The Viral Sublime exposes a symbiosis between oil paint(ing), virology, and contemporary concepts of the sublime. It explores how the sublime is portrayed by the dual identity of viruses as both malevolent and beneficial in regenerative medicine and genomic science. My painting embodies my imaginative relationship with being in the world knowing that my body is shared with an unwanted virus that has the potential to destroy or possibly save me. To convey my sense of being in a viral world, my painting takes the form of viral landscapes in which oil paint is treated as having some characteristics inherent to viruses, in the ways in which oil paint behaves on a substrate. In fostering these viral dimensions of oil paint in my paintings, an homologous relationship between oil paint and viruses is demonstrated. Meeting with scientists and managing the medical intervention necessary, virology and genomics have become sources of inspiration in relation to the regenerative potential of the sublime. The Viral Sublime is not designed to provide answers, but to question whether it is through the gaze of technology, medicine or science that postmodern ideas of the sublime continue to thrive. Since Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, artists have conceived the sublime as a distinctive aesthetic category that is magnificent but overwhelming, awe-inspiring but terrifying, dangerous and life threatening (Burke, 1757). My lifelong experience of dealing with forces unseen to the naked eye has motivated the contextualisation of my practice within the art histories of invisible energies and virology. Drawing upon Burke and Immanuel Kant’s theories, and postmodern concepts of the sublime within contemporary art, the terrifying and overwhelming power of the contemporary sublime in the form of viruses is explored in my painting. As genomic medicine opens the doors to personalised medicine, one of many objectives is to expand the dialogue between science, medicine and art to initiate change in society’s perceptions of disease, particularly viruses. I propose the Viral Sublime as a new category and extension to knowledge within the canon of art history surrounding the concept of the sublime.

This practice led research investigates the relationship between cycling and abstract painting. It is a written commentary presented alongside my artwork that gives voice to my studio practice. The history of abstraction and cycling are explored to discuss the myths and nuances of painterly practice, cycling and the studio. The text is an assemblage or collage, put together to represent the modality of interests in the studio and an exploration of key motivations that have driven my practice during this research. There are chronological and parallel developments in the history of Modernist painting and the history of cycling, I will use these to illuminate my relationship to painting and explore the mechanics of the studio. The fact that cycling and painting are both caught up in their own histories is evidenced and also how at certain moments these histories have intertwined and overlapped, such as, in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Jarry. I have produced a text that is intended to reflect the complexities and impossibilities of explaining an intuitive, visually driven studio practice. It seeks to examine and present key relationships within my painting and the studio in order to extend my knowledge and the vocabulary of my making. The writing touches on the not always immediately apparent connection between my work and those things that populate the studio, I am interested here in the coincidences, references and happenchance that enable and nourish my work in the studio. I discuss first hand meetings between myself and other artists, how work is sustained through studio visits and discussion. I investigate the placement and logic of references and how they function. I am interested in how past historical works enable, inform and develop artwork, these precedents are explored here to gain insight into practice. I consider the role of abstraction in my practice, what it means and how the idea of non-figurative painting is negotiated by myself and others. The history of painting and the work of other artists leave a trace in my studio, a catalogue of references, which allow me to navigate my paintings and give them context. This is in no way a definitive history of abstraction but an attempt to map a personal dialogue, implied by the paintings and suggested by theoretical writings and the curatorial landscape of contemporary painting in London. The reflection on paintings’ past is to be focused on the early and mid-twentieth century traditions of abstraction and its persistence in the post-conceptual art landscape of contemporary artistic practice and current painting. I do envisage this as an attempt to address the specific and historical problems of painting, in particular the contested and shifting position of abstraction. I decided to research abstract painting because it is the domain in which my own practice situates itself, but it also allows me to direct my historical study towards a particular period of painting and pick up on a current dialogue on the reach of modernist practice and the contemporary place of abstraction. In order to do this I will use the somewhat disparate voices that are the key texts that have informed and become my influences in the studio. The texts of Jean Luc Nancy, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Roland Barthes have been a constant presence throughout this research and have provided a framework for this writing. The relevance, pertinence and necessity of these writings have not always been immediately apparent, their relationship to the vocabulary of a painting sometimes oblique. I have appropriated the Wittgenstein’s text Zettel, a post-humously published series of numbered fragments and quoted them here to enable me to respond to them and use Wittgenstein’s language of visual depiction (to explore philosophical thought) to give a structure to my reflections on painting. Jean Luc Nancy’s writing has allowed me to place texts together that are both attracting and repelling, pleasing and repulsing, hoping to find a traction between them and to draw out invisible, previously untraced lines between what concerns my practice and my writing. I take from Nancy the idea of presence in terms of painting and how might this be considered, that text and painting both present something, have presence. Nancy is instructional for shedding light on my thinking about text and image, to assist the discussion, to develop the relationship, to signal ideas about painting and writing. The text explores image, the image therefore captures the text. In this research I consider moments of cyclings past, in order to explore the way in which cycling might describe ways of being. A way of describing movement and existing, of going beyond or outside of oneself, exceeding. So cycling, as discussed here, is often the negotiation of a climb, the assent, the rise, moments where the essence of the race is found; altitude, height, the peak. Nancy speaks of the intimately mingled relationship between form and intensity, that intensity animates form. And so to interpret, to understand and to position my thinking about painting, cycling has been useful and insightful. In Hubert Damisch’s discussion on the tradition of Chinese painting there is the opportunity to think outside of a Western Tradition about how to animate the field of a painting. Considered here is the idea of painting made up of limits, paths and journeys. The order in which the development of an image might be traced, how a brush might journey through a work. The flesh and bone of a work are discussed through a meditation and reflection on the relationship of brush to ink. In Chinese painting the pictorial field and its orientation are, says Damisch, given priority over delineation. But this kind of delineation is not set up to separate or isolate the fields of the painting but to open up a relationship of opposites and allow a dialectical relationship to occur across the painting. A pivotal part of this research, is the reading of Zettel by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which allowed me to respond to my practice as a thread of connected but unrelated ideas. A discussion on how a text might explore and reflect the content in my work but also the continuity or discontinuity of approaches in my thinking about painting. Visually specific and descriptive Zettel connected to my paintings with its open and abstract propositions. The question of intention, connectivity and meaning are brought up by these writings and help to establish a pattern for a series of responses to my own painting and reflections on practice. The quotes I use are part of a posthumously published, fragmented collection, open-ended, they are descriptions of ideas that conjure visual pictures and enable me to respond with a collection of ideas on practice. The writings were found clipped together, somewhat ordered and boxed. Are they random? What interested me about this is that they ask questions about arrangement, for my work and this writing. And so, this allows me to touch on the openness of my practice and the question of refinement and resolution that the painting presents. I discuss how Modernist painterly abstraction and in particular how the writing of this period sought to resist depiction and mimicry. Placement is suggested by my reading and revealed in the arrangement of these writings and how they are placed or collaged together. The possibility of leaving something unsaid is explored here and considered alongside the impossibility of description when discussing painterly abstraction. The associations or representations about practice are oblique, lateral and sometimes silent. I have sought an open interpretation to these writings, suggested by my practice. The relationship between the text and painting affirm a language that is an attempt at equivalence, seeking to engage the impossibility of writing about painting, within the text.

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‘Altermodern Painting’ is a study which uses representational painting practice to interrogate experiential aspects of altermodernity. Considering processes of spatialisation, the development of network forms and the manner in which they are encountered and interconnected, it looks toward a new method of representational painting in the context of the altermodern space of flows. First published in 1992, Marc Augé’s Non-­‐places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity examines the transitional, functional, and anonymising global places cited as becoming increasingly prolific in the late twentieth century. Seventeen years later, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Commonwealth, 2009) and Nicolas Bourriaud (Altermodern, 2009) articulate the altermodern as an ‘other’ modernism suited to describing a developed twenty-­‐first century sense of global interconnectedness. In order to better articulate this complex term of the altermodern, it is necessary to engage with questions of space offered by contemporary networks. The spatial forms of the line, the intersection of lines and the point of intersection, stem from Marc Augé’s consideration of anthropological place, and are employed as thematic elements in this study. These elements are closely connected to movement and transition, and are utilised to order the collections of paintings and textual investigations which unpack the tenets of the altermodern. ‘Altermodern Painting’ draws upon terminology relating to movement and spatial processes to investigate individual positioning within, and movement through, contemporary networked spaces. Discussion of the altermodern takes into account continued advancements within communication, global travel and interactions with a virtual apparatus. This study also proposes that Augé’s positioning of the ‘non-­‐place’ can be examined with reference to the network to better articulate ‘ground level’ conditions of altermodern experience. This study encompasses aspects of spatial practices, movements within a virtual apparatus and the use of the informational network within the context of an increasingly flowing and malleable environment readily available to individuals. Representational painting practice is employed as a method to unpack crucial component parts of altermodern discourse; the experience of the network, the non-­‐place and the fragment. This research project is presented as a combination of practice and text. Early textual sections focus on examining the theoretical basis of the altermodern with reference to spatialisation processes. Consideration then moves to the ways in which the network, the non-­‐place, the fragment and the process of creating a contemporary personal archive, are usefully connected to altermodern experience. The visual projects, titled in this volume as Bridging Sections, are introduced in the text and then visual documentation of each distinct body of work is included. The documentations of the practice-­‐based research are positioned to be read as visualisations of the themes of the text, and also as investigations which further the research process. ‘Altermodern Painting’ considers how an artist, specialising in representational painting, can create works which reflect on the contemporary blending of user-­‐centric physical and virtual experiences which characterise an emerging altermodern ground level. It also shows how the development of such visual practice serves to develop comprehension of the altermodern as a central term within contemporary practice and research.

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Compared to other avant-gardes of modernism the detailed analysis of what has come to be known as the 'St Ives School' is still in its infancy, and lags behind the detailed attention lavished on modernisms in Paris, New York and other western capitals. Most publications about St Ives are by English non-academic agents: The Tate, and popularist writers. Both groups are entrenched to varying degrees in monographic writing that privileges and enhances the masculine myth of the (male) artist as genius. This thesis examines the means and modes that brought about masculine reputation construction and aims to deconstruct much of its assumptions. The First chapter examines the textual evaluative procedures that predominate in art historical writing; the second chapter describes, analyses and deconstructs the 1985 exhibition at the Tate Gallery London, as an event that established the myth and canon of the so-called school of St Ives. Chapters three and four focus on two women painters Margaret Mellis and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham that I argue have been expunged from the school. Both chapters address two consecutive issues: first the artistic milieu, or artworld the artists were involved in, second - their artistic output. This thesis does not present a survey of any kind, instead it aims to render the dominant narrative unstable, and to open up gaps for my intervention so as to redress the imbalances rooted within this topic and question some of its assumptions, mainly in relation to women painters. I have used Bourdieu's notion of habitus both as an overall structuring principle and as a methodological tool in linking the societal and individual so as to expose the gendered imbalance of appraisal in both domains of structure and artistic subjectivity. 1

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