Tracing, reference points and communication paths in artwork.

Research into the way multiple decision-making strategies are required to amalgamate diverse elements in an installation forms the basis of Tracing, reference points and communication paths in artwork. I came to realise that this was a crucial, yet unconscious part of my own practice. Despite an extensive literature search, it became clear that prior research or textual analysis that would facilitate a better understanding of this process was lacking. This led to an initial investigation into the work of other artists and filmmakers who appear to use multiple decision-making in their practices, artists as varied as Blinky Palermo, David Reed, Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt, François Morellet, Gerhard Richter, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Karl Stanley Benjamin, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, each of whom has something to reveal about multiple decision-making as a strategy for combining diverse elements in an exhibition space.. In my own work, I amalgamate images derived from photographs, abstract-painting methods, and built structures to instigate a play of relations between the elements in the exhibition space. As a way to begin to decipher the decisions that underpin the process of making, I undertook a method of tracing, diagrammatically, both the physical movement of the elements of the artwork, as well as the operation of multiple-decision making during the production process. As a diagrammatic visualisation, it highlighted a series of points interconnected by communication paths. Within this exegesis, the communications paths should be thought of as the spaces, intensities and movements that operate across the physical and cognitive parts of artwork, as well as the points at which decision-making has moved from unconsciousness into awareness of how the decision has affected the arrangement. This move from unconsciousness to awareness is the decisive advance in the practice, since this is the point of regenerative significance and development. In the bringing together diagrammatically of the communication paths and the points, unfixed movement and productivity (a becoming) also manifests. The tracing of actions and decisions has also allowed me to recognise the productive forces within my own practice around different modes of decision-making, such as chance, serendipitous connecting points, and rule setting. This has proved to be a generative process, opening up ways for making new artwork. In coming to terms with how multiple decision-making drives art-marking, the exegesis has taken a sustained investigation into a wide range of practices. Thus, the research not only identifies the particularity of decision-making as it relates to my own practice, but also contributes thinking about the way other artists engage a variety of decisions to realise their artwork. The research is not interested, therefore, in artwork that espouses singularly focussed positions of artistic intent, but in demonstrating how work that aims for complex and multi-dimensional layers of meaning is underpinned by a varied range of technical and cognitive decision-making