2020 Honours Fine Art

Adrienne Piscopo

Between Two Worlds: Making and Identifying Liminal Spaces Through the Semiotics and Corporeal Experience of Circles

Between Two Worlds is a practice-led research project inspired by a personal near-death event in which I experienced a black and white tunnelling sensation towards a circular void. I conceptualise this encounter as entering the liminal space between life and death, an experience that motivates me to pursue deeper understanding of liminal spaces and the discursive presence of circles in modern and contemporary art, visual language and society. In this exegesis, the term ‘liminal space’ relates to unknown, transitional and transcendental spaces, their connecting thresholds, and their interrelationship with the metaphysical Void.

The research adopts a non-objective abstraction framework, a mode of representation removed from mimetic forms in the material world. It explores representations of circles and experiences of liminal states to problematise associations of the void with nothingness. Underscored by the conviction that circles predominantly function in visual culture as signs and symbols of liminal spaces, the research proposes that the viewer’s embodied phenomenological engagement with these forms interacts with content relating to personal subjectivity.

Working through cross-disciplinary studio methods, the visual thesis is the result of an interdisciplinary approach to painting and drawing, that manifests as an immersive installation. This approach proposes that a perceived aesthetic object cannot be a void, but rather, functions as an opening and opportunity for the uncanny experience of being between worlds. The installation invites viewer introspection, arising from phenomenological engagement which is in turn derived from aesthetic pleasure. In doing so, it aspires to contribute to the growing ontology of non-representational abstraction in contemporary visual art, which is underpinned by notions of aesthetic experience as being intimately connected to the subjective dimensions of reality.

Keywords: Circles, the void, liminal space, abstraction, non-objective, semiotics, phenomenology, the spiritual in art, pure aesthetics, aesthetic pleasure.

Alexandra Sloane

I’m Almost Ready

Women’s self-portraiture enables a confrontation of one's own experience as both subject and object, agent and image. I’m Almost Ready investigates how drawing as a medium can be employed to highlight and communicate the personal and social construct of awkwardness, as it is experienced and manifested within the feminine artist’s self. Drawing as a medium has associations with privacy and self-reflexivity, reinforcing its role within the project as a pivotal act of making that serves to highlight the psychological and physical manifestations of awkwardness and discomfort.

I’m Almost Ready develops an understanding of the relationship between the feminine experience and that of awkwardness, presenting the latter as a pivotal challenge that occurs when in the process of anticipating the self as an image. Presenting a series of drawings on rice paper that engage with the artists feminine body and the struggles for autonomy over one’s own image, the project examines how the performance and masquerade of femininity further contributes to this discomfort experienced. The works challenge the private and public self and confronts the spaces in which awkwardness becomes infectious, using the medium and materiality of drawings on paper to not only represent the experience of awkwardness, but to further communicate and highlight it within the drawing language itself. The project is concerned with creating a dialogue surrounding the feminised relationship between the body and the image and intends on bringing new knowledge to the psychological impacts of this relationship.

Keywords: Awkwardness, private/public, femininity, performance, self-portraiture.

Ashlee Becks

To Have and to Hold

To Have and To Hold investigates how self-portrait painting can be used as a vehicle to express and heal from childhood trauma. The series includes large painted self-portraits and smaller matching works. The smaller works are cropped, expressionist masses of paint, the compositions inspired by their larger counterparts. The paintings feature thick swipes of impasto applied by palette knife. While the larger works carry a narrative and can be read quite literally, the smaller works are less representational and require the viewer to focus more readily on mark making. Mark making, evident in both the small and large works, allows the viewer to distinguish an indexical sensibility – that being, the artist behind the mark.

This materiality is important as it reminds the viewers that a human has devoted excesses of time and care to it. It acts as a metaphor for physical healing - tender and massaged paint application promotes personal healing and, I hope, will encourage others to revaluate their relationships with the self. Similarly, I have created works that are symbolic in their representation. Through the painted self-portrait - including several works where I am embracing myself - I reinforce a metaphor of physical healing. Repeated self-images and motifs such as flowers are an important way to communicate a desire to help myself heal from childhood trauma. Through painting, I reflect on my own personal experiences and explore the role of art in a process of healing.

Keywords: Trauma, psychology, painting, index, materiality, healing.

Branka Sinobad

Registering personal experience through painting

Representations of displacement often appear through mediated photographs for example, images of trauma and peoples fleeing armed conflict. These types of representations capture an acute moment, a specific type of displacement. The sharing of these types of images influences the way that displaced individuals think about their experiences, identity and sense of self.

The works in this exhibition were created as a reflection on my own experiences of displacement and an investigation of the ways this continues to inform my own sense of identity. Beginning with old family photographs, I question its capacity to grant access to far places and diverse experiences, as well as to my own past experiences. Sensing a disconnection with the photographs, I question the role of the photograph in developing a sense of knowing and participation in the world.

Rejecting traditional photographic representations, my work is a deeper investigation of a chronic ex-perience of displacement. I investigate how the materiality of paint and gesture can be used to embody a long-term experience of displacement.

I reflect on my experiences over the past 20 years and use gestural mark making and additive process-es in the studio to capture an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia and longing, existential struggle, as well as questioning and challenging notions of identity. I use these works empty feelings and thoughts about myself and my experiences while simultaneously taking ownership of my own identity through the index of the painted gesture to re-establish a sense of belonging, connection and worth.

Keywords: Displacement, painting, abstraction, gesture, experience.

Chris Underwood

From Thrones to Fields: Ambivalent Cultural Identity and the Archive

This project emerged from an interest in how archival modes in art can address the sense of ambiguity that a varied cultural background implies. Cultural identity in the 21st century can be complex, with rapid globalisation bringing both multicultural richness and also a sense of loss as cultural difference is increasingly threatened by generic capitalist forces or simply fading with the passage of time. Complicating matters further, the commercialisation of genetic testing, ethnicity estimates and the mass digitisation of historical records offer insights about ancestry (however potentially erroneous) that can reveal connections to many different cultures and lands.

Using my own family as a case study, I created a series of 23 patterns that trace an ever shifting patchwork of cultural heritage back to the 7th century. Each pattern is themed around the life or lives of particular family members, and uses assorted artefacts sequenced according to extracts from my DNA. These fragments evoke narratives of cultural and familial change, from the monasteries and thrones of Europe to the fields of Australia and into the multicultural present. Dadaesque and whimsical in approach, the work navigates what Bradd Shore and Sara Kauko have deemed the "landscape of family memory" that is situated between individual and collective recollection.

Building on Jacques Derrida’s seminal critique of the archive as a fallible but nevertheless intriguing source, I apply Annet Dekker’s conception of the “living archives” that digital media enables, to consider how creative practice can respond to interconnected notions of heritage and belonging today.

Keywords: Archival art, Cultural identity, Ambiguity, Globalisation, Digital art, Post-internet, BioArt.

Emily Puxty

With Pleasure

With Pleasure examines the history and treatment of the maligned category of the decorative. In particular, it considers the ways in which a contemporary art practice can deliberately embrace decoration to interrogate and rethink the way we conceive both high art and everyday experience. The project also works to continues the legacy of the Pattern and Decorative movement in overseeing art considered to be simply “sensuous,” “pleasurable,” and “ornamental” as every bit legitimate, complex and sophisticated as its contemporary counterparts.

The series includes medium to small-scale domestic objects made with clay, detailing forms that re-imagine and deconstruct domestic ware. The objects employ a naïve child-like sensibility, engaging with mimetic practices to locate their site of political oppression. This includes the abstracted imitation of traditional decorative elements such as florals, patterning, and structural flourishes. These unrestrained aesthetic choices work to unsettle the coding of traditional activities within the home as decorative and thus secondary, utilizing ornamentation to re-imagine mundanity with deliberate excess, kitsch, and ‘girliness.’ By engaging with hierarchies that privilege the moral superiority of Western civilization, women and non-Western’s corporeality can be liberated through the celebration of promiscuity, of excess. This assists in the making of a contemporary art field that is more equitable and open-minded; more complete.

Keywords: Decoration, sensuality, sculpture, mimesis, semiotics, domestic.

Kierra-Jay Power

Our Home is Girt by Sea: re-materialising the Bramble Cay melomys

The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) is the first documented mammal species to be classified as extinct due to anthropogenic climate change. A small rodent endemic to the Bramble Cay, a tiny island far in the Torres Strait, it was officially declared extinct in February 2019 by the Australian government. Rising sea levels inundated the island, destroying the foliage and habitat. Traces of this species are now only accessible through archived material, such as skulls in storage in the Queensland Museum collection.

The natural history museum is an archive of objects and images which can be used to connect audiences to ecological narratives of biodiversity loss. My research examines how contemporary artists have used museum specimens to expose audiences to ecological narratives, and how digital fabrication methods can facilitate these connections.

My practice-based research re-materialises the extinct and inaccessible Bramble Cay melomys specimens hosted in museum archives. I use digital fabrication (3D scanning and printing of the specimen) and traditional metalsmithing techniques (lost wax casting in sterling silver) to translate the archived and inaccessible skull of a Bramble Cay melomys from the Queensland Museum collection into sculptural and wearable objects.

These works explore how contemporary jewellery can mimic and inhabit the skeleton of the Bramble Cay melomys to create close spaces for personal connection. The intimate scale and personal/public dialogue allow the maker, wearer, and viewer to engage with the body of the Bramble Cay melomys and the broader narrative of biodiversity loss.

Keywords: Digital fabrication, biodiversity loss, the museum, the archive, contemporary jewellery and small objects, Bramble Cay melomys.

Libby McDonnell

Show Girl

Show Girl is a research project that explores the disciplinary boundaries between circus and performance practice. I work with organic materials and circus artists to ally contemporary circus with performance art practice to create live art in an ebullient exploration of my personal experience of sub-fertility, success, and failure. The organic material functions as both an abject performance art material and circus apparatus to complicate the physical, aspirational qualities of circus performance.

Drawing on the archetype of the showgirl I frame my work within feminist discourse. I locate circus as historically marginalised and I argue that contemporary circus is ignored by the art institution. This exclusion raises critical questions; what might allow circus to be considered live art and would it still be circus when and if that happened?

Keywords: Abject, Circus, Circus Apparatus, Performance, Performance Art, Feminist, Non-Newtonian Fluid, Organic Material.

Macarlya Waters

Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art (Honours)

Questioning historical narratives associated with the contemporary identity of female Aboriginality

From a historical standpoint the two most influential Acts which have affected the identity of Aboriginal women since colonial history are the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Act 1909 and the Queensland, Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. These Acts determined the movements of Aboriginal women, confining them to designated reserves and missions and marginalizing them within colonial Australian society.

The focus of this work is to recognize Aboriginal Feminist Standpoint theories and assess how political determinants might have influenced the creation of subjective artistic artefacts including, the potential to identify Aboriginal women's historical issues from a First Nations perspective. These concepts are particularly reflective of Race Relations within Australia and internationally which have become a controversial topic particularly in the areas of post-colonialism and decolonisation practices. The critical concept which is being addressed is the issue of Aboriginal female fiction and how representations of female identity are reflected through the totality of accumulated artistic expression; music, poetry, creative, and fine arts, and literature. Rummaging through feminist and black history in search of an alternative innovative contemporary indigenous narrative.

Drawing particular attention to the purpose of the creation of, and experimentation with, conceptual materials and artefacts to subvert the historical stereotyping of Aboriginal women and fostering artistic expressionism, empowerment, and healing. This includes the use of symbolic phraseology and semiotics in female representation. The premise of this investigation is not to centre entirely onto an Indigenous worldview but will also incorporate the Western Canon and its juxtaposition within literature on female Aboriginal representation. Additionally, I am looking to discover something about my own artistic practice and the use of objectivity to portray an alternative narrative which in this case demystifies colonial ambiguity.

Keywords: Aboriginality; Decolonisation; Symbolic Phraseology; Aboriginal Feminism; Artistic Expressionism.

Maddison Bygrave

Ngarra Yilabara (Listen Now)

Considering the narrative materiality of wearable objects to signify the continuum of cultural knowledges.

The aim of this project is to consider the narrative materiality of wearable objects to signify the continuum of cultural knowledges. I am researching historical context of the government issued Blanket Lists and considering the relationships of traditional and contemporary possum skin cloaks by using decolonising methodologies. These methodologies guide my project as an Indigenous researcher gaining traditional knowledges and practices. The materiality of possum skin and fur is considered by activating the object through wearing. Reflecting the relationship between the wearer and object is an important aspect of signifying the continuum of culture. My response through this research involves a collection of contemporary wearable objects, interweaving possum skin and metal smithing materials. I am contributing to the reclamation of culture by using materiality to signify the survival and resistance of Indigenous peoples.

Keywords: Resurgence, Possum Skin, Cloak, Blanket List, Culture, Dharug, Jewellery, Decolonising, Healing.

Merete Megarrity

The Grand Negotiations

My exhibition proposes to stage The Grand Negotiations (2020), a circular installation of twelve sculptures with soundscape, constructed from natural and human-made materials and sounds. The work is invested in an anti-didactic communication of environmental concerns and explores how an installation of objects and sounds, in our era of the Anthropocene, can help the viewer to connect with the non-human.

New materialism theorists including Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour make the case for re-establishing respect for the earth by accepting the idea that all ‘material’ is ‘alive’ and therefore demands respect and agency, equal to that of humans. Exploring these ideas in my studio practice, I have constructed a kind of parliamentary assembly of ‘earth members’, performing the act of negotiation for the future of our planet. Each column, similar in scale to a human body, is uniquely constructed from natural found objects and seaborne plastics. By combining organic found ‘objects’ with these manufactured elements, I am referencing the comingling, interdependence and interconnectedness of humans and nature.

The immersive soundscape ‘records these negotiations’ and its narrative combines sounds including birds, bush fire, frogs, chain saw, koalas, ocean, with fragments of poetry and an invocation spoken in Jandai, the Indigenous language of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island).

The key to the scale and circular configuration of the sculptures not only allows for the viewer to physically enter the work but combined with the soundscape, which equally is designed to draw the viewer into its centre, the viewer’s active listening and spectatorship completes the intention of the work.

Keywords: Installation, objects, sound, Anthropocene, New Materialism, agency, voices, the non-human, Parliament of Things, Vibrant Matter.

Michelle Wild

Grounded Witness

How can a text-based art practice explore the threshold between guest, host and witness with regards to the concept of hospitality?

As a structure, hospitality has no fixed content, however an act of hospitality always takes place at a threshold and involves a guest, a host, and a witness. Jacques Derrida’s theoretical writings on hospitality highlights the broad context to which these concepts can be applied, including crossing the thresholds of the personal, political, ethical and cultural realms. This theory along with Judith Still and Anne Dufourmantelle’s writings underpin this research which asks: How can a text-based art practice explore the threshold between guest, host and witness with regards to the concept of hospitality?

My studio research uses both phenomenology and deconstruction as a methodology, allowing for the exploration of the language within the concept of hospitality. This language provides the visual and material framework for my studio practice offering investigations into the various thresholds and relationships attached to hospitality. The outcomes of these investigations have developed into a body of work that comprises of both two- and three-dimensional text-based works, including a series of small-scale objects, etchings on paper, an artist book and a larger sculptural work. The guest/host relationship is extended by the viewer becoming an integral element in activating the dialogue between the text-based artworks, the concepts, and the gallery space.

This practice led research engages a contemporary arts practice to explore the relationships between guest, host, and place as witness. In the context of contemporary society, the relevance of my studio and research outcomes has become heightened as we continue to navigate through a pandemic. Borders and boundaries, spaces and interactions are now entities that are being generated and regenerated at both a societal and individual level.

Keywords: Contemporary art, text-based works, threshold, place, guest, host, witness, hospitality, deconstruction, Jacques Derrida.

Molly Smith

Persistent Bodies

This project explores the common ground held between Post-Minimalist abstract sculptural practices and contemporary painting theory. Through a series of abstract, constructed, post-medium paintings, the work produces a non-literal bodily presence and proposes paintings as bodily interlocutors in a gallery space. This project reviews the somatic trace in diagrammatic modes of making and uses the grid as an artistic device, further proposing that the grid is equally fallible, warped, tenuous and unruly as the flesh to which it refers. Using the language and history of painting to explore ways in which the non-figurative reflects ideas of embodiment and corporeal space in a contemporary capacity, this project explores the open-ended dialogue between form, environment and the body and aims to contribute to a revision of the presence of “the body” in art historical contexts where it may have been overlooked.

Keywords: Post-medium painting; corporeal space; the grid; post-minimalism .

Natalie Lavelle

Ontology of a Painting: the abstract and the physical

This exegesis outlines a practice-led research project concerned with the ‘abstract’ and the ‘physical’ in painting. It asks the question: How can abstraction be used to consider painting’s ontology through the common physicalities between object and Self? Drawing from the established discourses of Michael Fried, Barry Schwabsky and Gilles Deleuze, this research asserts the continued relevance of theories of Minimalism to contemporary painting. It does so in a way that acknowledges the difference between objecthood and the ontology of the art object, specifically, painting.

Responding to contemporary painting practice, my methods aim to explore surface relationships where visual perception prompts a tangible awareness of painting’s objecthood in relation to our own body and the natural world. Developing a studio practice which builds on physical fundamentals present in the works of artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, the intention is to rationalise and make visible the ‘body’ of a painting in its foundational form. Abstraction today depends on a present- tense engagement with the physical work in front of us. Therefore, this enquiry will result in paintings that use a construct of the abstract and the physical in painting, deliberately offering painting’s own medium as subject.

Keywords: Abstract, Physical, Objecthood, Body, Ontology, Being.

Paula de la Rua Cordoba

Seeing Plants: Reversing the politicising of plants as a decolonialist strategy

This installation is an ode to nature and the seeing and framing of plants as central decolonising strategies. Using the power of multiples, the ceramics highlight the abundance and regenerating power of nature and the strength of the individual working within the group to decolonise the landscape. The intricate compositions of rhythm and movement oppose the constraints of the frame, symbolising a political call for action. Curved lines and shapes mirror the natural world surrounding us while scale symbolises nature’s growth and questions anthropocentric spatial perspectives. The artwork creates a positive response compelling the viewer to focus on the importance of seeing plants, while radiating warmth, persuading the viewer to want to touch nature. The patterns and the glossy finish of the ceramics create a sense of rich lusciousness emulating life, while blocks of colours showcase the strength that variety provides to the group. The aesthetical visual language of the artworks has a tangible weight with an explosion of colour and growth of flora into the room where joy provides a potential for hope as a tool for decolonisation.

Keywords: Reclaiming Nature, British Imperialism, Decolonialising, Politicising of Plants, Landscape, Ceramic Installation, Plant blindness.

Ruth Cho

Australian Knockoffs: Exploring the potential for printmaking processes to de-Westernise Eurocentric images of Australian identity

Australia has always been ethnically diverse however it continues to draw upon and uphold images embedded in the history of European colonial rule. As a result, Australian identity continues to be dominated with Eurocentric representations, despite its cultural diversity through past immigration. As a first-generation Australian immigrant, my project specifically addresses Asian immigration in Australia and the term East-Asia refers to the region that includes China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam. My processes and methods of printmaking and appropriation will be discussed on how they can be used to question the validity of Eurocentric representations through de-westernisation.

This research project explores the potential for printmaking to de-Westernise icons and images of Australian identity through appropriation. The visual outcome consists of a series of multi-coloured linocut prints that appropriate or provide an alternative interpretation of celebrated images from Australian art and culture. The postmodern and postcolonial strategy of appropriation critiques these dominant representations by taking these symbolic objects embedded in colonial history and recontextualising them. The prints utilise the relief printing technique of linocut to evoke the aesthetic of traditional and modern Chinese woodcuts, creating a visual imbalance and new hybrid compositions. These new variations of familiar compositions disrupt these European representations and create a different visual overview that reminds Australia of its culturally diverse past. The concluding works of art will demonstrate the obsolescence of these Eurocentric images and highlight the need for them to be reassessed.

Keywords: Australia, identity, de-Westernise, decolonise, Eurocentric, post-colonial, postmodern, printmaking, representation, images.

Savannah Jarvis

On A Scale of 1-10

On a Scale of 1-10 examines painting’s ability to articulate women’s chronic pain through the use of metaphor. In particular it investigates how painting can resignify and de-catastrophise the imagery and metaphors promoted in contemporary painterly representations of endometriosis. Often chronic pain evades simple linguistic expression — encouraging sufferers towards imaginative linguistic frameworks, and a reliance on imagery and/or metaphorical language to describe their pain experiences. The dominant modes of representation for endometriosis represent a static pain experience through physical damage metaphors, an approach that has been recently debated due to the frequency of miscommunication between practitioners and patients. This practice-based research navigates the contemporaneous trend of physical damage metaphors by reparatively building networks of metaphoric imagery that emphasises divergence to approach more dynamic accounts of the experience of the disease and its broader impacts.

The series contains imagery of metaphors from personal experience and metaphors used by women in clinical studies on their experience with endometriosis. Influenced by Susan Best’s Reparative Aesthetics, the works attempt to emphasise affect and aesthetics in the hopes of creating a visual lexicon that enables effective and comfortable communication. Until recently endometriosis has been little understood, and still individuals struggle for diagnosis and treatment – this project hopes to continue to raise awareness of the disease and provide varied representation and clarity for those as the pre and post diagnosis stage.

Keywords: Endometriosis, Reparative, Semiotics, Metaphor, De-catastrophisation, Linguistics.

Sean E. Crookes

Generations – Four Score and More: An exploration of painting as a means of communicating experiences of family relationships and ageing

This practice led research investigates how painting can communicate experiences of familial relationships and aging in the home with the goal to achieve a collection of resolved paintings that communicate what family dynamics and aging in the home can look like.

This project is socially and artistically significant. In social terms Australia has drifted into an ageist mindset that undervalues older people and limits their possibilities. Using my parents as subject, I use painting to make visible, the often invisible and sometimes difficult experiences of elderly members of our community and their families.

In artistic terms this project contributes to a contemporary resurgence in figurative painting. It operates within, and builds upon, the art historical traditions of portraiture, realism, and domestic interiors painting, employing these genres to foreground previously underrepresented elderly subjects.

My methodology draws from these art historical frameworks to foreground: the human subject and intersubjectivity (portraiture); the lived reality of everyday human experience (Realism); and a deeper consideration of the domestic setting (interiors painting, using painting as a means of representing and addressing human themes.

By leveraging characteristics of domestic interior painting, portraiture, and realism, painting can communicate experiences of familial relationships and what a contemporary experience of aging at home can look like. This is most effectively achieved by providing sufficient visual cues to locate the subjects and their environment, using formal qualities of painting to activate mood/feeling/empathy and by leaving sufficient space / omissions for the viewer to insert themselves and their own narratives.

Keywords: Painting, domestic-interiors, portraiture, realism, ageing, family, relationships, home, intersubjectivity, empathy.

QCA South Bank undergraduate exhibitions

See works from QCA South Bank Design, Visual Arts and Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art students.

Opening night

Thursday 27 October 2022 6 – 9 pm

Exhibitions open:
28 October – 3 November 2022, 10 am – 4 pm

South Bank campus, 226 Grey Street, South Brisbane

QCA Gold Coast undergraduate exhibition

See works from Queensland College of Art Gold Coast Bachelor of Design students.

One night only

Wednesday 26 October 2022 6 – 9 pm

Open for one night only

Gold Coast campus, G14 Precinct, Parklands Drive

Griffith University Queensland College of Art 2021 Graduate Exhibitions. Opening night Thursday 11 November 226 Grey Street, South Bank

QCA Honours and postgraduate exhibitions

See works from Master of Visual Arts, Master of Design and Honours students.