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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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.