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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ItemObjects on the edge of awareness: reframing peripheral objects in a sculptural field( 2018)This research considers the potential of peripheral objects in a process-driven sculptural and spatial practice. The peripheral object is something that goes largely unconsidered, but whose necessity to the centre, and whose lack of stability give it incredible potential. The peripheral object forms a relation between states, sites and objects, and this research posits that it lends those things that it links identity and structure. Here peripheral objects are drawn from architecture and construction sites and are elements that support, facilitate and frame, such as scaffolding, architectural surfaces and apertures. Linking peripheral objects to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of The Parergon and Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures, peripheral objects are established as inherently supportive, as the connector between, as always in-relation-to another, and as intimate, touching the objects that they surround. I speculate that peripheral objects, as things that often go unnoticed, or that appear to be incomplete, are not perceived as objects. This notion is discussed through the perceptual functions within the apprehension of Michael Fried’s concept of objecthood. The qualities that are essential to the object are established in reference to Robert Morris’ series of essays Notes of Sculpture Parts 1-4. The notion of the contact-boundary brings the operations of the surface into focus, and I link this to sculptural and material potential to express objecthood. The intimacy of touch and its implications in a sculptural practice are drawn out in a discussion of casting processes and performance in the work of Isa Genzken and Bruce Nauman. The outcomes of this research are a written dissertation and an installation of sculptural artworks. Through investigations into casting and re-engineering peripheral objects, my process-driven practice has discovered the functions, necessity and potential within them. This research brings focus to what is often considered outside our view and bodily experience. This work enacts the edges of spaces and forms; it does not bring them to the centre but sees the edge.
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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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ItemEmerging from and disappearing towards dust( 2017)The research investigates the ambiguity of permanence and impermanence using the medium of dust. This is achieved by: considering the relationship between ephemeral art and documentation; identifying the material and poetic possibilities of dust in relation to time; and through the melancholy experience of preservation and loss in the artworks. This thesis articulates the concept of “enduring temporality,” addressing questions about what we seek to preserve compared to what we identify as worthless, and the paradox of experiencing life as perpetual while knowing we will return to dust. The creative works, which form the partial fulfillment of this PhD, include: temporary installations; evolving site-specific works; potentially enduring forms of documentation; performances; and archiving work in human memory. Collectively, these artworks create a complex cloud of associations that drift, gather, and disperse the concepts of durability and temporality, value and worthlessness, and it is concluded from this that they create tensions and ambiguities between these themes. The artworks are themselves a unique kind of research, and the type of knowledge that they contribute is raises questions that are allowed to remain as questions. The written component of the research is a companion to, and conceptual extension of, the artworks. Drawing on the fields of philosophy, science, literature, poetry, and art, it presents five contributions to new knowledge. These include reframing concepts through new terms: dust as an “enduring temporality,” and decoration as mode of ordering and display. Additions to theory and philosophy have also been made through the arguments that documentation can be reframed as a doppelgänger, and that dust provides a way to understand the blurring of the human/non-human binary (as claimed by the philosophic field of New Materialism). It has also been posed that the artworks provide an opportunity to contemplate the value of the quotidian and to reflect on our own fleeting existence.
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Item'Help a sculpture' and other abfunctional potentials( 2016)This practice-led research investigates the relationship between sculpture and concepts of function in contemporary art. Since the Enlightenment, art and function have commonly been understood as mutually exclusive concepts. Associated with everyday life, function is considered outside the sphere of art, where the art object is predominantly positioned as “functionless” and hence “autonomous” from the everyday prerequisites of living. In the instances where art has incorporated function, this has frequently been framed in terms of dysfunction, “dissolving art into life,” or as an alternative strategy in the “dematerialisation of the art object.” Yet, a neologism that emerged from my own art practice – “abfunction,” meaning to move away from function – implies that function is implicit within art itself, suggesting that the neat separation between art and function is not so clear cut. This thesis, includes the artwork produced for the Help a Sculpture exhibition at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA in July 2016 and the written dissertation. The project asks: in what ways can the neologism abfunction reveal and divert the role of function within the production and end-effect of the contemporary artwork? Three bodies of artworks were produced for the project and have been used as case studies within the written dissertation. They are: How long (2008-ongoing), Houses that are happy to help with at least one of the possible problems of art (2010-ongoing) and the Hold UP series (2013-ongoing). These artworks comprise: video, photographic installations, photo-sculptures and sculptural assemblies. The written dissertation establishes a foundation for abfunction within contemporary art. Part I seeks to define “function” that abfunction maybe moving away from within the artwork. Given art is considered to be functionless, concepts of function are investigated by Aristotle, early modernist architectural discourse, and those involved in function theory, such as Beth Preston and Ruth Millikan. It is proposed that function can be understood from two points of view. I have termed this as, “use-ready” function (what something is for), and function as “forming” of an object or thing (summarised by the adage: “form follows function”). Part II of the written thesis investigates how these two roles of function occur within art. The Russian and Polish avant-garde from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, provides an uncharacteristic example of artists and theorists activating the role of function in art. Discussed in this written component of the thesis, are artworks and theories from the Russian Constructivists and Productivists, including artists Alexandr Rodchenko, and Karl Ioganson and theorist Boris Arvatov, in addition to the Polish Unists: sculptor Katarzyna Kobro and her husband, painter Władysław Strzemiński. Part III applies the understanding of the role of function in the artwork to investigate how abfunction both reveals and departs from function in the artwork case studies produced for the project. Abfunction represents a significant opportunity for a more complex understanding of how function might operate with the artwork. Its meaning in relation to art is not encompassed by existing terms of function including, functionless, dysfunction, malfunction and the lesser known term para-functional. Moreover, in describing a deviation away from the end expectations of function, abfunction also acknowledges the alternative materialisation of objects and things produced through this method which the terminology associated with the “dematerialised” object fails to do. This research project draws to a conclusion with the argument that abfunction offers a new insight into processes within the production of art. Revelatory in its reveal of the pervasive role of function that it generatively departs from, abfunction accounts for the alternative unimagined outcomes produced in art beyond the teleological grip of function.
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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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ItemEnd of days: religious imaging in millennialist America( 2016)Michel Foucault once commented that: “Religious beliefs prepare a kind of landscape of images, an illusory milieu favorable to every hallucination and every delirium.”1 This thesis seeks to determine what drives certain contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a ‘secular’ context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language have impacted upon contemporary American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalypticism that underwrites it. By analysing contemporary American art and literature, this thesis investigates recent millennial imaging. Filtered through analysis of the work of the sculptor, performance artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney, the author Ben Marcus, the cinema of David Lynch and Christopher Nolan and others, End of days: Religious imaging in Millennialist America scrutinises an aesthetic or sensibility of apocalyptic thinking in contemporary American culture. The thesis argues that this may be characterised as ‘schizophrenic’ — a hyperbolic secularism rancid with chthonic religious imaging. Such imagery, derived from mutational variations of Mormonism, Judaism and Christianity (especially Catholic), articulate a series of translations, transformations, mutations and mutilations of these traditions. The results are near heretical permutations of orthodoxy fixated on apocalyptic imaginings and rendered most vibrantly in these artist’s works. The thesis examines the dialects of pathological America where the end of the world is forever immanent, but never arrives — or has already arrived.
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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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ItemBeforegreen, extended abstract painting( 2015)This project revisits aspects of Modernist abstract painting in order to extend its possibilities into the twenty-first century. Building on abstraction’s analogous relationship with music, a central focus of the thesis is to reconcile two seemingly incompatible pictorial modes – the poly-modal and the impro-modal – in order to create a new multi-modal form. By expanding painting methods through new digital technologies, the project presents a series of artworks in various media, including multi-modal, animated videos and sound-tracks, which reconsider abstraction and music’s relationship to visual art.