This project has visually explored the relationships between language, knowledge and subjectivity. Its conceptual foundations have been developed through an engagement with post-structural theory, literature and personal experience. Its visual language has been formed by adopting aspects of the theories of postproduction and relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud in tandem with early conceptual arts aesthetic of administration. The result of the project is a series of installations that focus on viewer experience and offer the possibility of developing new narratives about our relationship to language and knowledge. The installations incorporate already existing materials, cultural signs, objects and ideas associated with institutional practices of collecting, manipulating and disseminating information. The familiar language of bureaucracy has thus been used to create a network of seemingly interconnected scenarios that engage the viewer in the shifting roles of protagonist, subject, witness or voyeur. A sense of uncertainty and confusion is produced, evoking the idea of a fractured subjectivity in a state of limbo, a condition in which meaning is gained only through attempting to piece together the different narratives on offer. The nature of our relationship to language and knowledge is thus evoked through physical and psychological interaction as well as visual engagement with the work. The project's concern with language, knowledge and information systems harks back to the conceptual art movement of the1960s and to contemporary art's accompanying engagement with philosophy, in particular post-structuralism. Within this context, it has re-visited and re-assessed ideas about the role of language in defining contemporary subjectivity and has explored strategies for conveying those ideas through installation. From Kosuth to the Kabakovs, it references a broad spectrum of artists who have investigated related themes using an almost uncategorisable array of non-traditional materials, styles and strategies. The project has concluded that we are fragmented subjects in a state of limbo, our relationship to language and knowledge characterised by paradox, anxiety, complicity and challenge - and a continued search for meaning and wholeness despite their seeming absence. Ultimately, it has presented the viewer with an opening: a new network of possible narratives about language, knowledge and self. Although these narratives appear to be linked, they fail to come to a neat conclusion. Just as contemporary subjectivity is in a state of limbo, so too, are the scenarios depicted in the installations.

This research project investigates visual metaphors for aspects of the nature/ culture paradox. Modern human beings formalise nature, natural elements and natural processes by quantifying and qualifying the environment to better define themselves. A desire to comprehend and gain control over nature is expressed through the imposition of artificial systems and mathematical descriptions. However, the forces of entropy and decay are ever present. Despite attempts to suppress these physical processes, humans are necessarily bound to a common material existence. In response, attainment of a spiritual dimension is sought through cultural expression. The project explores how the nature/ culture paradox is manifested in the phenomenon of landscape design, especially formal gardens of 18th century Europe, including features such as Platonic forms, labyrinths, mazes and meanders. Particular attention is given to the work of Batty Langley. The investigation is located within an international field of artists concerned with the culture/ nature question. The enquiry considers artists who create visual representations of symbolic pathways, such as Jorgen Thordrup and Marianne Ewaldt. Land and environment art is examined with regard to concepts of order, disorder, entropy and stasis, emphasizing those artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Jurg Altherr, who contrast artificial constructions with natural settings. It also considers the appropriation of nature in a search for the sublime through the sculptural installations of Anja Gallaccio. Examination of formal garden features has informed new hybrid motifs which are developed in the work for this project. The application of these designs to the sculptural and installation mediums has involved innovative usage of materials and techniques. The development of a personal symbology to present metaphors for order and chaos/ entropy and stasis, has produced new juxtapositions of man made forms and natural elements. Exploration of the viewer's engagement with space and physical ambience, including smells, has also been an important element of the work. In addition, new methods have been developed to visualise concepts through computer generated virtual drawings and, to present the preparation and exhibition of sculptural installations through digital photography. Finally, the project considers the spiritual dimension within human culture, employing a number of universal symbols in new ways to create works, which echo both eastern and western sensibilities, for example, metaphorical methods for attainment and links between Buddhist and alchemical symbolism.

The project addresses issues of value and meaning in objects while at the same time considering more sustainable approaches to designing, making and consuming, through the reuse of already existing materials. By exploring concepts such as durability and ephemerality, the precious and the mundane, I have sought to show possibilities for reconciling the production of objects with reduced environmental effects of their production, use and disposal. This was an issue that tended to be neglected during the period of modernist design with its embracing of technology and the machine aesthetic. Since the 1960's with the emergence of designers and writers such as Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller there has been a growing concern to develop more sustainable approaches to design, and a broader consideration of meaning and engagement with objects. Some of the significant contemporary designers addressing these issues include Paolo Ulian, Hella Jongerius and Constantin and Laurene Boym. It is with reference to this field that I contextualise my practice. Through the research project I have recognised the importance of a local focus, in supporting more sustainable approaches and engagement with objects. In the process I have identified factors specific to designing with reuse materials, and have used them to guide the direction of the research. These include: material availability, perceived value of materials, time or cost required to achieve a high finish, design complexity and sophistication, and perceived value of the finished product. What has also emerged from the research is the importance of commercial considerations in designing for sustainability, as I believe economically viable objects contribute more than purely symbolic ones in influencing the perceptions and habits of designers and consumers. The project has shown that engagement with objects and sustainable approaches, when considered as integral to a design's development, can be mutually beneficial and lead to aesthetically sophisticated and highly valued objects.

This project investigates new ways to apprehend and visually reconfigure aspects of concealed or disputed pasts.' The intention of this work is to enable a viewer to experience obscured or nearly forgotten narrativesnarratives of memory, time, absence, location and representation. The works utilise found and constructed objects and techniques from the visual arts, the museum, the library, the shop, the garden. One common methodology is the arrangement of multiple objects to activate a surface optically, and encourage a viewer to read it as a means of temporarily holding the objects in place. In doing so they find themselves part of the work. These pieces are experiments in understanding how viewers can travel around an artwork and in this process move their position back and forth, flickering between past and present and personal and national memory. Most works incorporate ideas of movement or stasis either technically or in the story which they may be partially relating to the viewer. This suggestion of waiting or of motion summons a viewer to enter into the work as a timekeeper. This is an anxious position where many of the materials inviting curiosity, and initially implying the humorous, accrue a sinister edge as the viewer reaches a point of understanding his/her caged predicament within the work. For the first time all these works will be exhibited together. Showing them in different locations raised considerations of setting both spatial and conceptual - and recent works have developed that are about journeying across time and place. The investigation has emerged from very personal considerations of the place of memory, forgetting, loss, denial and the potency of the past within my own family. Artists who have explored similar terrain, visually reconfiguring the marginal or the textual, include Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Tracey Moffatt, Christian Boltanski and Fred Wilson. This project has been a journey through many stories across time. These have inevitably been incorporated into my own memory, my own life, and my own increasingly open narrative of deciphering self in the process of relating the past. Each work has been built from the outcomes of the last, and represents a claiming within a larger consideration of ways to personally invoke and involve nation, viewer and self in acknowledging our entangled histories.

The research is developed through sculptural artworks that seek to raise the question of their being. They do this through their indeterminate presence, which often awakens people to ask ‘What is it?’ I ask how sculpture can encourage people to wonder about what things are, and how the relationship/s we form with art can then lead us to reflect upon our other more worldly relationships. I also pursue the questions of what is sculpture, and what is contemporary art, in order to map out an understanding of the domain of my practice, and the issues at stake regarding the making and display of sculpture. Through a reading of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and other Continental philosophers, I have focused upon the way our (Modern Western) relationship with things in the world is problematic, and how art can help us to address some of these problems. It is through art’s poetic ambiguities that our usual determined and closed relationship with the world can be opened up to other readings. An investigation into contemporary art practices reveals several issues that put the artwork into context and shed light upon difficulties facing contemporary artists particularly in terms of: what am I to do, why should I do it and how should I proceed? My artworks are aimed at raising questions for the viewer about being, sculpture and contemporary art. I have developed the coopering technique of wooden construction to make unusually shaped wooden container-like sculptures. I have also investigated other semi-industrial working methods to construct sculptural objects that oscillate between various possibilities for the viewer. These artworks operate in the field between the familiar/unfamiliar, functional/non-functional and the known/unknown. They resist the viewer’s efforts at stilling the oscillation between possible readings and evade some of the common roles of contemporary art such as being a site for social and political dialogue or being a reflection of contemporary/pop/consumer culture. This project contributes to the dialogue already in play between several Post-Minimal sculptors whose work touches upon constructed and or manufactured ambiguous forms. It further develops the language of how to discuss these issues through my philosophical readings. It extends the coopering technique beyond the simple cask form to discover the technical possibilities for this method of construction. It brings to the gallery visitor an actual experience of what Heidegger writes about art, particularly in terms of his ideas about ‘the truth of being as revealing/concealing’. The research also develops our understanding of the nature of contemporary art through questioning several aspects of it and through adopting outmoded and laborious methods of making that are at odds with our digital age. The artworks are the result of working toward a position of indeterminacy that is alluring, by partially resisting the viewer’s efforts to know them.

behold, be still illuminates my predilection, that of a portrait photographer, which is driven by a fascination with viewing and collecting the ‘other’, the male, now extending into this suite of still moving portraits. Through this act and in my art practice, I uncover the vulnerabilities, both for myself and for my subjects, as they are offered for scrutiny on screen to become ‘public’, unlike their previous position in my photographic archive, which is private. I reveal for the first time my pathology in the drive to collect surrogates and stand-ins, to console the loss and give solace for the absence of one- revealing a latent scopophilia. Photography histories, specifically portraiture, and the moving image are discussed, focusing on the binaries of the medium/s, their reflective and reflexive qualities, and their inherent ability to reveal and conceal. My visual inquiry is an expansion to experiencing the portrait by presenting the sitters as close to ‘themselves’ via the medium of high definition video portraits. I expel the implications of women looking at men, and review the work of both significant and historical feminine influences and contemporary women artists positioned and working in this territory and who employ both film and photography. I highlight Victorian women and the melancholic age, where photography is deeply embedded, tracing the origins and lineage to my current work. I seek to define and locate the notion of a beautiful masculine, investigating what it is to view, receive, and collect between the axis of photography and video via the intimate exchange and operatives of my gendered and privileged gaze. The success is determined by the tension between these two machines and resulting portraits, as the act in sitting for a portrait with the technology of today, renders a more ‘accurate’ portrayal. From this the moving portrait completes the desire and an opportunity to obtain and possess the beloved after their absence. Crucial issues become apparent as I examine the imprint of the real in the photograph, the camera as a surrogate for myself, and the passive yet consensual subject.

The Empty Portrait forefronts a new experience of the portrait for all participants involved: the photographer, the subject, and the viewer. Breaking away from the camera, the materiality of the photograph, and the portrait as a locus of identity are central aspects of this new experience. As it challenges the relationship between photography and temporality, The Empty Portrait attempts to blur the boundary between the photographic and cinematic image, asking the viewer to look and contemplate further.

This study arises out of the researcher’s experience in the fields of costume and fashion. It develops, through design practice and reflection, a design process for fashion wear made from post-consumer recycled materials. Theoretical analysis provides global, historical, philosophical and design contexts within which to develop an ethos for this variant form of fashion wear designated ReFashion. Differences in design process between conventional fashion and ReFashion are detailed to highlight the significance of provenance of materials in the light of a perceived need to slow down clothing production and consumption. This perception is informed by scientific predictions that failure to engage with urgently needed changes to the prevalent economic paradigm will result in planet earth reaching a tipping point with potentially disastrous results for its inhabitants. Fundamental to the ReFashion ethos is preparedness for a speculative post-apocalyptic future that might render the fashion system unable to operate as it currently does, necessitating a more self-sufficient approach to clothing needs, with an accompanying shift in perceptions of what is deemed fashionable. The theme Survivalist Fantasy provides a lens to bring conceptual and material aspects of the work into focus. Informed by sustainability, Survivalist Fantasy recontextualises a failure of sustainable initiatives on a global scale and their adaptation on a local scale specifically in the arena of clothing.

This project contemplates where New Zealanders will turn to in the future for resonating, identity-based design, and explores two potential scenarios. The first scenario questions whether existing ‘classic’ motifs – currently enjoying pride of place on national identity T-shirts and accessories, and commonly used over the last century within the tourist souvenir industry – will still be relevant, and still resonate, if used in different ways. The second scenario questions whether a new round of more obscure, overlooked, ‘lower case’ and everyday domestic artefacts and experiences will resonate with New Zealanders. This project sets out to ‘craft nostalgic resonance’, through conceptual recycling from my own biography, in order to connect with viewers through personal recognition located within their own biography. It draws from experiences and artefacts specific and personal yet at the same time, inevitably, part of a larger collective story, in the creation of a new range of identity-based souvenirs for New Zealanders. The resulting body of work, and its successful public dissemination, proves that it is possible to craft nostalgic resonance through conceptual recycling, and that this approach could be extended to both a wider range of original artefacts and experiences, and a wider range of souvenir products in the future.

As an expressive language, fashion design has an innate capacity to engage a full gamut of sensorial responses. This research explores the contribution of synaesthesia to fashion design in an effort to highlight the positive aesthetic and intellectual impact of this integration. Such research advances my creative practice. The method of realising garments which address synaesthetic principles is an extension of personal interest in synaesthesia, driven from both an experiential perspective and a desire to gain a greater understanding into theories in relation to challenging the senses in a contemporary fashion world. If fashion includes novelty as a crucial and desirable aspect, and can be defined as an ever evolving and self rejuvenating art form, then the energy and frivolity of these components in association with multiple sensory stimuli and response will expose the consequence of the study through design-work. Recognition of the importance of sensory cross-overs in fashion design will reveal the quintessence of how humans position themselves and respond to a specific environment. If realisation of the senses is with regard to surroundings, and fashion becomes the surrounding which elicits multiple involuntary responses from stimuli, a conscious recognition has begun. Traditional theories on the organisation of sense modalities speculate that humans perceive their world with five senses, the most dominant generally being sight. The combined effect of these senses creates the environment in which we inhabit. The visual and tactile senses have long been the focus of the fashion product but, of all the senses, touch is most key to our species (Ackerman, 1990). Sound, taste and smell have been under-recognised as providers of ceaseless information about our environment. The investigation into the notion that fashion and other sensory systems are not separate entities assists with establishing the links between sensory integration and fashion design. The emergence of the synaesthetic paradigm has highlighted a unity between the senses rather than the traditional hierarchy of favouring the visual. The research on synaesthesia relative to fashion design occupies a parallel position to neurological theory and allows synaesthetic investigation to be a pivotal determining factor towards my outcome. I have engaged in critical self-reflection of my design process and production as a means of elucidating stimuli associated with multi-sensory perception.