School of Art - Theses
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ItemThe anxiety of the relation: the image as prosthetic perception( 2018)This project is concerned with an investigation of the image, and the technical apparatus through which it is produced, as a prosthesis. I develop a thinking of the prosthetic function of the image through a concentrated reading of the writings of Samuel Beckett, in whose work prostheses figure in various guises. My reading of Beckett is developed from his early critical writings on painting and literature, in which he explicitly questions the relationship between the artwork and the world it presumes to capture. This critique is connected to developments in Beckett’s prose work which come to demonstrate a prosthetic logic; which I elaborate here in relation to the use of this term in the work of Jacques Derrida. The image as prosthesis enacts a problematisation of relations implicit in the production and viewing of images: between the body and the world, the eye and the camera, phenomenal experience and its mediation in memory, photography or writing. The creative component of my research takes cues from Beckett’s work, yet seeks to explore how this prosthetic function can operate through different imaging apparatuses, including photography, video, drawing, and installation. This work is motivated by the acceleration of image technologies in the context of everyday life, and their disorienting and alienating effects. In taking cues from Beckett, I explore the way in which an artwork can reveal the prosthetic dimension of perception, and question the conventional positing of subjective experience in the production and viewing of images.
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ItemPoetic narrative: new visions of documentary photography( 2018)The research focuses on narratological possibilities in the so-called photographic series within documentary photography. Instead of causal, plot-based links, it considers other interrelations between images, invoking a linking principle outside canonical narrative forms. The research ultimately investigates a poetic logic, of which the photographic series is an articulation, distinct from apparent rationality, as a way by which the world, or worlds are exposed beyond mere recording, using questions constellated around notions of national identity as an example of this methodology.
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ItemResisting representation: photographing diffractively( 2017)This research project begins by asking, “can a photograph resist its representationalist apparatus?” It proposes that if the mechanisms of photographic representation could be used against photography’s inherent representationalism, an alternative way of seeing and being in the world may be revealed. This question is approached through a material engagement with photographic processes that encompass studio and gallery situations. When difficulties were encountered attempting to overturn entrenched photographic representation, research led the project to adopt a diffractive methodology. First articulated by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, a diffractive methodology is used to work with, instead of against, differences across disciplines. Key to this is an understanding of the constitutive role of the apparatus in the creation of knowledge including the performative role of the artist and viewer. Using the principles of this methodology I have devised a series of techniques aimed at disrupting and dispersing a photograph’s representational apparatus so that an alternative to representationalism may be revealed. These techniques are applied to the processes of studio based making as well as the presentation of photographs in a gallery.
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ItemUnlearning Cook: decolonising photography, the monument and self( 2017)The practice-led research encompassed in Unlearning Cook: Decolonising photography, the monument and self has been developed as a counterpoint to dominant colonial histories. The project draws a correlation between photography, history and ways of seeing. The research presented here addresses the question of unlearning Eurocentric colonial histories, specifically those relating to Captain James Cook, creating space for non-dominant narratives and reflecting critically on colonial heritages. The spectre of Captain Cook looms large, with the impact of his three voyages felt throughout the Pacific and in his home country of England. By using a variety of photographic methods, the body of creative work seeks to examine the medium's role in colonisation and question the historical narratives signified through colonial monuments, buildings and the built environment. Existing research into decolonisation has informed the studio project. Through situating knowledge, the artworks offer a decolonial approach to multiple perspectives on contested histories. This is a conflicted, unresolved space. The creative output of this research comprises the installation of a camera obscura structure, a number of cyanotype works on paper, lumen prints and a lightbox displaying an analogue negative. Documentation of the examined works is presented in the appendix.
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ItemThe Rigid and the Slack: photographic process in the pursuit of familial intimacy( 2016)The Rigid and the Slack: Photographic Process in the Pursuit of Familial Intimacy uses conditions of the photographic process, from the alchemical to Barthes’s ‘violence of capturing’ to pursue intimacy in familial relations - contained, measured and contingent upon ‘the everyday’ - to examine how a body of artwork may bridge the distancing paradox inherent in the photographic process to pull the subject close. My approach has been to visually and conceptually map the trace of the familial subject in their haptic actions and low-fi everyday setting alongside photographic picture making tools and approaches that aspire to ideal and hi-end production as a method to reflect both as intricately and intimately entwined and woven into the fabric of the artwork. My domestic setting is the studio and site where - as wife and mother - I experiment in the zone between control and disorder. The Rigid and the Slack: Photographic Process in the Pursuit of Familial Intimacy is informed by Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida alongside; Sally Mann’s approach to photography and her memoir Hold Still: a Memoir with Photographs and; Carol Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour. The creative work comprises two projected videos and seven photographic prints, three of which are diptychs. Images of examined works are included in the appendix and two separate video files are available for viewing.
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ItemThe in-between: representing female identity within shared spaces and experiences( 2016)This project explores the construction of women’s identities and the development of relationships within domestic space. Relying on the share house as a site and the constructed photographic image as a tool, the project considers the social malleability of liminal space and the relationships forged within it. The photographic work draws on historical imagery of women and proposes the share house as a space conducive to re-negotiating historically and socially set roles for women.
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ItemPhotographic interpretation through slippage( 2016)This research asks the question; can photography provide a framework to be both understood and be formed through a series of cultural and linguistic misinterpretations? Through the creation and development of two distinct methodologies of practice - functional parallelism and formation through dislocation - three bodies of work were created. Each body of work centers on a recognition of cultural and linguistic slippage that I have experience as a Japanese person living in Australia that alerted me to a possible way of reinterpreting and subsequently making photographs. It is what I have come to term a ‘roundabout way’ of interacting with the image where the viewer to see the state of the photograph occurring from the relationship among subjects as images. This thesis is accompanied by demonstrations of photographic works and interpretations forming in each stage through the slippage.
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ItemWhat lies buried will rise: exploring a story of violent crime, retribution and colonial memory( 2015)This thesis explores historical connections between colonial violence, memory and representations through art. It examines archival documentation and oral histories of an 1839 murder case in York; Sarah Cook and the hanging of Aboriginal men, Barrabong and Doodjeep. This case was the catalyst for the some of the worst massacres in WA. As an Aboriginal woman from York, I examine how art engages with story telling to investigate critical events in colonisation and imagine how what lies buried might rise.
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ItemUbiquitous object, ambivalent things( 2015)Building on the legacies of the readymade, this practice led research investigated contemporary art strategies for re-contextualising and abstracting waste to create original artworks. Working forward from the discarded packaging of objects and using the space left behind by the act of consumption, the investigation created, through the indexical processes of casting and imprinting, simultaneously abstracted and distanced art objects. This tactic re-framed the ‘eco-polemic’ of waste — inviting instead poetic reflections on the temporality, materiality and mutability of discarded goods.
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ItemThrough touch and sight: approaching enantiomorphism( 2013)Can visual perception be formed through an encounter with touch? Investigations into the visual phenomena of mirror symmetry, the horizon line, and their relationship with the haptic. This research uses the near visual symmetry of the flat white landscapes of dry salt lakes as a context to examine the relationship between visual perception and touch. Throughout the Masters of Fine Art program I have undertaken several research trips to lakes in north-western Victoria, gathering material using photography, observation, and collecting salt from the sites. I have captured the space of the dry salt lakes through the camera viewfinder and inserted the photographs into my sculptural practice. Using light boxes and backlit projection, I have returned them to their mode of production: light. Light sources are a central material of the work, simultaneously illuminating the images and lighting the installation as a whole. The photographs are presented in dialogue with delicate salt crystal collages encased in Perspex®. These transparent Perspex objects act as apertures, standing in for the viewfinder, and simultaneously capture reflected light from the installation. The majority of the images printed in this dissertation are intended as documentation, however, due to the nature of my work with light, my installations are often difficult to photograph. The view of my work through the mediation of the camera lens has produced perspectives, lighting and cropping that cannot be seen with the human eye. This photographic documentation has become part of my research and I have reinserted it into the work. This thesis is broken down into three chapters, each addressing theoretical concerns I contemplated while walking on the salt crust of the lakes and working in my studio. This document exists in dialogue with my artwork, and seeks to locate my practice within a wider context. I examine my perceptual experiences at the dry salt lakes using the concepts of enantiomorphism (mirror symmetry) and inframince (Marcel Duchamp’s term describing fleeting moments of contact), which are linked by the mysterious fourth dimension. The notion of ‘touch’ is viewed from the philosophical perspectives of Jean-Luc Nancy, Johann Gottfried Herder, Andrew Benjamin and Laura Marks. In this discussion I explore the possibility of haptic visuality, particularly through the medium of light. I propose that the haptic gaze is present both in my perception of the landscape and my resultant installations. These perceptual instances reveal the inexactitude of the visual perception of optical phenomena such as the horizon line and the enantiomorphic space of the dry lakes. Duchamp’s inframince is examined as a temporal space akin to Jacques Derrida’s conception of the ‘now’. Within my research, inframince operates as a lens, a space, a measurement and sometimes a momentary reflection.