This exegesis speaks to the body of work constructed over three years between February 2004 and April 2007, assembled and exhibited at the Lismore Regional Gallery in May 2007 under the title A Farewell To Meat: Rendering Ambivalence and Transgression. Written concurrently with the production of the paintings, this writing maps the literature surveyed and documents the studio research undertaken.This research consisted of collecting imagery from a wide range of sites and allowing it to trigger abductive pictorial responses. Erupting from this collecting process, social texts such as TV and radio news, cultural texts such as cinema and literature, and the subtext formed by my own dreams and nightmares were conflated to become a kind of mythology that informs the paintings and artist books in the exhibition. My studio research on one level, became a kind of phenomenological investigation that probed and responded to a media saturated consumer culture, whilst on another level, it seeks to facilitate the injection of an element of cognitive dissonance back into this culture.The resultant creative output utilises the efficacy of the image and the subversive power of metaphor to engage with several interconnected themes. These range from the dialectic of truth and illusion in the painted space, to power relations, marginalisation and the possibility of finding holes in that maze without exits we call ‘capitalism’. An ostensibly atavistic utilisation of figuration and oil paint is intended as a lucid rebuttal of 20th Century/modernist notions of minimalism and the so-called ‘end of painting’. The relationship within the paintings between the medium and the message (the paint and the illusion) seeks to operate like the drapery found in paintings from the Baroque era that antinomically both reveals and conceals the forms beneath it. This scopic contradiction serves as an anamorphosistic mirror which, in my own work, highlights the subterfuge and legerdemain currently operating behind the veil constituted by technology and contemporary mass culture.The goofy, cartoon-like nature of the paintings and the aleatory strategies deployed in their construction, bear witness to the profundity of play in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. The artist books articulate more fully the innovative nature of the research and complement the paintings in a way that adds the dynamic of a digital dimension to the more traditional methods of oil painting on canvas.As a crassly instrumental reason insists on tightening its grip on human affairs, everywhere emphasising efficiency over playfulness, and as coercive structures of order continue to reduce my ontic options to an ever-diminishing range of superlatively insipid and uninteresting purchasing ‘choices’, the capacity for play, for ridiculousness, for absurdity, noise and laziness, for me, became symbolically central.

This exegesis speaks to the body of work constructed over three years between February 2004 and April 2007, assembled and exhibited at the Lismore Regional Gallery in May 2007 under the title A Farewell To Meat: Rendering Ambivalence and Transgression. Written concurrently with the production of the paintings, this writing maps the literature surveyed and documents the studio research undertaken.This research consisted of collecting imagery from a wide range of sites and allowing it to trigger abductive pictorial responses. Erupting from this collecting process, social texts such as TV and radio news, cultural texts such as cinema and literature, and the subtext formed by my own dreams and nightmares were conflated to become a kind of mythology that informs the paintings and artist books in the exhibition. My studio research on one level, became a kind of phenomenological investigation that probed and responded to a media saturated consumer culture, whilst on another level, it seeks to facilitate the injection of an element of cognitive dissonance back into this culture.The resultant creative output utilises the efficacy of the image and the subversive power of metaphor to engage with several interconnected themes. These range from the dialectic of truth and illusion in the painted space, to power relations, marginalisation and the possibility of finding holes in that maze without exits we call ‘capitalism’. An ostensibly atavistic utilisation of figuration and oil paint is intended as a lucid rebuttal of 20th Century/modernist notions of minimalism and the so-called ‘end of painting’. The relationship within the paintings between the medium and the message (the paint and the illusion) seeks to operate like the drapery found in paintings from the Baroque era that antinomically both reveals and conceals the forms beneath it. This scopic contradiction serves as an anamorphosistic mirror which, in my own work, highlights the subterfuge and legerdemain currently operating behind the veil constituted by technology and contemporary mass culture.The goofy, cartoon-like nature of the paintings and the aleatory strategies deployed in their construction, bear witness to the profundity of play in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. The artist books articulate more fully the innovative nature of the research and complement the paintings in a way that adds the dynamic of a digital dimension to the more traditional methods of oil painting on canvas.As a crassly instrumental reason insists on tightening its grip on human affairs, everywhere emphasising efficiency over playfulness, and as coercive structures of order continue to reduce my ontic options to an ever-diminishing range of superlatively insipid and uninteresting purchasing ‘choices’, the capacity for play, for ridiculousness, for absurdity, noise and laziness, for me, became symbolically central.

This exegesis speaks to the body of work constructed over three years between February 2004 and April 2007, assembled and exhibited at the Lismore Regional Gallery in May 2007 under the title A Farewell To Meat: Rendering Ambivalence and Transgression. Written concurrently with the production of the paintings, this writing maps the literature surveyed and documents the studio research undertaken.This research consisted of collecting imagery from a wide range of sites and allowing it to trigger abductive pictorial responses. Erupting from this collecting process, social texts such as TV and radio news, cultural texts such as cinema and literature, and the subtext formed by my own dreams and nightmares were conflated to become a kind of mythology that informs the paintings and artist books in the exhibition. My studio research on one level, became a kind of phenomenological investigation that probed and responded to a media saturated consumer culture, whilst on another level, it seeks to facilitate the injection of an element of cognitive dissonance back into this culture.The resultant creative output utilises the efficacy of the image and the subversive power of metaphor to engage with several interconnected themes. These range from the dialectic of truth and illusion in the painted space, to power relations, marginalisation and the possibility of finding holes in that maze without exits we call ‘capitalism’. An ostensibly atavistic utilisation of figuration and oil paint is intended as a lucid rebuttal of 20th Century/modernist notions of minimalism and the so-called ‘end of painting’. The relationship within the paintings between the medium and the message (the paint and the illusion) seeks to operate like the drapery found in paintings from the Baroque era that antinomically both reveals and conceals the forms beneath it. This scopic contradiction serves as an anamorphosistic mirror which, in my own work, highlights the subterfuge and legerdemain currently operating behind the veil constituted by technology and contemporary mass culture.The goofy, cartoon-like nature of the paintings and the aleatory strategies deployed in their construction, bear witness to the profundity of play in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. The artist books articulate more fully the innovative nature of the research and complement the paintings in a way that adds the dynamic of a digital dimension to the more traditional methods of oil painting on canvas.As a crassly instrumental reason insists on tightening its grip on human affairs, everywhere emphasising efficiency over playfulness, and as coercive structures of order continue to reduce my ontic options to an ever-diminishing range of superlatively insipid and uninteresting purchasing ‘choices’, the capacity for play, for ridiculousness, for absurdity, noise and laziness, for me, became symbolically central.

Light Intensity and Surface is the title of this PhD art exhibition where I explore through paintings, the world of my own encounter with the radiant light of the Linear Accelerator used in treatment of women with breast cancer. This engagement with the world of light technology encompasses oncologists, physicists and women who extended their personal experience to inform my artwork and contribute to the theoretical connections made in this thesis. The contribution of this thesis lies in how the lecture The Origin of the Work of Art by philosopher Martin Heidegger can be applied to a reading of great artworks that are separated in time, space and culture but connected in their subject: Light. It was his philosophy that helped shape the connections between where art originates and what springs from the artwork itself. The concept of light in the title of this thesis refers to Heidegger’s notion of the clearing seins Lichtung-the lighting centre- the medium that holds one being to another from where the idea for an artwork springs in the artist. Surface relates to the attunement of artists throughout history to the new particularly in the science of controlling light which influences the way artists achieve the material appearance of their artwork. Intensity refers to the level of openness to the mystery of light in both physicists and artists to create and control some thing that stabilises a community and remains a source of wonder. This thesis demonstrated how artists have responded to the new light technology with a way of seeing that created a depth dimension that bridges cultural worlds to unearth the breath of something often most effectively communicated by being silent / Doctor of Philosophy(PhD)

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An exhibition about advertising and identity.

Land Incorporated is a practice-based investigation into the relation between the land, the body and its representation. The textural and haptic nature of light, philosophical notions of reflection and the embodied and phenomenological experience of movement through the landscape are explored via mediums of incised paper, etched mirror and line drawing. Studies in philosophy, film theory and anthropology into the structure of vision in space, the touch of the eye upon an object and the haptic nature of the mark that in-scribes a surface, have illuminated bodily perceptual relationships to the land and informed an understanding of 'inscription' that incorporates mobile narratives of the artist and the viewer.

The following thesis explores the complexities of visual representation in relation to women’s experiences of sexual trauma, focusing on Gita Hashemi’s durational performance, Grounding: States of Gender (2017). Specifically, I look at the prolonged psychic pain that stems from the infinite negotiating of traumatic memory and the simultaneous struggle to have these experiences be seen, heard, and validated. With reference to theorizations of mourning (Butler, 2004; Fitzpatrick, 2013) and feminist approaches to psychotherapy (Herman, 1992; Magnet, 2017) my study of Grounding responds to a contemporary turn towards embodied and autobiographical feminist research methods. Using critical methodologies of visual analysis and narrative inquiry, I seek to explore the therapeutic value of the aesthetic or, what I refer to as an aesthetic of healing. Acknowledging how subjectivity functions as both a site of knowledge and as a record of lived experience, I ask how Hashemi’s forms of narrative embodiment work strategically, revealing traumatic realties while simultaneously orienting the viewer towards a position of reflexive engagement within broader sociocultural contexts.

My thesis investigates some of the conceptual ideas related to my studio work, both in terms of theory and contemporary practice. This thesis focuses how the visual images formally operate, as well as the larger framework of discourse that surrounds my practice. In my work, the habitual, incessant process of cutting and extraction and the subsequent meticulous reconfiguring use the strategies of repetition and labor. These sustained, ongoing acts have the possibility to be generative or transformative rather than simply repetitive. This thesis also explores the found object, complicating the classification and knowledge systems of the source image with odd juxtapositions and reconfigurements. This body of work presents and develops several contradictions: the gimmick or lure of the initial appearance versus the underlying reality; the paradox between the promise of beauty or pleasure, and the sense of antagonism or disruption embedded in these images.

https://vimeo.com/142533096</p Every time I am on an elevator or an airplane there is always someone right behind me, or beside me, that is coughing or sneezing. That is implied in the film with the use of, among other sounds, a sneeze, that speaks about the uncontrollable. So there are definitely contradictions with these railings, as they are an idea of a support structure that in practice doesn’t really work. And this recurs in the video work where you’re trying to clean a piece of acrylic glass which, in itself, is an impossible task. As soon as you try to clean it you get marks on it. It’s an unprotected surface as soon as you pull off the plastic film and even if you leave it on when the pane is scratched marks build up under it. / SIX MINUTES OF FRESHNESS