School of Art - Theses
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ItemEnvelopes and appendages: the body’s response to structure and geometry( 2013)‘Envelopes and Appendages: The Body’s Response to Structure and Geometry’ examines the body’s capacity for agency in its entangled relationship with found objects, regulating structures and geometric spaces. The structure and the ‘envelope’ feature as recurring sculptural devices that visualise these relationships. Abstract structures play a significant role in our understanding of human systems of order that enable protection and survival. Architectural and infrastructural constructions provide functional spaces for us to inhabit and traverse. However, these structural entities can also exert a constrictive and compromising impact on the body, and my work addresses this bodily vulnerability. I articulate the ways in which my creative practice synthesises elements of geometric abstraction, postminimalist sculpture and performance art in order to present the human body as truncated, disarticulated and abstracted, but also as adaptable and resilient in response to the regulating effects of geometric space. My primary research question is as follows: How can a provisional, performative, postminimalist sculptural approach to discarded objects engage ideas of bodily agency and resilience within delimiting geometric urban spaces and structures? I have produced artworks that address the role of the body in art-making through physical interactions with discarded objects in the urban context, employing specific strategies (aggregation, distribution, participatory activities, envelopment, convergence and effacement) that result in fragmented and distorted abstractions of the body. I collect discarded quotidian objects, often salvaged from suburban streets and recycling facilities, and create improvised, provisional structural assemblages. I combine these structural elements with malleable surfaces, such as balloons and stretch textiles, in order to generate disarticulated, abstracted forms that manifest containment and compression, protrusion and distension. The elastic membranes, or ‘envelopes,’ feature in my sculptural work as pliable, penetrable, dynamic vessels (analogous to body parts, such as flesh and internal organs) that respond to the rigidity of the structure. In some works, an exoskeleton compresses the envelope and in others, an internal structure is enveloped by and gives form to the elastic membrane. Drawing on the work of a number of theorists, including Elizabeth Grosz, E.H. Gombrich, Peter Sloterdijk and Jane Bennett, I will consider how we perceive and inhabit our environments, how we interact with the living and nonliving entities that surround us and how we adapt and change, or ‘become’ in response to our circumstances. Their theories provide a platform for my haptic investigations of the interconnected relationship between humans, the objects they acquire and discard and the spaces they inhabit. Connections will be traced between my work and that of other artists working with: the body’s relationship with structural and restrictive forces; processes of effacement; and the ‘absurd’ body’s entanglement with found objects. My work’s increasing performativity will be mapped and I will analyse the implications of these developments, specifically the work’s capacity to embody the flux and instability of matter.
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ItemPlacing the body: towards a subjectivity of the feminine in sculpture( 2011)As a result of Sexual Difference theory a new way to consider feminine subjectivity has been developed that encompasses both the materiality of the body and its lived experience. This has proved highly relevant to both feminist theory and contemporary visual art. This project produces sculptural works that materialise this thinking and explore new possibilities for representing embodied space. The sculptural works deploy three strategies to imbue current visual practice with physical subjectivity: Minimalism, craft based practices and spatial metaphor. Considering the work of Eva Hesse as foundational in its capacity to evoke subjectivity within abstracted and material means, this research employs similar mechanisms of repetition, haptic surfaces and industrial materials. However, my research extends these strategies into architectural and bodily space, using the metaphors of the cave, the passage and the threshold. The accompanying written paper explores philosophical and psychoanalytical texts, along with art and feminist theory, to contextualize the materials and processes used in the studio research and exhibition of final works. Drawing primarily on the work of Luce Irigaray, whose writing offers a number of visual and poetic metaphors that have largely not been addressed in visual art, I consider the ways that phallocentric, binary thinking has previously shaped (and limited) the representation of the body in recent visual art. In addition, particular aspects of psychoanalytic discourse that address the pre-linguistic phase of development are reinterpreted to allow for a more open subjectivity, which is then explored through my materially charged practice. This discussion argues the importance of minimalism, materiality and spatial metaphor to conceptions of the feminine, in short the reattribution of the body itself, into contemporary art discourse.