Project (M.F.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Project (School for the Contemporary Arts) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

The reference to the body is a recurring and almost obsessive theme in Annette Messager's work. However, for the first time with Penetration (1993-1994) the artist investigates the inside of the body. / Anatomically descriptive and strangely symbolical the components of this hanging composition make up a huge portrait of the elements with which we are composed. With this thesis, I will demonstrate what is revealed is the body's structure: its content, its secrets, what is on the other side of the physical border and what soaks the flesh, the forces that bring us alive. / In addition, although the composition suggests a three-dimensional anatomical model, I will reveal it remains a distinctly visual and cerebral experience: a conceptualization of the body rather than the body's itself. Penetration stands for a view of ourselves that we know not from any real familiarity but from visual diagrams that have been derived from scientific research and consensus since, its separate elements and colors are taken from medical illustration. / Using artistic and historic examples, I will establish that even though the human body proposed by Messager is based on the anatomical model it is not a flattened representation reduced to an erudite enumeration but rather a three-dimensional model which can be experienced from within. / Messager stages the possibility of a face-to-face with the spectator. Inside Penetration the body recalls the very body materiality, a body where "dead" dangling internal organs "come to life" via the viewers' participation, via their penetration. The relationship of scale is upset and the spectators are invited to penetrate inside the body: to see things from up-close, to feel its elements, to touch its parts. / With Penetration Messager confronts the spectators with an intimate act as she directs them under (or rather) inside somebody's skin and forces them to confront their own sense of embodiment. Messager honours the physical body as our primary means of experiencing the world. I will ascertain that with her specific treatment of the body and without having to rely on modern technology, the artist offers an inquiry into the body as well as questions notions of embodiment. In other words, I will demonstrate Penetration exemplifies a complex set of negotiations between body and space: negotiations between the actual domain of the real body of the viewer and the three-dimensional (virtual) domain of the represented body and represented spaces. / In conclusion, I will propose that via the sense of touch Annette Messager produces a body where there is no escape between objective seeing and subjective feeling and where the human experience is formed and transformed.

The focus of this project is a creative investigation of the significance and function of the alter-ego in contemporary visual art, specifically in relation to sculpture, installation and video. / Artists, including myself, frequently develop characters or different personalities in and through their work in order to present an alternate, idealised or transformed self or as a tactic to investigate a different approach to their practice. These alternative constructed selves can function in diverse ways, often as a strategy for transgression, dispensing with accountability and/or for maintaining the freedoms and possibilities of a mutable identity. / Central to my research has been the development of a body of artefacts and texts that are made through, about or in response to a variety of my own alter-egos. Initially I inhabited three discrete alter-egos that were variations of myself, as an artist, in order to be able to observe and compare how they might operate and form an intra-subjective discourse. These version 'excursions', being Winifred, Edith and Sadie, can be more accurately described as semi-alter-egos because although the personalities are not entirely mine they are not different from mine they are not different from but simply 'mutilations' of my personality. They were initially outlined as Edith the struggling, self-effacing but creative loser, Winifred the straight faced, repressed, serious investigator brimming with curiosity and Sadie the successful, relaxed and happy self-enhancer for whom art and life flow. / The alter-egos evolved through changes of my appearance, behaviour and biographical data. Evidence of this approach is manifest through the amassing of fragments of images, artworks, video and photo documentation. The conception of Winifred, Edith and Sadie as artists allowed me to ground my activities in the studio around objects and materials through a project that was essentially a process. A critique of the art world is implied through the various strategies and responses of the alter-egos. The process eventually involved killing off these particular personae to more fully engage with questions of 'becoming' through a less contrived more unknowing approach to emerging alter-egos. / The artefacts were not conceived as an 'exhibition' but are residue of the research process and constitute the greater part of my thesis. The written exegesis elucidates the line of research undertaken within the studio practice with reference to personal perspectives and contemporary conceptions of the self. The exegesis also documents an exploration into the device and use of the alter-ego in recent visual arts practice and analyses how these constructed selves might permit, reveal, conceal or operate as projections of inner states or fulfilments of desire. My studio experiments and construction of artefacts have been informed by critical analysis of these functions and the ways in which they related or diverged from my own motivation and utilisation of the alter-ego. I briefly consider the area which includes abnormal psychological conditions such as the multiple personality and the splitting of the subject. / This project deals with complex philosophical issues without foregrounding a theoretical approach. The emphasis is on the generative potential through studio-based research in the area of visual arts. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2007.

Commentary on the visual arts in the past decades has noted a shift towards a 'return to narrative', particularly in relation to painting, photography and video, but also media where narrative concerns have perhaps been marginalised, namely contemporary installation and sculpture. Artists as diverse as Simon Starling, Mike Nelson, Tracey Emin, Robert Gober and Mariko Mori have been the subject of a general announcement of narrative as being at the forefront of international contemporary art practice. Closer to home, artist curator Richard Grayson's 2002 Sydney Biennale (The World May Be) Fantastic, has also examined this renewed interest in the possibilities of narrative for contemporary visual art. / In terms of sculpture, 'narrative' artworks can simply refer to the depiction of an action taking place, as in a tableau. Metaphorical, political, or other theoretical contextualising of a work can be another type of 'story', interpreting the otherwise pure materiality of an object. 'New narrative' might be seen as a development of postmodernist approaches of the 1980's, as exemplified say in the paintings of David Salle, wherein differing narrative styles, referents, and subject voices coexist simultaneously. It is perhaps not coincidental that the demise in the rigid orthodoxy of prescribed meta-narratives in politics would coincide with the rise of narrativity and fiction in contemporary visual art practice. What might be different today is the extent to which specifically personal, 'occult', or political discourses often appear instead of, or along side, early postmodern 'surface' readings of artworks. Indeed this new interest in narrative has been described as a 'gleefully regressive step', by one author. / This research project attempts to chart some possibilities for narrative within contemporary sculpture and installation through a complementary and reflective studio practice combined with writing, with particular reference to notions of non-dualistic, complex and personal perspectives on the reading of artworks. In particular, my research has been informed by my perspective on some critical debates relating to James Joyce's Ulysses, and the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The creative outcomes of this research, together with this exegesis (which combined form the 'thesis'), suggest that an understanding of divergent relativist, structuralist, and 'surface' understandings of narrative literacy approaches since the start of the twentieth century might add to our reading of some important recent developments in the visual arts. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2001.

Commentary on the visual arts in the past decades has noted a shift towards a 'return to narrative', particularly in relation to painting, photography and video, but also media where narrative concerns have perhaps been marginalised, namely contemporary installation and sculpture. Artists as diverse as Simon Starling, Mike Nelson, Tracey Emin, Robert Gober and Mariko Mori have been the subject of a general announcement of narrative as being at the forefront of international contemporary art practice. Closer to home, artist curator Richard Grayson's 2002 Sydney Biennale (The World May Be) Fantastic, has also examined this renewed interest in the possibilities of narrative for contemporary visual art. / In terms of sculpture, 'narrative' artworks can simply refer to the depiction of an action taking place, as in a tableau. Metaphorical, political, or other theoretical contextualising of a work can be another type of 'story', interpreting the otherwise pure materiality of an object. 'New narrative' might be seen as a development of postmodernist approaches of the 1980's, as exemplified say in the paintings of David Salle, wherein differing narrative styles, referents, and subject voices coexist simultaneously. It is perhaps not coincidental that the demise in the rigid orthodoxy of prescribed meta-narratives in politics would coincide with the rise of narrativity and fiction in contemporary visual art practice. What might be different today is the extent to which specifically personal, 'occult', or political discourses often appear instead of, or along side, early postmodern 'surface' readings of artworks. Indeed this new interest in narrative has been described as a 'gleefully regressive step', by one author. / This research project attempts to chart some possibilities for narrative within contemporary sculpture and installation through a complementary and reflective studio practice combined with writing, with particular reference to notions of non-dualistic, complex and personal perspectives on the reading of artworks. In particular, my research has been informed by my perspective on some critical debates relating to James Joyce's Ulysses, and the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The creative outcomes of this research, together with this exegesis (which combined form the 'thesis'), suggest that an understanding of divergent relativist, structuralist, and 'surface' understandings of narrative literacy approaches since the start of the twentieth century might add to our reading of some important recent developments in the visual arts. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Exegesis (MA--Art and Design) -- AUT University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (67 leaves : col. ill. ; 21 x 30 cm.) in City Campus Collection (T 709.93 CLA)

Thesis (MA--Art and Design) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2004. / Also held in print (37 leaves, col. ill., 30 cm.) in Wellesley Theses Collection. (T 709.93 LEE)

Thesis (M.V.A.)--University of Sydney, 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed 26 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Visual Arts to the Sydney College of the Arts. Includes a list of illustrations: leaves 5-6. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1993. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 21-22).