The University of Queensland Abstract Questions to Answers by Yaron Lifschitz The thesis, Questions to Answers, comprises two parts: a book-length collection of poems by the same title and a critical essay entitled “Behind the Verse: the Critical Prose of Poets” which examines critical prose written by three contemporary poets – Louise Glück, Anne Carson and Derek Walcott. The collection of poems is a series of lyrical digressions – oscillating between intimate reflections and intellectual musings. It aims to interrogate and undermine the known with pertinent (and sometimes impertinent) questions. The title suggests that rather than beginning with questions and moving to answers; the opposite journey is undertaken – the poems begin with the answers – received wisdoms, commonplace observations – and move towards uncertainty and curiosity. The poems range from short, lyrics to extended sequences. Being highly personal and eclectic statements of my sensibility, I aimed to create a free-flowing structure that reflects the curious digressions of this sensibility. There are several categories of poems that run through the work. These include poems of love and loss; short, lyrical odes to heroes of mine (mainly composers and poets); poems about reading the classics; poems about abstract philosophical musings; and poems about family – including my young son and my recently deceased sister. The placement of these poems aims to give a sense that these subjects are not distinct; reflecting my belief that one no more leaves the world of the heart to read the Odyssey than one forgoes one’s fascination with Kant to fall in love. The critical essay explores the relationship between the poetry and critical prose of three poets I admire – Derek Walcott, Louise Glück and Anne Carson. It proposes that the critical prose of poets is a neglected genre – full of delight and insight into the minds of the poets in question. The first chapter focuses on how a small observation in an essay by Walcott reveals a key feature of his poetics. The second explores the functioning of Glück’s stylistic reticence as she admires the sparse works of George Oppen. The third chapter looks at Carson’s radical troubling of the line between poetry and prose and seeks to explore it using digressive techniques borrowed from Carson herself. I begin the essay by exploring how the imperative to write a prose component to complement my poetry gave rise to this subject and finish the essay by analyzing what I learnt from its writing.

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Translatability and translation, the possibility and act of conveying some thing between people, objects, languages, cultures, times, spaces and media, have become increasingly important elements of creative practice and works of art. My research explores this proposition. To contextualise this concept of translation as an artistic and critical method mediating the relationship of the seeable to the sayable I retrace an under-mined vein of translation that grew from the Enlightenment, the Early (Jena) Romantic response to it and its subsequent development through Walter Benjamin to other modern theorists. I suggest that this tradition of translation has developed into a creative method that assumes a pre-existent given from which it evolves in order to destabilise, re-appropriate and make-new. The thesis argues that art has come to occupy the space of translation and proposes that an interpretative mode is ultimately antithetical to a form of thought engaged with in the creative process. This relies on the understanding of a qualitative distinction between acts of translation as presentational and of interpretation as representational. The distinction is not clear-cut since these two forms of mediation operate on a continuum. The probable root of “interpret” in English is “between prices” and derives from trade. This etymology stresses the transactional, hermeneutic role of the interpreter as a responsive agent that negotiates between distinct value systems to ensure equivalence during the process of exchange. While Interpretation operates primarily within the symbolic aspect of language translation retains a relationship to metaphor, which acknowledges that during transfer something becomes something that it literally is not. It must therefore also account for Aporia, or what fails to cross over and for a-signifying, singular aspects that affect or alter the symbolic during this process. In contrast to interpretation, translation’s relation to subjectivity, its resistance to schematisation and reduction to the accurate, objective and rational transfer of information provides a prophylaxis of doubt and generates heterogeneity. The thesis triangulates my practices as artist, translator and critic using translation to destabilise and re-calibrate the relationship of theory to practice. In relation to theory, rather than use this to explain, interpret, or categorize art, it advocates the translational practice of placing in parallel so that lines of thought may be drawn from one to the other, responding to and setting up points of intersection, divergence and congruence to encourage a non-hierarchical associative-dissociative dismantling. Translation informs the research method, structure and content of the thesis, which occupies an inter-theoretical, inter-disciplinary or matrixial space. As such, it is edified through a process that derives from and displays the translational method and diverse sources that constitute it. Four case studies bring together practices employing a translational method from different periods, cultures, creative practices and theoretical sources: Bernard Leach and Ezra Pound’s modernist projects; Jorge Luis Borges’ theory of translation and Briony Fer’s re-presentation of Eva Hesse’s studio work; the Brazilian poets Haroldo and Agosto De Campos’ theory of Cannibalistic translation and painter Adriana Varejao’s work with tiles; and ceramicist Alison Britton in light of Donald Winnicott’s concept of transitional spaces.

In this practice-based research the writer compares the metaphysics of the Hindu temple and the museum, and studying the role of the Hindu deity in these two contrasting settings through her artworks. By exhibiting them in a multi-sensory, and meditative environment created in the museum building, she invites the visitor to physically engage with her artworks and consciously experience the tensions between the religious and secular identities of the deity.

An enquiry into the significance of the ceramic vessel has led to an investigation of its historical and contemporary social purposes. Daily use of this object to hold substances essential to life connects it materially to the land and to the human body. This connectivity has created tradition and led to ritual expression in many parts of the world. The research analyses the manner in which individuals and societies have imbued these vessels with memory: aiding memory, obscuring it, telling stories, connecting people, embellishing tales and creating myths.

This thesis examines what literary theory can bring to the practice of visual story telling. Through praxis it examines underlying systems and techniques relative to works of fiction, investigating what impacts and advances narratology can bring to visual communication approaches and methods. This thesis will argue that literary concepts and methods produce new thinking and perspectives on visual methodologies, by establishing a dialectical relationship between the visual and verbal in creative practice; and in respect of literary theory and visual communication.

This research is led by an arts practice, and examines the relevance of the Bataillean concepts of uselessness, excess and non-productive expenditure for contemporary visual and performance practices. Deploying the model of Practice as Research the project investigates these terms through and against Catherine Clément’s concept of Syncope, her science of pauses and the philosophy of rapture. The key terms are investigated through a set of live performance interventions which are conceived for specific sites, and reconfigured in their translation to other sites. The written thesis traces this dialogue between the performed works and Clément's and Bataille’s philosophies. The chapters are interspersed with texts which select one theoretical notion at a time, and critically situate these within ethnographic, psychoanalytic and philosophical debates. Five close-up images and a Schema document each of the performed projects, and are dispersed throughout the chapters or included in the Appendix. A video DVD accompanies the thesis with documentation of Slow Races, the last performance project, a compilation of scenes of expenditure and loss. The Prologue outlines Bataille’s critique of the pervasive, utilitarian economic framework that is characteristic of capitalist modernity, based as it is on an idea of scarcity, and which harnesses individual agency for the sake of profitmaking. Bataille’s contribution to this debate, his core contentions that all exchanges are accompanied by excess, and that societies need to allow for a meaningful expenditure through socio-cultural and wider economic frameworks, forms the backbone of the enquiry. To explore this claim the live interventions look like work but do not produce anything, they disturb one system by performing another. Chapters 1 to 4 analyse a first set of performed works through Clément’s concept of Syncope, a philosophical project which challenges Western philosophical concepts of the subject and returns to what was advanced by Bataille. This discussion gives rise to the notion of the artist’s pursuit of the inconsequential, which is contextualised in Chapter 5 through relevant arts practices and art criticism of the 20th and 21st century. Chapter 6 critically investigates Clément’s contribution to the canon. The final chapter, Chapter 7, documents a departure from the earlier task-based interventions in the practice, and reflects on a new set of works which deploy a more radical notion of uselessness and sovereignty, and which conclude with a proclamation of the Universal Declaration of the Human Right to Uselessness. The research concludes that a pursuit of uselessness is not only a powerful method for arts practices that are concerned with a reflection on the human condition, but is an apposite engagement if art is to break through the limitations imposed by the claims of the Enlightenment and the economy of capital.

This study asks: what are the internal rewards associated with amateur making, and how do they offer satisfaction and fulfilment to those who participate in the activity? People considered in this research make furniture, jewellery, model engineering projects, canoes and cars. They all maintain and make use of an amateur workshop of some kind, and use a variety of tools, machines and materials in their constructions, carrying out work-like activity as a form of leisure. The research aims to understand amateur making not purely as a form of symbolic production – as the fabrication of signs and symbols that have a life after the making process is complete – but to focus instead on the experience of making, and the material interaction that occurs as part of practice.

This thesis provides an account of material objects which are related to the nation in their design and consumption. Addressing a major gap both in design literature and in theories of everyday nationalism, the study focuses on the processes of design and consumption in which material objects are nationalised, rather than on objects as representative of nations. For this purpose, a material-semiotic theoretical framework is developed, contributing to current debates on the use of STS-based approaches in design research. Accordingly, design and consumption are viewed as two sociotechnical settings where a variety of actors-engineers, designers, users, other objects as well as nations-are brought together. In application of this framework, design and consumption of a nationally charged kitchen appliance, the electric Turkish coffee maker, was investigated for the ways in which Turkish nation is evoked in discourse and practice by the actors involved. To this end, interviews were conducted with the managers, designers and engineers involved in the development of electric Turkish coffee makers. Together with the documents collected, the data is used to piece together the processes of product development and design. These were complemented and contrasted with interviews, focus groups and participant observation sessions, organised with users of the product. The analysis shows that electric Turkish coffee makers are conceived as a national project, which translates Turkish coffee to national tradition, and global commercial success via its mechanisation to national responsibility and pride. Accordingly, design practice attempts to produce and maintain the products as objectifications of national cultural authenticity. In the analysed consumption setting, however, users appropriate the products not as authentic replacements of, but as convenient supplements to the 'authentic', which they instead utilise to improve sociability. The study suggests and illustrates that a comprehensive understanding of everyday nationalism in particular, and politics in general, requires taking seriously the material agency of objects- conceptualised as symbolic and material assemblages with politically substantial meanings and affordances. It thus emphasises the significance of designed objects as nodes in and around which relations of power are shaped and stored, and the political role of design practices in assembling these objects by mediating such relations.

The primary aim of this practice based research was to develop, for the first time, a new combination of knitting methods which created knitted garments for larger size women that uniquely did not rely on stretch to fit their body shape. Through working with real women, an innovative capsule collection of custom-fitted knitwear toiles incorporating 3D knitted shape was produced which positively demonstrated the originality, effectiveness and significance ofthe outcomes. This research therefore focused on developing knitwear with an improved fit for the individual body shapes of a cohort of women over a UK size 16. In 2004, publicly available information from SizeUK indicated that the average women's size in the UK was a size 16. However following a literature search, and in conjunction with primary data from this research, it became evident that women over a size 16 were experiencing dissatisfaction with clothing fit. This disjunction formed an early driver for the research idea and helped to form the research framework that spanned three main areas: clothing fit, larger female body shape and mass knitwear manufacture. The research has been necessarily set in the wider context of debates on larger women's self-image and their relationship with fashion. Interviews and an online survey provided primary data on clothing fit, clothing choices, shopping experience, body image, body cathexis and self perception in relation to clothing. A case study research method was developed that resolved ethical issues which arose when working with participants. Prior to knit sampling, a hierarchy of desirable technical and aesthetic knit qualities was established, and a design process comparable to that in industry adopted in order to place this research in a 'real' commercial context. The knitwear was developed from manually acquired measurements and 3D body scanned data, using specific measurement protocols developed by the research for measuring larger size. Objective and subjective evaluation of the knitwear employing wrinkle-analysis, fit and comfort tests informed a final design development process that ran parallel to commercial examples. Amongst the final outcomes of this research is a library of visual digital templates derived from the knit programming, which offers a transferable new resource for future industrial developments of this process. Their particular and unique value is to contribute information to the emerging field of mass-customisation of knitwear and larger sized clothing as recommended for EU development by the SERVIVE report of 2010. This research concluded, as a significant contribution to new knowledge in the field of larger sized fashion knitwear, that improving the fit of knitwear for larger women by removing the fit-by-stretch factor (a major style and psychological drawback for these consumers), enhanced wearing experience and enthused the wearer towards the garment.