‘ma’ influenced the intention of the hallways, to take the viewer on a journey without destination. In addition, the viewer's body became an active force within the work in a similar way to the religious act of genuflection before a deity. Self-awareness was created with reference to Michel Foucault’s reading of the panopticon. To begin with, the work was an entirely interior space, impenetrable behind a screen. Then it became a cohesive whole within the gallery space and could be experienced in the round. Finally, it underwent a radical change from distinct cohesive entity to a set of relational discrete elements that took their reference from symbols of art and architecture. Photographic documentation of the work, as part of the work itself, became an indexed autonomous object that questioned the relationship of subject and object.