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This research examines landscape, explored within my own practice and within visual art practices since the 1960s, as sight (representation/mediation) and site (material). The aim of the research is to contribute to enriched ecological ontologies that further the development of a spatialised ecological politics. Two interlinked questions guide the research: 1) How can a situated art practice contribute an alternative aesthetic and material approach to contemporary debates on the environmental impact of new technologies? 2) Can landscape, as representation and material within art, offer critical significance in examining conditions of power in late capitalism? Adopting a transdisciplinary theoretical methodology rooted in the studio practice of assemblage the research focuses on spatial and temporal imaginings that enable alternative social-aesthetic-material formations to emerge. The chapters are organised around a series of landscape tropes - Tropical, Desert, Glacial and Atmosphere – each exploring the movements between the material and metaphorical meanings of space. The speculative fictions of J.G.Ballard are deployed alongside Paul Virilio’s concepts of “grey” ecology and “dromospheric pollution,” extending ecological debates to include the temporal and planetary impacts of new technologies. The thesis proposes that thinking “grey” ecology with and through visual art practices allows new spatial and material imaginaries to form. These newly assembled landscapes operate along a natural-technological continuum, able to incorporate the radically artificial environment that has emerged into visibility in the Anthropocene. The research argues that attending to the visual-material dialectic of landscape as sight/site reveals a situated geopolitics of knowledge production that is essential to the shaping of any post-anthropocentric ecological politics. Speculative spatial and temporal imaginaries are re-tethered to political possibilities for the human through acknowledgement of shared environments that are more-than human.

This thesis provides a history of early modern birth figures: images of the fetus in the disembodied uterus, printed in midwifery and surgical books, which describe the variety of fetal presentations. While these images have accompanied midwifery and gynaecological texts from before the invention of print in Europe, and up to the present day, they have been widely ignored or under-valued by historians and art historians. This thesis analyses printed birth figures produced in England and other western European countries between 1540 and 1774, and argues that they are a crucial and unique resource for understanding the visual culture, midwifery history and body culture of the period. Employing methodologies from social and medical history, material studies and art history, I address the different ways in which these images represented and shaped understandings of the body. Considering their engagement with anatomical, analogical, diagrammatic, religious, magical, symbolic and political iconographies, this thesis shows how widely relevant and influential birth figures were to early modern culture. As well as employing birth figures as a historical resource, it also demonstrates how they can be productively analysed as works of art in their own right, with their own history. I argue that artists and engravers, as well as commissioning authors, brought their expertise, understanding, anxieties and preoccupations to the production of these images. Beyond providing a properly contextualised, historically sensitive and wide-ranging history of this particular kind of image, this thesis also aims to make a wider argument for the ways in which histories of typically neglected images – small, cheap, anonymous prints, book illustrations, and technical and medical images – can be fruitfully written.

The existing body of psychoanalytic literature relating to the process of making visual art does not include formal studies of first-hand reports from contemporary artists. This thesis addresses that gap through the creation of a new series of artworks and through a qualitative study of artists’ accounts of the states of mind they experience as they work. It aims to provide new evidence relating to the artist’s creative process and to question the extent to which psychoanalytic theory in the Winnicottian tradition can account for artists’ experiences. My methodology was two-fold: I kept a written record of my own states of mind as I created six video, installation and animation artworks; I also conducted thirty in-depth interviews with professional fine artists. The testimony of the artists and myself was interrogated using psychoanalytic theory from the Winnicottian and British Object Relations tradition. Winnicottian theory was chosen because it offers a particular understanding of the inter-relationship between inner and outer worlds and the thesis considers the artist’s process in these terms. Drawing on Winnicottian theory, the thesis presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’ and the spaces between. The research reveals aspects of artists’ experiences that are not fully accounted for by the existing literature. To address these gaps, the thesis proposes the introduction of several new terms: ‘pre-sense’ for an as-yet undefined first intimation of the possibility of a new artwork relating to a particular aspect of the outside world; ‘internal frame’ for a space within the artist’s mind, specific to a particular medium, which the artist ‘enters’ when starting work; and ‘extended self’ and ‘observer self’ for two co-existent self-states that constitute the artist’s working state of mind.

This research project addresses the struggle to encounter and see others, and otherness, beyond preconceptions. Through my art practice I experiment with methods that aim to implicate the viewer in acts of ‘unlearning.’ These acts intend to provoke the desire to see beyond what has been seen and known before. I experiment with the printing processes of photographs and hybrid printmaking techniques, video, abstract concepts of drawing lines and text works in order to highlight the ambiguity in language and to create sites for ‘unlearning.’ My methodology developed from the German verb ‘verlernen,’ that translates to unlearning or forgetting in English. This verb contains within its meaning an action that is both passive and active. In my practice, it also emphasises the desire for a process that must be constantly at work. Experimenting with methods of erasure, I search landscape and language for moments of misidentification and misreading that offer generative ways to challenge the single reading of images and words. Through encountering sites in the UK, Germany, Israel and Palestine, as well as the material sites of making, I explore cultural and political narratives and my own biography. The encounters with these sites complicate the different rights and limitations applied to citizens, immigrants and refugees, and question what methods of identification are at play and whether they manifest themselves in the landscape. These encounters confront me with the ambiguity of the law and my national identity when meeting military forces and people who inhabit the landscape, as they both engage in acts of surveillance. These boundaries between different civil and national identities blur further through the collapse of dichotomies such as hospitality and hostility, poetics and violence and access and restrictions. The artworks I create allow for pauses or gaps that aim to challenge these positions and dichotomies.