Songs of silence: painting, phenomenology, aesthetics

The aim of my research is to explore the aesthetic potentialities of gestural painting and reductive spatiality in two dimensional and three dimensional forms. I have conducted an investigation into aesthetic experience through the phenomenological framework of the French philosopher, Merleau-Ponty and the foundational thinking of American theorist, Ellen Dissanayake in relation to art. I have addressed gesture and materiality as both a communicative tool and an aesthetic strategy. The work of Katharina Grosse (b. 1961), Fabienne Verdier (b.1962) and Anish Kapoor (b.1954) is investigated, especially in relation to aspects of visual art practice such as large scale works; the use of gesture in painting; spatiality in two and three dimensions; attention to surface and the strategic use of colour. The void and the sublime is also addressed, especially in the works of Anish Kapoor and Fabienne Verdier. My studio work is based on an initial series of mark making experiments in ink/paint on paper. The emphasis was on the phenomenological experience and aesthetic dimensions of verticality, in relation to falling and floating. The gestural marks are improvised, repetitive and experimental in nature; and the spatial activation of the white ground and its surface is also a primary consideration in these experiments. Painting in three dimensional space emerged through the studio practice and its theoretical concerns. This culminated in gestural experimental painting on 4.5m vertically suspended drops of muslin using both viscous and watery paint. The muslin was also sculpted and draped in various ways which evoked a multitude of bodily and experiential associations

inConversation

inConversation was a collaborative exhibition amongst creative higher degree by research candidates (from the School of Communications and Arts and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts), local, national and international arts practitioners and researchers from different art forms and discipline backgrounds. The exhibition invited conversations between artists and researcher collaborators working together to produce a broad range of creative works, culminating in an exhibition titled inConversation, staged at Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Project Space in October 2014. The context for the inConversation exhibition aimed to inform and expand on current debates about the challenges and benefits of inter- and cross-disciplinary collaboration in the arts. While collaboration within discrete artistic disciplines has been quite common, it is now becoming increasingly important for artists to look beyond their silos and invite interactions with researchers in other disciplines and art forms. This exhibition explored what complexity may mean in terms of the processes of practice-led research in probing how the push and pull of the collaborative process, by which the outcomes become more than the sum of the parts, plays out in a cross-disciplinary, creative context.https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecubooks/1000/thumbnail.jp