I began on the doctorate programme as a mid-career artist at a point when I wanted to review my past practice and reflect on what I believe to be the main and recurring themes in my work. Through this process my intention was to consider and plan the direction of my work more effectively. My solo exhibition, Beautiful Trophies had just opened at Edinburgh Printmakers the same month I started the DFA programme. This was a great opportunity to evaluate and reflect on a recent body of work, to question where I was and where I wanted to go. I considered which pieces were more successful and how I could best develop the work further. The installation work, which I created for Beautiful Trophies, using wallpaper and video was for me a new development in my practice (Appendix Fig. 1 & 2, p. 78). This opened up possibilities as to how future works could be presented. I wanted to consider the entire wall or all of the space and how I could incorporate images within it. My intention then was to explore the relationship between my video works and works on paper further. I also intended to increase the scale of my artwork, to maximize the physical impact of the work within the space. A period of experimentation would follow. Early on in the programme I made the decision to record my tutorials and seminars. This data has been a fantastic source for recall and has helped me to further define elements within my practice. At this point I had identified key elements that were important to the making of my work. These were repetition, appropriation, memory and re-enactment. The elements that I identified as important to the subject matter in my work were mortality, fragility and lament, (the human condition). These elements remain relevant to my creative practice and theoretical research. My interest lies in specific individuals and communities, their changing states and how this impacts on personal lives and histories. I question what is lost and what remains. Through the work there is a tendency to take something remote from the past whether imagery or cultural traditions and bring it to my own space, making something almost lost visible again. My interest in how artists including myself, appropriate images and objects continues to be important to my ongoing research. I began to examine the process of re-enactment in my practice, reflecting on works that I had made in order to re-enact something I had seen. I identified this approach as a vehicle for me to experience the subject on a physical and personal level. There certainly seems to be a need for me to experience something before translating it into a piece of work; I undergo an experience in order to speak about something. I considered how repetition plays a part in the making of my and other artists work. Repetition of ideas and or actions is a way of making memory stronger.

The practice-led research was concerned with the development of the combination of high relief prints and the creation of different shades of printmaking inks through heat. The research was in the proportion of 60% practice and 40% theory. To locate this research within contemporary practice, the study began with the literature review and consideration was given to the work of artists, who use heat in their work. The literature review also investigated embossed patterns and relief techniques including the work of artists who produce imagery through pronounced relief. Existing colour systems were reviewed and these assisted a framework for correlating the colour samples that were modified through the application of heat to printing ink. This review demonstrated that there was no compelling evidence to suggest that artists had seriously taken into account the connection between heat, colour and relief pattern. Studio research consisted of a series of studies that explored the potential of heat and its facility to change the effect of printmaking inks. In this research, temperature, variation and duration were all recorded. Research also examined the ability of heat to relax and release paper fibres under pressure thereby achieving extremes of positive and negative relief, as well as embossed and textured surfaces. This was done by exploring different methods of pressing paper under heat to form and print a variety of high relief, involving concave and convex forms. The research also examined punctured paper, tears, and embossed holes and examined how the fragmentation of paper fibres could be enhanced through heat. The research culminated in the making of a series of full scale prints that demonstrate the use of heat and its ability to enable high relief prints and subtle changes of colour. The research concluded with an examination exhibition and a written dissertation.

This research considers the ways in which digital, networked technologies influence contemporary everyday life and creative practice. Through studio practice and writing, I ask how a contemporary condition of everyday life, characterised by the suppression of distance in speed of communication and the ubiquitous presence of surveillant apparatuses, affects the way we understand and use the image. I also consider the role of the digital image in both destabilizing and reinforcing human agency. In the past, tactical creativity was protected by a level of invisibility from the vision of authority, as described by Michel de Certeau. With the the spread of networked technologies, that invisibility is no longer possible. I take Vilem Flusser’s methodology of ‘playing against the camera’—a recipe for overcoming of the functionalist relationship between human and image technology—as a possible model for establishing my own and identifying other artists’ practices as tactics of visibility. I seek to develop a material consciousness of the digital image based on ontologies that assert the materiality of its processes and effects. In studio work, I blend manual and digital techniques for image-making in order to expose the structure of the digital image. I attempt the work of the apparatus outside the apparatus, by performing digital processes by hand, creating a model of difference and refining a physical sense of the disparity between human and computer scales through the reassertion of the body in a process of making. Using Kendall Walton’s notio of photographic transparency, I make an argument for the affective potency of the ‘poor image’, evidenced in artwork and mass media, as inseparable from its materiality. I fictionalize aspects of this transparency, depicting an impossible reality and allowing me to model present anxieties stemming from the rise of digital image production. I find that transparency and the instantaneity of the digital network are responsible in part for the obfuscation of digital materiality, as well as a confused sense of spatial relationships and personal interconnection. Image quality is politicized by connotations of credibility or agenda as it bends to the need for ever-faster communications. Though certain characteristics of the digital image encourage or sustain an ignorance with regard to its materiality, these characteristics can also be exploited to foreground materiality in art practice that aligns itself with the spirit and purpose, if not the invisibility, of de Certeau’s tactics, and the critical methods of resistance to a programme of technology suggested by Flusser.