Two for Flinching is a manuscript of forty-four poems broken into three sections. The first section is centered around family and nature, the second is centered around love and relationships, and the third section is mainly poems inspired by various mythologies.

This arts-based study discusses using the horror film and monsters as a means of exploring the personification of fear in contemporary society. The paper incorporates the viewing and dissection of horror films into an artistic process to explore fears in order to further artistic expression. It additionally shows how this process can be used in an art classroom within the context of contemporary art to empower students and facilitate art criticism discussions.

This arts-based thesis will explore ethnic identity and narrative in symbolic self-portraiture as themes for a body of work. This paper will discuss how identity and narrative play an important role in the empowerment of the artist and viewer. It will also show how this can be incorporated into an art classroom engaged in multicultural learning and the study of visual culture to empower students and give them opportunities to narrate their life stories.

This thesis examines a body of contemporary Japanese films in order to unpack the various portrayals of some of Japan’s socially marginalized groups including women, alienated and rebellious youth, mentally unstable and socially withdrawn individuals, immigrants, and others who don’t adhere to the rigorous standards of social hierarchies and cultural traditions. Postmodernism provides the theoretical framework for the analysis of these films. I argue that Japanese postmodern films and their celebrations of the periphery are essential to contemporary Japan for three related reasons: These postmodern films represent sites of renewal - a positive view of the periphery; a neutral definition of the periphery as part of everyday life; and lastly, as a negative critique of an illusory meta-Japan. The intended outcome of this paper will be to find contrasting/contradictory representations of the periphery - as portrayed by Japanese filmmakers. Japan’s filmic representations of the complex social difficulties faced by the peripheral groups that exist within contemporary Japanese society can provide valuable social awareness and commentaries that are not readily found in other facets of Japanese society. / Graduate

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Though an installation, the exhibition Four Corners Gateway, examines how history and memory construct us as individuals and construct our national and personal identities and worldviews. All such constructions are ultimately fragmented and fictional. This body of work points at how ideologically formed, subjective narratives are made into ‘truths’. Connecting the personal with the public is my way of playing with history and its paradoxes. The resulting landscapes that I construct can be read as archives of fragments.

This thesis investigates, through a body of interdisciplinary artwork, the representation of the grotesque body. It examines how it might be possible to manipulate the iconography of attraction and repulsion in contemporary art with the aim of confusing the binary opposition of what signifies pleasure and disgust. Each of the three artworks function to draw the audience into a powerful and affective relationship with representations that are simultaneously appealing and revolting. Using a number of modes and techniques to disrupt the dyad, including audience interaction and the use of seductive visual forms, the work focuses on my body as a site for the development of new knowledge about the representation of the non-preferred body. By bringing together otherwise unrelated discourses such as horror and formalist abstract painting, the artwork in this study attempts to call into doubt received wisdom about the nature of beauty and ugliness. There are a lexicon of different artistic mediums explored in this project including performance, installation, video and photography. The engagement with these disciplines represents an attempt to speculate on how we know and experience the body in an increasingly mediatised world. This research is also a key means of highlighting how our understanding of the body is informed by the differing effects of timebased, photographic and performative media. By creating a series of dialogues between the live and the virtual, timebased and static imagery, and the fragmentary body and its relationship to the holistic body, this project seeks to activate in the viewer/participant, a critical self-reflexivity. I ask how it is possible to know and experience corporeality in a virtual world of digitally manipulated bodies.

This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments. The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary. I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re-alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for ‘printmaking’.

This thesis offers an interpretation of the life and work of Karl Rahner with the specific purpose of introducing and recommending him as an important source for contemporary initiatives in spiritual formation. The guiding notion through which this thesis is developed is that of a perceived ‘spirituality of silence’. This notion is explored and developed with reference to Rahner’s biography, his Ignatian spiritual roots, his first and most widely read book of prayers and his theologies of mystery, word and sacrament. Finally, the thesis facilitates an extended discussion between the dimensions of ‘spirituality of silence in Rahner’ and the contemporary spirituality of Western culture and the place and role of the church. An extended version of this summary is offered in the introductory section of the thesis proper.

The journey into theatre-made places offered here is both analytical and creative. It is comprised of case studies analysing three theatre productions that occurred in Perth between 2004 and 2006 and two of my own creative works, forming the Prologue and Conclusion to the thesis. Throughout, I am informed by Edward Casey’s philosophy of place as I work to develop both a poetics and a dramaturgy of place in theatre. I draw upon of a range of thinkers in order to interrogate the limits of theatrical representation and to suggest that an active engagement in the process of place-making in theatre offers a touchstone and paradigm that can release both thought and the body from totalizing and foreclosing cultural imperatives. This dramaturgical and poetical journey into place works, I hope, toward creating an open and dynamic field from which to experience the ‘here and now’ of being in place in theatre, and in the world. I argue that the notion of place as embodied meaning frames the body and the mind in contexts that are personal, emotional, historical, ethical, and political; that to be in place, to be aware that one’s body is a particular place, suggests that the body and mind are listening to each other. This conscious connection, I believe, offers a radical challenge to the bifurcation of body and mind that runs as a consistent theme throughout the history of Western thought. More particularly, I aim to demonstrate that a voyage into place, in theatre, conveys the body and mind together in ways that allow us to “resume the direction, and regain the depth, of our individual and collective life once again – and know it for the first time” (Casey, 1993: 314).