School of Art - Theses
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ItemSculpture as activating object( 2019)The practice-led project Sculpture as Activating Object, which has developed over three years, 2015-2018, investigates how a sculptural object activates a process of transformation through play. Sculpture activating describes how the process itself becomes the artwork. Through the investigation of three artwork case studies produced for this project, this thesis examines the different outcomes generated by the art objects and speculates that sculpture as activating object is a new category within the field of contemporary action-sculpture.
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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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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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ItemThe telepathy project( 2012)The thesis comprises two interrelated parts: An exhibition of artwork generated by and in response to telepathic prompts and processes, including telepathic events made with people from around the world at varying physical distances and degrees of intimacy. These attempts/events manifest as curatorial projects, performances, conversations, lectures, photographic tableaux, drawings, paintings, dream interventions and group wall drawings. The second part of the thesis comprises a written dissertation that responds to and expands on the practice led research by introducing a range of thinkers, writers and artists who approach telepathy in their work. In particular it is concerned with the ways Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida apprehended and deployed telepathy in their writing. The text proceeds via a logic of association and assemblage – a telepathic writing – finding its precedent in Derrida’s Telepathe. Emerging out of this research is a discussion and performance of some of the anxieties generated in the practice and contained in the literature and current knowledge surrounding the questions telepathy poses for subjectivity, interpretation and meaning making. This has been achieved by shifting some of the questions telepathy posed to Freud and Derrida et al. to a contemporary art practice. This shift has allowed new nuances in the discourse around telepathy to emerge and it is this that comprises the research’s original contribution to knowledge.
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ItemThe limits of sociability: an exploration of the possibilities and pitfalls of participatory art( 2011)This thesis explores the possibilities and pitfalls involved in engaging viewer participation in art. Increasingly, many artists work in a relational and socially engaged manner, requiring the involvement and activation of the public. Yet too often, artists assume that an open call for participation will automatically result in equality and inclusion, as they instrumentalise art to create new, emancipatory social relations. I outline how critics such as Claire Bishop, however, have challenged these assumptions of openness and emancipation, exposing the aesthetic and political limitations of participatory work. I describe how theorists Miwon Kwon, Rosalyn Deutsche and Bishop, have looked to recent theories of radical and plural democracy, particularly Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of antagonism, to reveal the political shortcomings of much socially engaged art. In citing this theory, Kwon, Deutsche and Bishop urge for a more sophisticated understanding of concepts like “democracy” and “community”, that recognises conflict and friction as fundamental aspects of social relations. In doing so, they advocate a more disruptive approach to socially engaged and participatory practices. I finish this thesis by explaining how these new theoretical underpinnings have impacted my art practice, while describing the suite of seven participatory projects I have developed for Masters. In doing so, I elucidate a number of aesthetic, political and ethical questions that have arisen during the practice-based component of this research, which are central to ongoing discussions about participatory art for both gallery and site-specific contexts. Namely, I establish how I have sought to reconsider the ways in which I engage people and thematise the limits of participation and sociability in my artwork. By acknowledging that the selection and creation of a group of participants can produce an inability to connect and an inadvertent exclusion, I have attempted to allow for disconnection, fragmentation, friction and lack of interest to have an impact on the outcome of my participatory works. As such, failed moments of connection are as integral to the work, as are its instances of surprising engagement.