Cutting choreography : redefining dance on screen

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Portrait of Albert Tucker, 1914-1960

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Women's silence : in the space of words and images

My thesis is made up of words and images. This study investigates the way in which silence operates productively within and between the two modes of communication. I suggest that in the process of changing words into images or scripto-visual art-practice, the silence in women's lives can be articulated. I argue that women draw on the generative qualities of silence to create forms of speech that override the cultural constructions of gender which have placed them within the space of ‘mute’ silence. To gain an historical perspective of this practice by women, I consider the lives of medieval nuns within religious enclosure and their work with words and images in the illuminated manuscript. I make a comparative study of original illuminated manuscripts, focussing mainly on visual language and locating aspects of the work closest to my own art-practice: the visual treatment of the space and inter-textual components of the page or folio. This project does not include an examination of miniatures or historiated initials. Rather, its aim is to identify and compare the use of other aesthetic devices available to the medieval scribe/artist through which they might have interacted with the text. I suggest links between verbal and visual performances of language and the repetition, or copying of texts by medieval nuns, as a means of female embodiment of words and their spaces. From the outcomes of my studio investigations and my consideration of other contemporary feminist art practices, I demonstrate how women artists may ‘re-write’ the text and ‘speak’ their silence through visual language and the acts of writing, drawing and painting the words of others. Through my engagement with feminist critical theory, the work of medieval scholars, original illuminated manuscripts and my studio research, I propose that scripto-visual practice remains particularly significant for women despite the differences between the medieval period and our own. As a generative practice, it negotiates some of the societal constraints on women's speech and visibility, because its language is ‘silent and disembodied’ from the image of woman constructed by male discourse. It is a form of speech that acknowledges as it defies the social and cultural conditions that shaped its necessity, articulating an alternative voice of women in the space of words and images.

Painting that moves : digital realism and the single moving image

Explores space and object relations in a digital 3-D animation production, "Moving-Image". The exegesis examines these relations through an analysis of pictorial realism in painting. The illusion of three dimensional forms in the space of the computer screen is contextualised by investigation of the work's underlying digital conditions.

Photography towards painting : the techniques of large contact negatives

Investigates the relationship between painting and photography, with a special focus on techniques using large contact negatives and digital applications. The thesis is comprised of a written exegesis that contextualises and informs upon an exhibition of photographic and digital inkjet montages. It discusses the theoretical and structural issues underpinning the conceptual basis of the research and elaborates upon the applications and processes involved in producing each exhibited image.

After-life of modernist abstraction

An investigation of the consequences of pluralism for abstract painting. A central theme examines the possibilities for contemporary abstraction to question its own condition and history. The theoretical model of after-life forms facillitates an understanding of modes of abstraction which recombine unresolved, syncretic forms and address domains excluded by modernism.

House for Heraclitus

Notions of Australian identity are still being constructed. In landscape painting, problematic differences of possession, ownership, spirituality and ethnicity are frequently highlighted against perceptions of what landscape looks like and how we might begin to imagine our relationships to where we live. This thesis has explored strategies employed in landscape construction. It has involved establishing connections between landscape painting and alternate disciplines that investigate landscape values, many of which aspire to the successful habitation of our environments into the future.

Kai Tai Chan

Analyses the work of choreographer and director Kai Tai Chan whose different pathway through dance and theatre opens up discourses about the nature of non-ballet concert dance in Australia. Orthodox paradigms of training and performance making are interrogated and a greater understanding of the relative nature of those practices is established by analysing the competing ideologies, philosophical frameworks and aesthetic understandings of these practitioners.

My story, your story

This study focuses on the narratives present in the performance of contemporary dance. Conducted through practice and theory, five choreographic works were made and analysed by the researcher to reveal three narrative modes: Surface narratives or stories, narratives affecting choreographic structure and narratives of history and experience embodied by performers.

The idiosyncratic movement potential of the dancer's subject body in the work "Deep map"

An investigation into choreographic processes employed within contemporary modern dance. This involved the exploration of working methods used in the making of "Deep map" nos.1, 2 & 3, presented in Melbourne from 1997-2000. The focus of that method was the placement of the dancer as 'subject' whilst maintaining the role of the choreographer as 'auteur'.

Return to the mother : male surrealists - female bodies

The exegesis examines Surrealist writing and visual art, arguing that the Surrealists assumed the patriarchal role of the mythological hero whose subjective quest was to return to, and conquer, the Mother. The other part of the thesis is an exhibition which parodies and plays alongside Surrealist ideologies.

Tuning fork: Shopfront

The audience of this performance got to view actions and installations building and evolving over time, and a projected time-lapse video.
In this iteration of Tuning Fork, James Cunningham & Joncli Keane continue the development of their two pronged approach to finding the watering hole of stillness and action, collabora tion and orientation.Originating from a showing in the Bell Tower II series, in the Judy's new Shopfrontspaoe, Tuning Fork will Fuks accentuate the durational aspect of movement through time-lapse video, heighten the trans formative potential of objects using three-metre long carbon rods as instruments of sense, sound and support and alter the space through the numerous tape measures which take on a life of their own. James Cunningham and Jondi Keane inhabit the Shopfront from Friday 7 November, eJqJioring, measuring, filming and projecting, in order to fine tune their interactions for the performance season commencing 19 November.

The Sydney front recalled

This chapter provides a critical account of the Sydney Front performance group's 1987 production of John Laws/Sade.