School of Art - Theses
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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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ItemThe refigured fragment: provocations in experience and landscape( 2017)"The Refigured Fragment: provocations in experience and landscape" examines how a site-responsive sculptural practice can create alternative narrative pathways towards the understanding of a place. In the first instance, this is a research project that plays out through the apparatus of moulding and casting, audio documentation, photography and written provocation. Through installation-based artworks and the accompanying dissertation, this practice explores ways of engaging with and imagining specific sites encountered by the artist throughout the project. Material collected from these locations is reworked and rethought through sculptural, photographic and narrative processes to generate new spatial artistic outcomes. Poetic strategy is at the core of this enquiry and practitioners such as Jeffery Jerome Cohen, Paul Carter and OSW (Open Spatial Workshop) situate this work in a field of site-responsive work that resists quantitative methods. Unpacking the relationship between "site" and "capture", this project also considers the resonances between contemporary photography and the site-specific moulding techniques employed. The transformative potential of moulding and casting is applied and expanded to articulate instances where experience, recollection and landscape intersect. Reworked in the studio and composed in the gallery, spatial compositions of these impressions and cast models traverse the connections between geology, memory, narrative and the relentless progression of time. Rather than setting out for literal depictions of site, this project examines how a poetic and tactile practice-led studio methodology can transgress quantitative assumptions concerning the landscape and generate alternative pathways towards how it is understood.
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ItemThe land of rainbows( 2013)My research is about the community where I was born and raised in rural Victoria, the town of Rainbow. Rural communities are now seen to be fading into the abyss. Within these communities exists a deep emotional and rich visual culture covered by layers of relics and artifacts, a resource for the arts not just historians. My practice draws on the lived experiences and memories I shared in this community. My practice uses digitally manipulated visual media to reflect a mindscape and narrative correlating with medieval artists such as Bosch and Chaucer. I further translate these influences and digital processes into my practice via my journey into other worlds. In this project, the other worlds I inhabit are the jail, the asylum and death. These other worlds come without the protection and nourishment of the microcosmic world of Rainbow.
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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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ItemShelterbelts and quaking zones: antipodean gothic in the postcolonial cultural landscape( 2011)This paper is divided into two parts. Part One examines the historical and cultural influences that have led to a re-emergence of the Gothic mode in Antipodean visual culture. It investigates the relationship between the theories of postmodernism and postconialism and their shared or divergent assumptions, motivations and strategies. It analyses the role of art and film in locating and conceptualising the postmodern Antipodean Gothic in the postcolonial landscape, providing a context for the painting-based studio component of the research. Part Two focuses on the theories, concepts and processes involved in producing the paintings for final exhibition. These works are based on a particular interpretation of the Gothic, located in a specific landscape in New Zealand. They deal with boundaries and their disintegration, ‘gaps’ in the shelterbelt, drawing parallels between the postcolonial relationship with Britain and its reflection in the landscape. They also focus on the swamp or quaking zone, the antithesis of the colonial ideal of cleared pastoral land. While the paintings for exhibition have evolved out of and alongside themes discussed in the paper, they also form a self-sufficient body of research that is independent of the text. They are presented in this context as the studio-based contribution to this study of the Antipodean Gothic revival.
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ItemLandscape: interwoven knowledges( 2010)My project presents an analytical and intuitive consideration of ways in which the epistemology of Western Modernity frames my perception of landscape. Through the research I have begun to develop a more emergent and ecologically interrelated cognition within my practice. This has been facilitated by discussion of the dualistic thinking by which modern knowledge is produced, opening towards an understanding of non-dualistic knowledge formed within landscape. Weaving has precipitated this investigation and has become a sculptural and conceptual methodology that affords a comprehension of different knowledges co-existing as strands of vision contributing to this body of work.
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ItemRomanticism: re-occurring sentiments( 2009)Romanticism: Re-occurring sentiments is an investigation of Northern Romanticism and its influence on contemporary art. Identified in this research paper is how romantic references are used in contemporary art and what separates these themes from their historical application. Central to this investigation is how the adaptation of romantic references found within the landscape genre can reflect the concerns of current culture. This is further pursued and examined in regards to my own art practice. In order to address these concerns I have separated this paper into three chapters. The first chapter explores the work of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner. This historical foundation allows for the evaluation of the romantic themes within the landscape genre and an exploration of notions of the sublime commonly articulated. Concluding this historical investigation I briefly look at the work of Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer as they provide insight into the adaptation of the romantic landscape prior to contemporary art. The second chapter examines and identifies contemporary artists utilising romantic sentiments in their work. The initial historical exploration provided the parameters for the selection of the following artists: Edward Burtynsky, David Schnell, Stephen Bush and Julie Mehretu. Subsequently the similarities between these contemporary artists and my own practice are explored and defined. This area of research is supported and informed through an evaluation of the curatorial premise and the art in the exhibition Damaged Romanticism A Mirror of Modern Emotion, 2008/09 Houston, Texas. The final chapter identifies the concepts relating to my own studio practice. The development of this practice is articulated in regards to the visual and textual-based research examined in the initial chapters. Further, the architectural scale “painting/drawings” created, are discussed in relation to the application of medium. Consequently this application has allowed my work to utilise romantic sentiments to comment on the concerns of current culture. This depiction has enabled my work and research to identify a digital and technological representation of the contemporary landscape, one that has provided an area indicative of further artistic development.