Tag: aesthetic subjectivity

Sydney Field Trip

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edge of trees 2

In late December 2013 I was able to make a research trip to Sydney. My aim was to see two spaces that I had viewed from a far for too long- Edge of Trees and Paddington Reservoir Gardens. I also took advantage of my temporary location by visiting a few other art sites.

I visited the amazing collection of contemporary Chinese art at White Rabbit Gallery in Central Sydney http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org/ , I was impressed by the way many of the works really grappled with the social, political and spiritual turbulence spurred by globalisation’s rapid pace. Gonkar Gyasto is the artist who has most stayed with me- his works deals with place and placelessness and identity.

After lunch I made the trek to Brett Whitley’s Studio in Surry Hills, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/brett-whiteley-studio/  where I spent time with epic self-portrait as a landscape, Alchemy. I had seen this work on an ABC Documentary http://www.abc.net.au/arts/artofaustralia/ and felt that Whiteley’s process of making an immense landscape as self-portrait and autobiographical narrative illustrated my notion of aesthetic subjectivity perfectly. I crawled over this painting for almost an hour.

brett_luminous

Walking back into Sydney Central I made my way to the Art Gallery of NSW. Here I was most keen to see the work Illuminate. The product of a community arts collaboration between paper makers and Euraba artists from Northern NSW. I found this work mesmerizing. A corrugated box hut made of paper and illuminated from the inside out by four video projectors which animate each of the four walls with documentary style footage- it became this glowing aesthetic object, what you imagine the intersection between memory and place, our memory and home may be.

On my second day I sought out Fiona Foley’s and Janet Laurence’s Edge of Trees and the Museum of Sydney Forecourt. I first saw this work on a documentary about Laurence on the ABC (God bless aunty) back in 2007 I think. At the time I was really impressed by her approached and just really “got it”. In this work trees originally felled from the area (that had taken seed pre-colonisation) were returned to the site as greyed, noble logs. Laurence and Foley have used a number of materials to convey and capture the memory of this site, Latin and indigenous names are inscribed on the poles and heard echoing through this relic site. This was one of those sites which visiting only enhanced my appreciation of it, I felt it as a really powerful memorial and as a place in which to come to terms with history. Sitting there on a Sunday morning with the noises of buses, cars and pedestrians I imagined what it would feel like in the quiet of 3am, in the dark would the speaker’s aboriginal voice echo in the urban still?

Edge of Trees 1

I took a punt and figured out how to use Sydney public transport just enough to get myself to Paddington. I bought myself a coffee, crossed the road and walked down the stairs into the Paddington Reservoir Gardens. A young lady sat taking flute lessons, a family picnicked on a section of grass. I looked around the space, beautiful- what I had expected, an eclectic intersection of ruins and landscape gardening that embodied that contemporary eco-aesthetic. But I was a little underwhelmed too, and that is not a bad thing, I really had to query why I was underwhelmed. My research has led me to look at our relationship to the environment and this has in turn revealed the many ways in which this relationship is constructed. This construction process is not always one in which we can exert our own agency however, it is not uncommon for the constructed spaces in which we find ourselves to be forces themselves in fact shaping our agency.

Paddington

I had stayed in Western Sydney and caught the train to and from that infamous urban landscape. Making my way into the Sydney CBD that morning it was impossible to ignore the way money concentrates itself as witnessed in the buildings of the area, their commercial occupants and their proximity to the harbor, the memory of that Edge of Trees nestled into this Western, globalized space. Sitting here in Paddington it was hard to detach from the awareness that this beautiful, ethical space was entwined in the circumstances of privilege that keep its nearby property prices so high. Another dimension to my underwhelming was to do with the difference between a space made using aesthetics to create a more neutral common area and a space made using aesthetics as a language to engage its visitors and its socio-historical contexts in order to push into a questioning of that relationship between subject and world.

These are questions and currents that keep pushing through my research and will be developed as I go. In two fast approaching weeks I will take flight for overseas field research in America and Japan. Questioning the processes of aesthetically made spaces will be a core task of this research. Stay tuned…

Making Spaces

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making space 1-2

The drawing series “Making Spaces” notes the shift in my understanding that occurred through the domestic observations I undertook through my PhD Research in 2013. I had come to see how the interfolding of body and environment was dynamic, reactive and productive. It could never be a pure, pre-reflective engagement. Perception is always prewired in some way. Just as each photograph I took of my domestic life operated to construct a scene, each perceptual engagement with space operated to construct that space, making it into a particular space dependent on the intention and activity of the subject and the resources and conditions of the given space.

 

I saw these drawing works as indicating some of the processes that enable us to make the ordinary (almost invisible in their apparent un-remarkableness) spaces of our everyday worlds. I chose to draw on maps which were directly relevant to my ordinary life. The maps include the location of my children’s school, family daycare and my house. My previous year’s research into the operation of ecosystems, Warrnambool’s geology and indigenous understanding and connection to land combined with a deepened understanding of Colonisation’s material processes of naming, dividing, selling and “developing” land. This utterly changed the way I perceive the fixed, concreteness of urbanization, its infrastructure and the cultural practices it enables. I see these drawings as an interaction between the maps, the drawn image and the title. To me this is a way of grappling with the actual material reality of how it is that we shape land and resources in order to produce and maintain the homogeneity of contemporary urban life and the regular comforts this enables.

making spaces 3-4

making spaces 5-6

Consumer Tracking

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Shopping Bag-by three

(as always you can click on this image to enlarge it 🙂 )

I began this series as part of my on-going observation of my domestic space. Between December 2013 and March 2014 I managed six substantial trips away from home, most lasted more than a week. Over this time I felt a disconnect of degrees with my “home space”, one of the interesting ways this emerged was in the reduction of ordinary items in my pantry and around the home.

As a mother…. (& as an artist not strictly locked into a formal 9-5 employment schedule) I am the one in our house who does “the big shop”: the bread, the cereal, the detergents, the snack foods, meat, canned food, fruit & vege etc. Usually once a fortnight I stock the cupboards, fridge and freezer so that the stuff we want is there (where our bodies are) when we want it. In not being home so much over summer this routine dissolved and our attainment of these items became a “seat-of-the-pants kind of affair”- you know, the kind of little shops you do to get the ingredients for tea and the toilet paper (or the whatever else its is you’ve noticed is running out) and usually a fistful of munchies or some other crap that you don’t really need.

All very ordinary and not very remarkable, but in this process of coming and going, and being home and away and home again I realised the significance of this ordinary consumption of grocery goods: the availability of the ordinary items that I use everyday in my “home space” creates the sense of stability and fixity – even, perhaps, domestic wellbeing….

The interesting thing for me was that sense of stability is dependent on the constant motion (of trips to the store- encapsulating economic exchange & the processes that produce the goods) of that “renewal”. & of course there is a whole dimension here which infers the impact our (varying degrees of/disruptions to) ability to “renew” our spaces has on our lives/relationships/wellbeing etc.

DSC_0511

On the morning that my youngest son began his primary school career the fly-by-the-seat-of-our pants consumerism finally let us all down: there was no sugar. Enough was enough. After I took my three amigos to school I went to my local IGA & bulk bought a bunch of stuff: cereal, sugar, lunch box snacks, cheese, ham, fruit etc.

In my haste I’d forgotten my green bags and found myself with a kitchen full of grey plastic regret. I decided that I would use those bags to record the contents of my shopping trip. I began with the bananas… Restoring our domestic stocks has taken numerous well thought out trips to numerous supermarkets, we reached a nice equilibrium last week before I left for another trip interstate…

These drawings are an interesting way for me to consider this particular intersection between myself and my environment. There is an amount of ethical illusion or contradiction in the the whole green bag thing that emerges in these drawings- reducing the amount of end-of-shopping-plastic in the bags I use to take the shopping home does little to impact the product packaging they contain, its subsequent “disposal” or the products lineage in the “food chain” that got it to the store….

hmmmm, food for thought (I know…)

Memory Flesh

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memory flesh_fold

I have been getting back into my PhD studies over the last few weeks. The main focus of this research is to investigate and develop my notion of Aesthetic Subjectivity. This model of subjectivity looks at the human, or the self, as an enfolding of body and environment, always absorbing and processing (metabolising) the external world in the process of forming its conscious image, drawn from sensory inputs and body states (synaesthesia), of its self in this relationship. Said in another way, looking at how we process the intersection of our inner and outer worlds to interact within “the world”.

I began my PhD in February 2012 by focusing on my relationship to the environment. This took in my childhood and adult geographic environments as well as the socio-historical lineages of these environments. That first year of my research was mainly spent surveying that vast contextual field. A vastness that turned out too overwhelm my core research aims. I was advised by my supervisor, Head of the ANU’s Sculpture Workshop Wendy Teakel, to narrow the aperture of my focus to my immediate domestic space. I was resistant and sceptical to this idea at first and the shift from the theoretically and geographically broader landscape to the absolutely localised space of my immediate world was an at times painful transition. But at my heart I am a good girl and I could see potential in Wendy’s suggestion so I did what I was told to do and set about observing my domestic space through visual diary format.

This process of continual observation has proven to be a rich venture yielding insight into that overlapping of self and space that so enchants me. It gave me the platform that I needed to ease myself back into the production of art itself. I can see a strong little body of works emerging that embody my research concerns. This series of small sculptures considers the way in which we interact with everyday domestic and familial objects, ingesting there physical forms and patterns as our muscle memories form the habits of their use. Through observing myself and my family in our ordinary space I have come to believe that these habitual actions provide the canvas for our social interactions, the shared moments through which we model behaviour and modes of organising emotion, communicate and gesture our believes and values, and so critically yet often so unwittingly imprint each other in shared experience. I use fabric in these pieces as a loaded medium. To me fabric conveys something of the material body, the weaves and intersections and connections of neurons, nerve fibres and muscle, the intricate braids of DNA . It is also temporal, it conveys “social fabric”, the “rich tapestry of life”, the weaves that extend from one generation to the next.

This series of works is titled “Memory Flesh”. I can envisage a kitchen full of these items, the inanimate made aesthetically animate. The work at the top is called “Memory Flesh #3, Unfold Me”. I borrowed a lyric from a beautiful, vulnerable Sia song “Breath Me” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSH7fblcGWM . I put this piece up for auction at the recent F Project fundraiser for the Artery and believe it was bought by one Mr Gareth Colliton. I am using a combination of textile work, painting and poly resins to create these expression of the body. I am quite excited to see what else comes through this creative stream.

memory flesh

Social Schema… this Interwoven Flesh

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social schema

This image should be floating around as a free art card in Warrnambool anytime soon. I was still breastfeeding my 9 month old son when I began this painting in 2009. I embroidered a maternal figure, nursing her infant into the canvas after I stretched it. The frame is the base off our old queen size bed, the canvas gathers in the corners and the are sections where the fabric buckles and pulls. This painting had lingered in my imagination for years, when I undertook my Bachelor of Arts Honours through Deakin University I allowed it to finally come through.

I used this Honours year (or year & a I/2 in my case) to examine questions that had perplexed me for sometime- all around the relationship between our internal and external experiences of reality. Was it possible that the external world was somehow a reflection of our internal self-consciousness, perhaps our unconscious too? This research lead me to investigate the history of “substance dualism” best known as the mind-body split and to trace the history of this dualism through Western intellectual traditions and practices. Having recently borne my third child my own maternal body and contemporary Western culture and medicine became a nucleus for this inquiry.

That period of research was rich and formative, it produced the notion of aesthetic subjectivity which drives my current practice led research. I made a number of sculptures, abstract paintings, a video and this painting which all became the womblike installation space Maternal Interstice.

I have always found it frustrating to be a passive witness of news, of world trauma and global changes. I also cringe at the phrase “as a mother” which is mostly used as a qualifier for nappies and paracetamol. This painting, Social Schema, is the confluence of those two: as a mother passively witnessing world trauma. It was influence by my deep reaction to the Little Children Are Sacred Report in 2006, the on-going anxiety, frustration and grief I feel regarding our destruction of the environment, Australian media’s and politics’ misconstrued representation of asylum seekers. This painting was produced over about twelve months, I drew from Australian artist’s Jeffry Smart and James Gleeson as influences and “as a mother” I found it significant to be referencing great Australian, male painters. I grappled with a lot of questions through the making of this image, parts were challenging technically and this was often mirrored on a philosophical level. I probably began this work from the basis of an “us” & “them”, I was critical of how “they” were screwing up my world- gouging it out in open cut mines, shipping meaningless consumer items across  oceans, starving ecosystems and filling the atmosphere with that contentious, choking gas. The on-going wrestle and dance persisted on the canvas and in my body, in my muscles and nerves: how many items in my home were once afloat on the ocean, how much CO2 had I put in the air on behalf of my precious babies?

This painting became a process of accepting that interfolding between body and world; it gave me an insight into the complexity of this interfolding- we overlap our world views and realities building the familial, communal, socio-political, global, perhaps even spiritual spaces that become “the world”. Many ideas germinated through my honours year- this inquiry into the co-productive relationship between space and consciousness has become quite loud in my current  work….

 

Metabolic Synaesthete

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The phrase Metabolic Synaesthete describes the way in which we connect with our world absorbing and processing it to produce ourselves and co-create our realities. I am an artist who works across artforms to inquire into the nature of our relationship with the world and, where appropriate, to reinvent this relationship. I use drawing and painting, sculpture, installation and new media. My practice includes intimate studio inquiry, arts research and the development of participatory art programs.

I am currently a PhD Candidate through the Sculpture Workshop at the Australian National University. My research centres on developing an understanding of the body that accounts for the overlapping of embodied conscious with its environment. This notion is called aesthetic subjectivity and I examine it through a creative practice led inquiry of my domestic environment.

Aesthetic Subjectivity: an embodied consciousness embedded in and emergent from its environment.