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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ItemHow we live now: The place of class and taste in contemporary Australian art( 2018)This practice led research has explored the various ways taste (with its implicit relationship to class) has manifest itself as a type of cultural marker, sending a series of complex and coded messages to its audience. With a focus on a local, Australian contemporary and historical culture, the research exerts that the talismans of 21st century taste inhabit a psychic space, a complex matrix of subliminal and latent cultural ideas, implicitly understood by both artist/producers and their audiences/consumers. Themes and motifs present in the paintings are examined and hypothesised as exemplifying this condition, simultaneously offering the superficial comfort of naïve recognition and a deep,reflective cultural discourse. The research finds that a middle–class hegemony permeates not only the fields of reception and production, but unlike other creative disciplines in Australia, the visual arts are reluctant to engage directly with these issues. It also finds that the process of aestheticisation, once the domain of the creative arts is now embodied in all aspects of middle–class culture, best seen through its hagiographic treatment of food and foodism.
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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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ItemInto the void: exploring the experience of vision loss through visual art( 2016)This thesis explores a personal experience of vision loss caused by the onset of juvenile macular dystrophy, through the framework of a studio art practice. It asks, “What does vision loss look like?” or, more specifically, “what does macular dystrophy look like to me?” seeking to find those answers in the very arena where its impact is felt most – in the field of vision as it is experienced in everyday life, and through the very visually expressive language of art.
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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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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 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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ItemEach copy may perish individually( 2013)Today when the digital image is but an instance existing in multiple versions, the aim in this paper is to investigate how each instance may differentiate. In the research that follows it is suggested that it may not be possible to fully gauge the implications of a digital image at the moment of its production or through the sharing of its popularity in transmission – this may in fact only emerge some time later. This measure may be introduced as a material durability, yet a central issue arises in that it is only by assumption that this can be known, given that the digital age is relatively recent. In the absence of any substantial digital history, we can only postulate what digital duration may be. It is to this end that my work and research is focused. The final body of creative work in the graduate exhibition has been produced in a manner that oscillates from screen to print and back again, across a range of objects using artistic and commercial services. A digital painting is printed in multiple outcomes, stratified across a host of surfaces and sites. It is with humor that a game situation is invoked, where each instance must silently compete against the others through time. The game is not just about which one lasts longest, but most beautifully, faithfully, or poorly. A website has been established to document the digitized versions of the work. It is hoped that this exhibition may go some way to exploring the ways in which an image belongs to a network.
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ItemHilda Rix Nicholas: a catalogue raisonne( 1994)This thesis is a study of the art of Hilda Rix Nicholas, an Australian painter who constructed what appeared to be a successful career in the period between the wars. Her achievements were impressive: she held several solo exhibitions and showed her work in a large number of group shows, and in 1926 became an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Despite her accomplishments, however, Rix Nicholas has been virtually ignored by art historians. Often mentioned, but rarely discussed, her work, like that of a number of women artists, has been excluded from and marginalised in the writing of Australian art history. In seeking to account for the reasons why Rix Nicholas's work failed to achieve any lasting recognition in Australia the thesis examines the ways in which she constructed her career. In Paris, before World War 1 she attuned her art to the standards of the Salon, appropriating its genres, particularly the French peasant tradition, as models of artistic excellence, models which underpinned the emergence of her distinctive Australian imagery in the early 1920s. In Australia, Rix Nicholas conscientiously set out to represent the national landscape in her work. Describing herself as 'the man for the job' she attempted to establish her career within a milieu where the rules of representation were controlled by men. In doing so, she challenged the masculinist framework of the cultural and artistic establishment, as well as the idea that the representation of the nation was the exclusive domain of male painters like Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen. Furthermore, Rix Nicholas painted several pictures of women in the bush, and dared to suggest that women had been equal partners in the formation of the imagined community of the nation. Refusing to acknowledge the gendered boundaries of the Australian art world, she constructed a position for herself that was at odds with the prescribed role of a woman painter, a role which was acknowledged by most women artists working in Australia. Like her male colleagues, Rix Nicholas distrusted the modern movement and was sceptical about the involvement of women artists in it. As far as she could see women modernists had accepted a subordinate position within the artistic hierarchy, a position Rix Nicholas was not prepared to recognize. Her assertive affirmation of her rights meant that her artistic practice occupied a difficult and ambivalent position. Existing outside the mainstream of both male and female representation she challenged the establishment on too many levels, making it virtually impossible for her to achieve any lasting recognition in Australia.