Centre for Cultural Partnerships - Theses

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    Bridging the unseen in art writing
    Heagney, Denis ( 2017)
    This project asks how blindness can inform art writing practice to bridge an experiential gap between sighted and non-sighted art audiences. Initially focussed on reducing cultural isolation and increasing inclusion in visual culture for people with low or no vision, this project later shifted into practice-led research. Based on the Vislan concept devised by Brisbane linguist Geoffrey Munck, the work is directly informed by the lived experience of blindness, and aims to translate visual objects and spaces to assist in comprehension. The context of project explores my own practice in art writing as a form of critique and ongoing learning. After experimenting with ekphrasis, didactics and visual literacy, the methodology settled on formal observation and dialogic learning. The outcomes of a pilot project, iC2, created text translations of public art works in Melbourne and a custom built website (vislan.net), made with the support of City of Melbourne Arts Projects. The pilot was presented at the Performing Mobilities symposium in 2015 and tested in public spaces with various participants on a walking tour, before being published online for testing. The full texts from the pilot project are included here as the creative component of this work. The final discussion suggests a generative language system as an adaptive tool for observing, verifying and writing about visual objects.
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    Aesthetic Systems of Participatory Painting: communicating in Third Space and mental wellbeing in Tonga
    Douglass, Adam ( 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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    Material matters at the coalface: a socially-engaged art enquiry into the politics of coal, space and place
    Veit, Hartmut ( 2017)
    “Material Matters at the Coalface” questions our human relationships with geological matter through a socially-engaged art enquiry into the politics of coal, space and place. Activating coal as “vibrant matter”, this project works with brown coal as a medium to investigate the role that coal plays in Latrobe Valley mining communities. This project combined socially-engaged, participatory practice and practice-led artistic research with an ethnographic sensibility to investigate the community’s response to living in, and among coal. It aimed to create dialogue and better understand the complex web of changes affecting communities, who are in transition and impacted by the closure of coal-fired power stations and sweeping changes in power generation. The research findings are presented through a written dissertation and durable records of the “COAL” graduate exhibition, which was staged at the VCA Art Space in Melbourne in February 2017. Unearthing coal’s performative material qualities, this exhibition put the gritty materiality of locally collected brown coal to work as an aesthetic medium in a series of visual artworks, performances and installations encompassing three interconnected galleries and 210sm2 of space. Questioning the physical, psychic and social relationships humans have with non-human matter coal, the “COAL” exhibition also included documentation of performative acts of labour, such as sweeping and cleaning, which were originally performed in public spaces, neglected historical buildings and empty deserted shops in Morwell. The resultant body of artefacts, performances and installations reflect a sustained material engagement with brown coal and socially-engaged arts practice with Latrobe Valley communities over the last three years. The creative works are analysed and contextualised by drawing on a lineage of artists, writers and philosophers from the intersecting fields of social practice, art and anthropology, who have explored the political ecology of geological matter and the environment. This investigation of coal’s role in the local community of Morwell demonstrates the increasing ecological impact of human beings’ commodified relationships to nature, place and matter. Departing from these site-responsive concerns and the context of peri-urban Victoria, coal’s political ecology acts as a microcosm, an allegory and visual metaphor for much larger political and cultural situations. Moving beyond the impact of globalisation on local conditions, the project scrutinises deeply entrenched thinking, which “places man-as-subject at the centre of all relations.”1 The research adopts a New Materialist lens to frame the project and foreground the agency of matter to questions such pre-conceived human-centric biases. As a heterogeneous, emerging cultural theory, New Materialism pays renewed attention to the central importance of matter in cultural discourse as a pathway to re-orientate human beings’ relationality with the material world. Responding to, and building on existing scholarship, debates and critiques of New Materialism, this research challenges binary perceptions, that coal is an inert resource to demonstrate coal’s vibrancy as an active agent in shaping experience and discourse. Contesting anthropocentric definitions of temporality, performance and authorship this research endeavours to act as a cultural agent of change and assist the local community to make the long-term transition to a sustainable local economy and cleaner energy future that better supports jobs, communities and their long-term health. The complex web of changes facing coal and communities in the Latrobe Valley are brought to the attention of a wider audience through art. The project was driven by a sense of optimism, that contemporary art and culture can create genuine dialogue, engagement and common ground between opposing and polarized views regarding climate change, so that communities can work together and re-orientate currently destructive social relationality with coal, to globally make the vital transition to renewable energy sources. 1 Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, Carnal Knowledge: Towards A'new Materialism'through the Arts (Ib tauris, 2013).1z
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    Re: Marks from East Timor: a field guide to East Timor's graffiti
    PARKINSON, CHRIS ( 2017)
    This thesis investigates the specific conflicts and contexts that produced East Timor’s fledgling graffiti between 2004-2008 to demonstrate links between its local lineage and a globally contextualised backdrop. It is a work that is advanced through the epistemological propositions of Southern theory. Primarily, it is concepts of the centre and the periphery and how graffiti negotiates movement between these positions that are the thesis’ main concerns. With this in mind, the central question of how East Timor’s graffiti contributed to the cultural expression of East Timor’s growth into nationhood from conflict is framed. In demonstrating graffiti’s contribution to the cultural expression of East Timor’s growth into nationhood from conflict, its location at the nexus of resistance and transformation is revealed. This thesis presents graffiti in East Timor as a hermeneutic, validating the expressions of marginalized actors in geo-political contexts of conflict, reconstruction and social relationships.