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In the context of Italian colonialism, relations between the colonisers and the colonised have often been constructed and conducted through materialities (objects, things and artefacts) as means for the transmission, exchange and exercise of power. Practices of architecture, infrastructure and spoliation have then created and intensified systems of circulation connecting the metropole to the periphery. Along this axis the movement of materialities justified the colonial order within a capitalist system of production, trade, migration, communication and conquest. This dissertation interrogates the relationship between ‘materiality’ and ‘circulation’ as central categories of analysis that allow the evaluation of Italian colonialism as a historical event and the deciphering of the complexities of Italy’s post-colonial present. It offers an in-depth analysis of specific materialities that from the earlier phases of Italian colonisation in the Horn of Africa and Libya up to the post-colonial present have circulated between Italy and its colonies, tying the centre to the periphery. This thesis reveals that as a parallel to the movement of humans between the metropole and the colonies, between the Global North and the Global South, an ensemble of materialities – road infrastructure, an obelisk, anthropometric artefacts and skeletal remains - seem to be epistemologically crucial in describing power relations between the colonisers and the colonised in both the colonial and post-colonial epochs. Formerly instrumental for civilisational claims of Italian superiority in relation to native populations, since decolonisation these materialities have turned into objects of dispute, emblems of postcolonial identities and bargaining chips for posthumous justice for colonial violence and pillage. Within such a context, the discourse on memory and the elaboration of the colonial past together with the definition of new power relations and techniques of government over ‘others’ – migration policies, development and humanitarianism – constantly develop while revolving around those same materialities that, in the first place, served the purposes of the colonial mission.

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Italy's post World War II art and artisan produce and her small and medium scale ceramic production between 1945 and 1958 has been characterised I by an apparent aesthetic synthesis of avant-garde ideals, craft traditions and popular culture. This thesis examines this particular occurrence through a multi and interdisciplinary approach. It has profited from the application of methodologies deriving from the different fields of history, ceramic-, art-, applied art-, design and architectural history and from information obtained from economic and naval histories and tourist guides. This has enabled on the one hand to explain this phenomenon and to situate the ceramic manufacturing sector and the objects within their socio-historical, economic and cultural framework and on the other to employ the objects themselves to challenge dominant ideas within contemporary design-, art-, craft- and ceramic history. The majority of the data that informs this work derives from the analysis of primary sources collected and researched in Italy such as the objects and works themselves, contemporary magazines, archives and interviews. Whilst the time-span has been defined by the perceived birth and decline of the synthesis phenomenon, the period studied in this thesis includes a brief introduction to the tradition and revival of Italy's post-unification ceramic culture and industry and the general aesthetic and artistic developments which have significantly influenced the post 1945 developments. This is followed by an in-depth account of the aesthetic panorama of Italian ceramics between 1945 and 1958 through the works of its protagonists and an analysis of ceramics used as an ornamental medium in architectural structures and modem interior decorating schemes and exteriors. Another part analyses the ceramic industry from a production, economical, commercial and consumption point of view and establishes its significant role not only in relation to Italy's overall economic reconstruction efforts but in the creation of the image that constituted the ideals associated with the 'Made in Italy' label. The last part examines Italian ceramic culture between 1945 and 1958 in its contemporary design, art and craft context. It will present the history of Italian material culture and design as based on an evolutionary model which is incompatible with modernist-lead design histories. In addition, this thesis challenges the under-representation of Italian ceramics within 20th century British ceramic, art, craft and design history and the British approach to ceramic writing and aims to incite further multi and interdisciplinary approach to the history of design.

This thesis re-evaluates Italian Futurist art's relationship with the past, focusing on the years 1909-1919. This aspect of the movement is fundamental to its complex identity, yet has not received prolonged scholarly attention. In order to reconsider Futurism's temporality this thesis focuses on the fine art practice and theoretical writings of Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, and also the writings on the movement's leader F.T. Marinetti, plus the Florentine Futurists Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici. The historiography of Futurism, which both produces the reductive antipassatista model of the movement and highlights the presence of formal similarities between the Italian artistic tradition and Futurism, is also interrogated. The first part of this thesis argues that the Futurist temporality is more nuanced than the widely accepted model of adoration of the future and repudiation of the past, and that it is related to the conflicting notions of time present in the decade in question. Using the Futurists' concept of time to analyse their relationships with the past, present and future, it argues that the present is the most important temporal mode for Futurism, but that the past and future are part of this present. This thesis approaches Futurism's relationship with Italy's artistic past in tandem with its interrogation of its temporality. This requires a consideration of the temporality of art history, the temporal orientation of avant-gardism and the connotations of tradition and appropriation in art historical practice in order to produce a spiralling art historical model in which returns to the past can be forms of progress. In the second part of this thesis, these possible appropriations of the Italian artistic tradition from Magna Graecia to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo are surveyed, using the reception of earlier art historical periods in early twentieth century Italy to consider how and why the Futurists could have appropriated them. The Futurists' continuation of the recent past of Italian and French art from Italian unification up to the launch of Futurism is also addressed, noting the anti passatismo of these precedents to show that the Futurist relationship with the past, as reconstructed in this thesis, was not sui generis. The aim of this thesis is to bring together Futurism's rhetoric about the past, understanding of time, and relationship with art history in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the movement's antipassatismo.

This practice led doctoral thesis explores the meaning of spirituality and its manifestation in figUrative art in the wider historical, religious and artistic contexts of Pakistan, alongside the presentation of a new body of artistic work which explores the contemporary possibilities of materialising spirituality in a predominately Muslim culture. The illustrated thesis engages with these two interconnected but distinct forms of research which underpin its two-part structure. The first part, Section A, comprises four chapters which investigate the various cultural and religious contexts of figurative art with particular reference to Muslim painting; Islamic attitudes to figurative art based upon the study of Islamic law and the various interpretations of the Qur'an and the hadith. It assesses the impact of colonial and postcolonial politics on the arts produced in the Indo Pak Sub-continent and the specific area that later came to constitute Pakistan (a pre-dominantly Muslim country) after the Partition of 1947. The section concludes with im exploration of Islamic spiritual ideals of truth and beauty, through Sufi thought, including the significance of for Allah and the concept of Tauhid. or His Oneness. The three chapters in the second part, Section B, represent a critical reflection on ongoing artistic practice as a female figurative artist in contemporary Pakistan. Drawing upon autobiographical material and fieldwork conducted at Sufi shrines as part this research, I discuss the series of more than twenty five paintings, drawings and siœtcnes which aim to materialise the spiritual. These are supported by a thirty minute documentation of the shrine culture with a voice over along with a video installation film on a DVD exploring the concept of fana or 'spiritual annihilation', which is the key aspect of the shrine culture. In conclusion the vital concern of finding means to materialise the concept of spirituality by creating a body of art work is an effort to fill the gap in Pakistani painting the impact of Sufi philosophy on artistic endeavours is yet to be fully explored in contemporary painting in Pakistan.

The core of this research are the paintings and cultural context of Alan Cuthbert, a hitherto un-researched figure who trained in the English art school of the late 1950s under the Constructionists Kenneth and Mary Martin and subsequently became the Head of the Foundation course at Wimbledon School of Art from 1963-1979. Cuthbert produced a substantial body of over a hundred geometric abstract paintings, lecture papers and writing and played a significant role in training future generations of artists and designers from the 1960s onwards. This thesis proposes that Cuthbert is part of a broader tendency in British art schools and that practice and teaching is intimately connected to the reorganisation of the art schools and the introduction of the Foundation course in the early 196Ös. I put forward the argument that through a study of Cuthbert and the shifts in art schools one can map a much under-researched aspect of British art. This research encompasses the three fields of art history, art education and art practice and centres on an artist-lecturer, a subject of study largely ignored by the majority of art historical writing, which is dominated by the modernist model of monographs, movements/groupings, and periods. In placing the case study of an artist-lecturer in a critical and historical context, this study maps British art through organicism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus art school pedagogy and colour as they pertain to basic design and the changes in art school teaching between 1955 and 1979. Through this case study of a colourist and systems painter this thesis suggests a different, Continental orientation for British post-war geometric abstraction.

Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948, the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded, and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on industrial design, concluding more than a decade of discussions, the thesis aims to examine some artistic and cultural phenomena identified in Italy and Great Britain, and seen as the acknowledgement or as the reaction to modernity. Topics and fields taken in consideration within the thesis are technology, science (fact and fiction), vision of the future, the relationship between arts and the awareness of industrial design as a new discipline. All these aspects, that might seems unusual in relationship with visual arts, are perceived as the expression of a second phase of Modernism. The British personalities included in the thesis are Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, all members of the Independent Group. With the presence of architects, visual artists, photographers, critics and, in a broader sense, designers, the group encompassed a variety of popular interests, with the inclusion of mass‐produced goods. The Italian figures presented in the thesis – Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass and Giuseppe Pinot‐Gallizio – focused on industrial design objects, viewed as a new artistic branch, to promote, to plan or to question. Other recurring figures analysed in the thesis are Max Bill, Asger Jorn and Tomás Maldonado, who give international connections to the themes and British and Italian personalities examined. In order to provide a wider understanding of the 1950s and their crucial function in the story of post‐war Europe, the thesis aims to emphasise the role played at different level by British and Italian visual artists, designers and critics, and explain the reasons that, in the following decade, would push Italy in its industrial miracle and Great Britain at the peak for its popular culture, pop music and fashion creativity.

This practice-based PHD project tests cross/trans disciplinary approaches to historical artifacts, set in the field of contemporary fine art research. It is predicated specifically upon my discovery in 2013 of a forgotten deck of fortune-telling cards, hand painted 1906 by the English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare. Spare's cards had lain unnoticed for almost seventy years within the collection of London's secretive Magic Circle, following their accession to the magic club's museum in 1944; before that date, no record of the deck exists. I respond to this historical find in the form of two interdependent "readings" of the artist's deck of cards. 'Reading One' provides the first in-depth descriptive survey of the deck, as well as establishing its provenance, its place in the artist's oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy. 'Reading Two' adopts complementary approaches that are contingent upon, and shaped by, specific findings within 'Reading One'. These include an elaboration of the deck's release from captivity at The Magic Circle ('Facsimilate and proliferate'), an evaluation of its internal connective logic ('Combinatoric consciousness'), its introduction to the moving image ('Cartomantic cinema') and to historical time ('Making up for lost time'), and the articulation of a card that is missing from the deck ('Casting for the voice of Strength'). The relationship between these two constituent readings is explored as a continuity which follows a cyclical, rather than linear, progression - second readings are contingent upon first but often lead to renewed first readings, leading to renewed second readings and so on. Within this reanimating process, the object can be seen directing its researcher, sometimes casting her/him in particular roles that meet its needs. In the realm of art production, this orientation towards the object implies that the appropriation of historical material by artists be appropriate, with all the psychological, ethical, and political consequences that such encounters entail. While applied here to a single object - Austin Spare's cartomancy deck - the project's model of contingent and continuous knowledge production encourages other researchers to respond innovatively to the directives, even demands of their chosen objects of research.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This thesis maps the sixty year history of the Qantas flight attendants’ uniform. It figures the Qantas uniform as a prism through which to explore a history of modern Australian fashion and design, and the social and cultural web that gives life to the image of the Qantas flight attendant, rather than a history of the airline itself. Qantas, with its humble origins in the rural town of Longreach, Queensland, became the national carrier when it combined interests with Britain’s Imperial Airways to form Qantas Empire Airways in 1934. From the time the first female Qantas flight hostess appeared on board in 1948, the aircraft aisle became a 'catwalk for the image-makers'. It is particularly important to the role of the flight hostess, later the flight attendant, that the dress of the cabin crew, although clearly defined as uniforms, also responded to current fashion from the beginning of this history. Although the story of Qantas has been well documented, this thesis will focus on the uncharted area of the evolving design history of flight uniforms from the clinical white dress of the 1940s, through the military designs of the 1950s and the synthetics and stilettos of the 1960s, right through to the corporate designs of the present day. The analysis of such corporate design is a relatively new field. This study uses the flight attendants’ uniform to chart the links between the Australian fashion and textile industry and with militarism, versions of Australian nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the corporate world and the role of international designers in Australian design history. While the method of this thesis is largely archival, meticulously detailing the changing facets of the Qantas uniforms and unfolding those details into an engagement with these historical context, there are other theoretical influences on this study. In particular, it is underpinned by the ‘semiotics of uniformity’ drawn from fashion and design studies and by an equal focus on discourse analysis. The flight hostess’s uniform was always a complex ‘articulation of discourses’ as national image had to be played off against international trends, dominant and emerging gender norms, and the language of professional 'decorum' for people with high levels of responsibility and public exposure. Across each of these registers, the frisson of glamour was also a factor, morphing across this history from images of modernism and internationalism via the quasi-erotics of uniform fetishism into ‘postmodern’ performativity.