Inaug.-Diss. Philos. Bern, 1997.

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There are two inter-related parts to the hypothesis explored in this research. The first is that it is significant to employ fabric as a medium in a fine art context, and the second aspect argues that female artists who choose fabric as their medium should be recognised as 'artists' rather than as crafts practitioners. I propose that in choosing fabric as a medium and sewing as my method of making art, I am working within the framework of contemporary fine art practice. In his essay 'To Cut is to Think' Germano Celant succinctly described the 'cut' made by artists who choose cutting as their process: The cut of the scissor is like the click of a camera or the whirr of a movie camera, like a stroke of the pencil or paintbrush: all these acts decisively isolate a form or representation, marking a surface that generates a reality. The cut puts an end to the traditional representation of the image, dissolving it and then restoring it as a testimony to the artist's vision and understanding. In this light, the cut confers meaning, and its use unites artists, photographers, designers and tailors, who cut their visions from the magma of their materials, whether these be colour or bronze, fabric or film, metal or wool, wood or canvas (1996, p. 31). My own use of the cut, as the bespoke tailor, reinterpreted fabric as paint and utilized pinstriped fabric as a visual metaphor for relationships of power, pink satin as a symbol of the female inclusion and Frank Stella's Black Paintings as a tool to position my work. Therefore, I would claim that I am working towards a conceptual repositioning of fabric as a medium in fine art.

The decorative and the textual have a complex and uneasy entanglement within the history and practice of modernist art. Sometimes celebrated as critical modernist strategies, sometimes denigrated or repressed as the opposite of Art, the decorative and the textual were understood as "foreign" forms that variously endangered, or, in turn, invigorated the power of art. My creative practice, which includes installation, painting, photography, text and an exhibition catalogue, exploits and explores this decorative and textual instability within modernist art practice. In my work, (visual) codes conventionally associated with the fields of writing and pattern, are re-examined and problematised by placing them within the context of visual art. When writing and pattern become the subject of painting there is an intriguing oscillation, complication and dialogue between the spaces and codes of reading and seeing, writing and pattern, the decorative and the abstract. The thesis also explores the decorative and textual instability within modernism by analysing some key contradictory moments in aesthetic thought and arts practice. In the writings of Clement Greenberg, a "decorative" painting is deemed the highest achievement of modernist abstract painting but to arrive at this goal, the decorative must be used against itself. In Frank Stella's early abstract paintings, decorative patterns structure the work, and yet the artist and his commentators only see the work as a kind of pure, abstract painting. In Lawrence Weiner's statement-sculptures, the terse, laconic text, that nominates materials and processes, is thought to be a "direct" form of art information that would remain unchanged even in reproduction. But as Weiner's work is reproduced in journals and magazines, this "direct" form of art is complicated through a variety of reproductive forms - documentary photographs, transcription errors and differences in the visual format and typography of the text. In these key moments of contradiction, concepts such as the decorative and the textual, that have often been regarded as peripheral to visual art, will be shown to have central significance in analysing its specific qualities.