4 research outputs found
A Leap In The Dark: Identity, Culture And The Trauma Of War Mediated Thorough The Visual Arts Of North-East European Migrants And Émigrés To Australia After 1945
This thesis explores the contribution to the cultural life of post-war Australia by migrant artists from north-eastern Europe. It researches the lives and work not only of displaced artists arriving in the mass exodus from Europe after the Second World War, but also second and third generation artists descended from original migrant families, and much later émigré artists.
Art histories written to date about the post-war period provide little coverage of the contributionto the art and culture of Australia by migrant artists from north-eastern Europe. The coverage in the literature written about the visual art produced by established Australian artists is far greater than that given to the migrant artists also exhibiting at the same time. Insofar as the ‘gap’ in the literature is concerned, this research reveals a number of factors which appear to have influenced the non-recognition of migrant art—such as, poor reception of abstract art in Australia post-war and the protection of established Australian artists. The impact of European abstract expressionism that migrants introduced in the 1950s had a lasting effect on Australian modern art, together with the innovation of their contemporary sculpture, which changed the urban landscape of Australian cities.
This research questions the possible long term repercussions emanating from colonial Anglocentric Australian government policies, which in turn leads to questions about the importance and location of cultural heritage, sense of identity, third space and cultural hybridity. With a focus on migrant artists from north-eastern Europe—the Baltic States and Poland—the research investigates how second and third generation artists locate their visual art in relation to their cultural environment and how they navigate between their cultural heritage and the cultural mosaic of an Australian context. The impact of war on artists from migrant families through the subjugated experience of those families is also addressed to ascertain any effect on the visual art currently being produced.
Interviews were conducted with ten artists of north-east European ancestry, using an ethnographic qualitative research methodology incorporating in-depth interviews together with close analysis of artwork during interview or subsequent contact in the artists’ studios and at exhibitions of their work.
Research revealed that, regarding a sense of belonging and identity, nine of the ten artists still retain a perception of living between cultures, which appears congruous with the importance of the retention of language and ‘home’ culture. Making art appears to strengthen their sense of living between cultures, and their creative praxis combines experiences passed down through the generations fused into their own Australian life-world, modified and shaped within a third space of meaning. The thesis argues that second and third generation Australian artists, whilst engaging with contemporary issues, make reference to cultural traditions interspersed with comment on contemporary conditions, resulting in a syncretic articulation which forms a third space of cultural transformation and unity.
The investigation into the impact of war, particularly World War II, revealed that only five participating artists directly manifest war themes in their visual art. However, the repercussions of that war and the Cold War, which lasted for many years after the Second World War, appear to have been subconsciously imprinted on the artwork of all three categories of artist, i.e. second and third generation and émigré artists.
The cultural aesthetics migrants introduced has had a long-lasting effect on Australian tastes generally and on art education in particular. This research underlines the particular contribution of migrant artists from north-east Europe, revealing the aesthetic value such cultural integration has produced. This research seeks to initiate dialogue and a growing understanding of the rich and complex history of art and culture which migration has stimulated in Australia since the 1950s
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Understanding complex biomolecular systems through the synergy of molecular dynamics simulations, NMR spectroscopy and X-Ray crystallography
Proteins and DNA are essential to life as we know it and understanding their function is understanding their structure and dynamics. The importance of the latter is being appreciated more in recent years and has led to the development of novel interdisciplinary techniques and approaches to studying protein function. Three techniques to study protein structure and dynamics have been used and combined in different ways in the context of this thesis and have led to a better understanding of the three systems described herein.
X-ray crystallography is the oldest and still arguably most popular technique to study macromolecular structures. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a not much younger technique that is a powerful tool not only to probe molecular structure but also dynamics. The last technique described herein are molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, which are only just growing out of their infancy. MD simulations are computer simulations of macromolecules based on structures solved by X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy, that can give mechanistic insight into dynamic processes of macromolecules whose amplitudes can be estimated by the former two techniques.
MD simulations of the model protein GB3 (B3 immunoglobulin-binding domain of streptococcal protein G) were conducted to identify origins of discrepancies between order parameters derived from different sets of MD simulations and NMR relaxation experiments.The results highlight the importance of time scales as well as sampling when comparing MD simulations to NMR experiments. Discrepancies are seen for unstructured regions like loops and termini and often correspond to nanosecond time scale transitions between conformational substates that are either over- or undersampled in simulation. Sampling biases can be somewhat remedied by running longer (microsecond time scale) simulations. However, some discrepancies persist over even very long trajectories. We show that these discrepancies can be due to the choice of the starting structure and more specifically even differences in protonation procedures. A test for convergence on the nanosecond time scale is shown to be able to correct for many of the observed discrepancies.
Next, MD simulations were used to predict in vitro thermostability of members of the bacterial Ribonuclease HI (RNase H) family of endonucleases. Thermodynamic stability is a central requirement for protein function and a goal of protein engineering is improvement of stability, particularly for applications in biotechnology. The temperature dependence of the generalized order parameter, S, for four RNase H homologs, from psychrotrophic, mesophilic and thermophilic organisms, is highly correlated with experimentally determined melting temperatures and with calculated free energies of folding at the midpoint temperature of the simulations. This study provides an approach for in silico mutational screens to improve thermostability of biologically and industrially relevant enzymes.
Lastly, we used a combination of X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy and MD simulations to study specificity of the interaction between Drosophila Hox proteins and their DNA target sites. Hox proteins are transcription factors specifying segment identity during embryogenesis of bilaterian animals. The DNA binding homeodomains have been shown to confer specificity to the different Hox paralogs, while being very similar in sequence and structure. Our results underline earlier findings about the importance of the N-terminal arm and linker region of Hox homeodomains, the cofactor Exd, as well as DNA shape, for specificity. A comparison of predicted DNA shapes based on sequence alone with the shapes observed for different DNA target sequences in four crystal structures when in complex with the Drosophila Hox protein AbdB and the cofactor Exd, shows that a combined ”induced fit”/”conformational selection” mechanism is the most likely mechanism by which Hox homeodomains recognize DNA shape and achieve specificity.
The minor groove widths for all sequences is close to identical for all ternary complexes found in the different crystal structures, whereas predicted shapes vary between the different DNA sequences. The sequences that have shown higher affinity to AbdB in vitro have a predicted DNA shape that matches the observed DNA shape in the ternary complexes more closely than the sequences that show low in vitro affinity to AbdB. This strongly suggests that the AbdB-Exd complex selects DNA sequences with a higher propensity to adopt the final shape in their unbound form, leading to higher affinity.
An additional AbdB monomer binding site with a strongly preformed binding competent shape is observed for one of the oligomers in the reverse complement strand of one of the canonical (weak) Hox-Exd complex binding site. The shape preference seems strong enough for AbdB monomer binding to compete with AbdB-Exd dimer binding to that same oligomer, suggested by the presence of both binding modes in the same crystal. The monomer binding site is essentially able to compete with the dimer binding site, even though binding with the cofactor is not possible, because its shape is very close to the ideal shape.
A comparison of different crystal structures solved herein and in the literature as well as a set of molecular dynamics simulations was performed and led to insights about the importance of residues in the Hox N-terminal arm for the preference of certain Hox paralogs to certain DNA shapes. Taken together all these insights contribute to our understanding of Hox specificity in particular as well as protein-DNA interactions in general