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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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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ItemThe embarrassment of sincerity: the changing state of contemporary figurative painting( 2014)This practice led PhD is concerned with the problems and possibilities of figurative painting. It examines questions of perception and interpretation and interrogates agency and affect in figuration. The thesis comprises an exhibition exploring empathy and a dissertation considering the limitations of the conceptual model and in what other terms painting might be viewed. Considering formal painting language and research linking emotion, sensation and perception, new possibilities in making and viewing are revealed. This comprises the research’s original contribution.
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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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ItemRain skating( 2009)In the Twenty First Century, cheap digital video has challenged the photograph for the distribution of visual ideas. Clip sharing sites such as YouTube now receive up to two hundred thousand uploads per week shared by one hundred million users worldwide. This exegesis and its accompanying exhibition, discusses the painting of the ordinary and banal in relation to this recent emergence. It consists of 6 oil paintings depicting skateboarding; all reconfigured from low resolution digital stills found on clip sharing sites, exhibiting many of the signs of degradation and artifacts that are characteristic of digital images. Representation of the day to day in painting has its own discreet history, extending back to French Realism in the 19th century. Numerous artists of this time, in the spirit of the flâneur, made popular by French writer Charles Baudelaire, explored the streets, boulevards and lanes for those encounters that would become paintings. By the 1960’s the painting of everyday life had also shifted to the direct representation of photographic material from personal snapshots to images circulating in the mass media. Today, an artist following these same interests is also likely to make these searches online. For scenes capturing the ebb and flow of humanity, YouTube has become the virtual boulevard for the digital flâneur, a conceptualization of contemporary browsing that mirrors the casual stroller of the physical city in search of fresh experiences. What this shift signifies, is the fact that much of everyday life is now subsumed to the digital. Painting is important in realizing the significance of this fact, due to its ability to reveal the scope of which the formats of popular media act as a go between in a viewer’s experiences, and its long and extensive tradition in documenting the events of the everyday.