Diminishing Connections

I explore our skin\u27s durability as it protects our inner being, but its fragility in our death. Paint allows me to understand the physical quality of skin and the structure underneath its surface. We experience the world and one another through this outermost layer of our selves, providing the ability to feel touch and to establish corporeal bounds and connections. Skin provides a means of communication and interaction, of touch and intimacy. It contains, protects, and stretches with the growth of the body, adapting to the interior bodily demands. It is through this growth that there is also a regression or a slow decay of the body. In addition to exterior exploration, I also investigate the vitality of our viscera even when disease destroys it and claims our lives. From this visual exploration, the tension between the reality of life and death begins to emerge. My paintings engage the disconnect between living and dying. Our experiences of both can be beautiful and repulsive, intimate and removed, private and public, and involve connections as well as loss. My work\u27s content, formal qualities, and historical and contemporary references, elicit physical, emotional, and existential reflections on life and death. The works and studies of artists from the Italian Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, have influenced my work through their dedicated desire to understand our physical existence and anatomical structure. The human body, the subject of my artwork, is inspired through the exploration of paint and flesh by artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Jenny Saville, and Lucian Freud. The skin as a means to understand the surface of our being is explored through the works of Anne Noggel and Susan D\u27Amato, helping to shape my own investigation. Lastly, the work of Mona Hatoum challenged my thoughts on bodily representation, altering my investigation of the exterior to beyond the surface of flesh. It is through the work of these artists, their processes, and various depictions of the human body that my own reflections upon our existence and mortality in this finite state are evoked

Cultural-based visual expression: Emotional analysis of human face via Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF)

© 2015 The Author(s) Peking Opera as a branch of Chinese traditional cultures and arts has a very distinct colourful facial make-up for all actors in the stage performance. Such make-up is stylised in nonverbal symbolic semantics which all combined together to form the painted faces to describe and symbolise the background, the characteristic and the emotional status of specific roles. A study of Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF) was taken as an example to see how information and meanings can be effectively expressed through the change of facial expressions based on the facial motion within natural and emotional aspects. The study found that POPF provides exaggerated features of facial motion through images, and the symbolic semantics of POPF provides a high-level expression of human facial information. The study has presented and proved a creative structure of information analysis and expression based on POPF to improve the understanding of human facial motion and emotion

Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul

Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul, arises out of my artistic practice, and thoughts behind my current project and MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies. Linking the problem of the world ‘out there’ or external space, to inner experience through painting as both medium and practice, my work expresses what I call inner geographies, spaces where intimate immensities, folding inside and outside, find expression. I think of my paintings as beginning with this gesture of laying out a between-space where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, and grow into, actual places, events, and geographies. In this sense they are real fictions; real because they make room for, and respond to a real otherness, unknown or excessive forces—spiritual, affective, historical, material, social. Most of the paintings in my MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies, were made working with red dirt from Oklahoma, where my family has generational roots, and are based on actual places familiar, yet distant to me. They also take up the mythology of the American west, and the “western” in various ways. Dyeing canvas and using earth as pigment allows me to work with shapes and textures already present that push against me and inform my images; the canvas becomes an inner geography—a meeting place of inside and outside

On tangibility, contemporary reliefs and continuous dimensions

I am a relief maker, who proposes "worldmaking" as a paradigm for works of art. The relief, whether it is an art category or a geological section, is a space that extends from the surface to the volume. Such a space is as tangible as it is visible. The notion of tangibility is paramount for making and receiving artworks commonly known as relief sculptures. My thesis examines my practice by establishing the territories of my artworks. Triggered by personal encounters and perceptions, each of these is a case study forming a section in my analysis. My purpose is to contextualise and underscore my practice, in a pragmatic rather than theoretical investigation. The public art commission Ways of Worldmaking raises my main questions. These relate to the topographical interconnectivity across the surface of the earth. The use of the books as a collection and an archive is another layer developed further in my concluding artwork Ways of Worldmaking / Self-portrait, that is, my thesis bibliography turned into a sculpture. My making of reliefs responds to sculptural and material dimensions of site specificity while examining its social and political features. Relief is an overlooked category of practice. It is a metaphor for observation, with qualities of elevation and depth and a variety of thickness that highlights notions of discovery and emergence of meaning. The history of Western relief sculpture informs my study of contemporary pieces. These articulate several sets of dimensions continuously from recessed parts to more protuberant ones. There is a tension between the desire to touch and the frustration of that same desire expressed particularly clearly in relief. I observe that dialectic through the senses of tactile touch and optical touch. Artists are constantly creating and exhibiting reliefs, but they rarely make full use of the physical complexity and the epistemological potential of this form of art. Relief making seems to me an interesting way of expressing our distance from or our relationship with the landforms, either theoretically or practically. Although the idea of category remains questionable in itself, I make textured world-versions, promote the relief as a rich space, readdress and redress its position among sculpture and painting

National identity through the connotation of cloth

This paper is an investigation into Welsh national identity through what was considered as national cloth, for example the traditional woven patterns or hand stitched quilts, and the significance of the cloth and fabric used. Elaborating on how these were valued then and now, I explore Welsh cloth in the context of Welsh culture

World Settings

Acoustical building materials, with their ability to absorb and diffuse sound, can reshape the character of interior spaces in profound ways. Woven textiles often perform as acoustical materials, whether by coincidence or by design; strategic use of textile structure and dimensionality can yield specific experiential qualities in homes, offices and shared spaces. The way certain materials manipulate sound can feel otherworldly, as if they break the laws of physics or the familiar parameters of one’s surroundings. The same properties can be found in emergent visual patterns and illusory lighting conditions, which provoke an investigative, deliberate way of looking. In this thesis, I explore the history of architectural acoustics and the meaning of noise as a sonic, conceptual and technical term. Visual metaphors of windows and screens, digital and analog noise and perceptual phenomena shape this work, while the “aliveness” of self-organizing materials provides a rationale for new variations on weaving techniques. The result is a collection of interior fabrics that aim to modify room environments acoustically and visually, suggesting that the static “settings” of such places have shifted. I argue that this sense of unfamiliarity can be fruitful, prompting the viewer to spend time in a focused, exploratory state and become aware of the cognitive processes by which they make sense of the physical world