Introduction.
This year's project will be to explore further the relationship between the thinking self and the object world. Traditionally I have used the medium of painting to engage with a creative process of making.
I discovered last year that painting in many ways restricted my ability to engage with materials that may produce results that expose my work and practice to new discourses and more interesting dialectics that are developing within the making process.
My intrigue to further explore how we relate to the object world has grown using different materials that I engaged with last year. The use of new materials, mainly concrete, wood and steel, l has opened a whole new narrative within my practice.
Using sculpture as a possible way of expressing deeper meaning, ontological proposition, and phenomenological effect has brought my focus into the world of object orientated thought. So, this approach acts as a contrast to the constricted exactitude of my mimesis style of painting. Artist I would like to use as a reference to the direction of my practice and how that direction is signposting my developing approach to making will be:
· Rachel Whiteread
· Eva Hess
· Cerith Wyn Evens
· Steve McQueen
· Doris Salcedo
· Bruce Nauman
My research will be studying how these artist use materials in space, and if at all, what correlations exist between their work and my own in a way that opens new avenues to explore? What do their objects bring into question? How are we engaging space? What interpretations does one material lend to my developing practise over another, and what is relative within the outcomes?
What will be important in my research is making and trying ideas, learning through doing. This making process will be underpinned and contextualised by researching critical thinking within art and philosophy. How does naming artwork frame or contextualise the work?
Using thinkers works such as:
· Hal Foster, Return of the Real
· Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
· Briony Fer, Selected and various journal writings
· Karen Barad, Meet the Universe Halfway
· Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge
· Graham Harman, Object Orientated Ontology
These texts, amongst others, are the basis of a holistic approach that fuses my research from the Critical Contextual Studies module—thinking about the object in Spatio-temporal relativities. How do essential elements of an object question the qualities that make up that object and their relations to viewership and perception?
What taxonomies site these arrival points when we encounter the object and its qualitative attributes, form and features? And how does materiality play a role in reducing or adding essential qualities to the object's thingness?
Also, this year I will explore the questioning of meaning and existence as that relates to my practice.
Siting philosophy as the study of the relationship between the thought world and the object world, I will harness emerging relations between what is to hand around me and how any emerging apparatus symbolises and acts as a metaphor for other objects or meaning.
The medium I would like to explore emergent happenings within the everyday object world is film.
Again, this approach widens my ability to embody the underlying stream of thought that compels the creative process and motivates my practice.
Below are some examples of work from last year that were the result of combining ideas to materials.
