Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / A personal experience of migration provides the content for this exegesis research and exhibition titled A Long Road Home. Narratives of identity, displacement and loss, common to the migrant experience are translated as concept and inspiration for this research. Exploring an attachment to my cultural past highlights a disrupted sense of place, which is examined within the context of personal experience. Movement as a condition of migration is a developed theme in this thesis, which is described through a shared sense of place between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, Scotland and Australia. The exhibition A Long Road Home is developed from studio-based research and journeys into past and present landscapes over a period of three and a half years. Accompanying this exegesis is an exhibition of four components: Painting and drawing, a book of self-published poems and memories, after before white rabbits, 2009 [appendix i]. A self-published book of documentary photography of Glasgow’s East End, 2007, the dead end of culture, 2009, [appendix ii]. This exegesis and exhibition component employs mnemonic notations to explore memory as [re] remembering to conceptually underpin this thesis and also to prompt an emotive response. As an abstract concept, memories encompass an itinerant history that is teased from beneath the surface of the skin to extend the narrative of personal experience. after before white rabbits, a series of memories and recollections, reinterpret the past to inform the present, suggesting mindscape as an alternate landscape. A series of mnemonics invite the reader to participate on a journey that is in a continuous state of flux and transformation that moves between one horizon and another.

This paper establishes the pivotal role and irreplaceable value of painting in the technology-driven, image-saturated contemporary culture today. Particularly in my work, painting old childhood photographs creates a contemplative platform where I can deconstruct and reconstruct relics of my formative past as means of better understanding my multicultural upbringing. Inspired by both Chinese Communist propaganda posters and the ’85 New Wave Contemporary Chinese Art Movement, my senior project confronts the façade of perfection staged in Chinese family portraits through convoluted layers of imagery and Chinese text that build up the painting. The amalgamation of bold outlines, expressive brushstrokes, and disciplined grids, challenges the stifling values of discipline, order, and homogeneity in traditional Chinese culture.

The paintings in Based on a True Story are at once illogical and concrete – implying both failure and the hope of figurative and architectural construction. Developed as a kind of psychological landscape, they suggest a depiction of contemporary societal / political, and environmental instability. Neither true nor false: the paintings are spaces in which one may become dislocated, anxious, and unsettled. Inclusion of architectural fenestration suggests one’s fractured location and continually shifting ground. Furthermore, literary and cinematic fiction plays an important role to the work in that they both suggest landscapes that may never exist literally. Fiction is also indicative of the close relationship between the utopia and dystopia as environments for escape. This sense of balance or lack thereof, becomes important to the development of the theatrically absurd, so that an audience may be implicated as the tragic and comic active participant. While investigating the work of Peter Doig, Stephen Bush, and Dana Schutz, for example, I suggest that the trail of the painter’s hand becomes a necessary mode of entrance into the work, offering a closer relationship to the act of painting as another form of escape. This gestural mark-making runs counter to current pushes toward technology, and suggests the re-emergence of painting as a primary approach in which to investigate the development of personal space and experience.

The paintings in Based on a True Story are at once illogical and concrete – implying both failure and the hope of figurative and architectural construction. Developed as a kind of psychological landscape, they suggest a depiction of contemporary societal / political, and environmental instability. Neither true nor false: the paintings are spaces in which one may become dislocated, anxious, and unsettled. Inclusion of architectural fenestration suggests one’s fractured location and continually shifting ground. Furthermore, literary and cinematic fiction plays an important role to the work in that they both suggest landscapes that may never exist literally. Fiction is also indicative of the close relationship between the utopia and dystopia as environments for escape. This sense of balance or lack thereof, becomes important to the development of the theatrically absurd, so that an audience may be implicated as the tragic and comic active participant. While investigating the work of Peter Doig, Stephen Bush, and Dana Schutz, for example, I suggest that the trail of the painter’s hand becomes a necessary mode of entrance into the work, offering a closer relationship to the act of painting as another form of escape. This gestural mark-making runs counter to current pushes toward technology, and suggests the re-emergence of painting as a primary approach in which to investigate the development of personal space and experience.

My paintings are linked to a thirst for exploring new landscapes and perspectives, my interest in the extremes and subtleties of geological phenomenon and a desire to create, chase after, and teeter on a brink. Here I will discuss these topics and work to unpack my interest in avoiding comfort, my relationship to control and the creation and function of my paintings. To extract myself from my tactile and visual world of process and paint and enter the world of written language presents very different challenges than the ones fostered in the studio. The goal in both is to reveal the overlaps and complexities of the issues I am researching and to embrace any contradictions not as ambiguity, but as migrating, nutritious sediment; ever changing particles that can be examined again and again as their intersection with a historical and contemporary discourse evolves.

This research entitled Images of the urban experience in contemporary painting began as an investigation into the consequences of urbanism such as human alienation and personal detachment. As a studio based research, this practice was based on five individual exhibitions of contemporary paintings accompanied by four underlying theoretical exegeses. These components together with the involvement in various group exhibitions, awards and professional practice documented in a research portfolio were developed over a three-year period. As each series of paintings was exhibited, new priorities and directions were established. These developments ranged from documentation of the decline in the conscious organisation of urban life images to the utilisation of media and techniques to promote greater fluidity and painting spontaneity. The theme of human alienation in this investigation developed into a focus on the existential predicament of place-bereft individuals. As the nature of location was brought into focus, an exploration of the influence and question of place emerged. This concept gave rise to an investigation into place-panic or human anxiety at the prospect of an unknown place. / Doctor of Creative Art

Diploma project Zenith House is trying to find and map a position of figural painting in a contemporary art world. Through a detailed study of works of contemporary painters, who use historical influences and compositions, it argues the evolution of painting. It slightly touches the phenomenom of portraiture and the contemporary trend of de-skilling the craftsmen.

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As palavras no titulo desta tese \"Tipotretaletra\", se referem ao lugar da letra na pesquisa em poéticas na forma do trabalho escrito de cárater acadêmico. A treta por um lado é tensão; de outro são as estratégias necessárias para conviver a produção artística e produção acadêmica. O tipo pode ser uma maneira, um jeito ou o suporte físico para a impressão da letra, a treta como estratégia e método, a letra como letreiramento, a letra desenho e projeto; e o letramento, a letra como alfabetização, habilidade com o código desenvolvida por meio da educação. Todas as três palavras se relacionam de algum modo à pesquisa e ampliação de suportes é uma palavra em questão nesta tese a proposito dos vários caminhos e materialidades que compõem os trabalhos, desde a pintura, a performance, a tipografia, o objeto. / The title ofthis thesis \"Tipotretaletra\" refer to the place ofthe word in a research ofvisual arts, about the form ofwritten word in a academic work. The \"treta\" as confusion as a tension; are strategies needed to live together the artistic production and academic production. The \"tipo\" can be like a typeface or a way to do anything. the \"treta\" as a strategy and method. The lettering, like a particular style ou the process ofwrinting, drawing or print words, the design ofthe letter; and the letter as literacy, like the ability to read and write acquired through education. All three words are related in some way to researches Mukambu which can be translated as support in Kikongo, refers from the stick with two people carry an object; Also can be a technology that use forks to support the ridge ofa house; support is a word in this thesis like several materiality that was made de art work, from painting, performance, typograpy, object.