The contemporary visual landscape can be seen as a continuously shifting experience of surfaces. Synthetic, glossy, reflective, transparent, flexible and colour saturated. We find them often in the form of architectural facades, automotive finishes, interior fabrications, printed materials and design objects. They are rich, seductive and desirable skins on the surface of everyday items. / Within recent contemporary visual art practice, and particularly certain nonobjective painting practices, there can be seen to be an engagement with the idea of surface as it relates to aspects of the 'everyday'. These artists are often incorporating 'new' materials and methods of making that actively respond to what is out there in our lived urban environment. They share a concern for rigorous play with an attention to surface quality, functionality, materiality and manipulability. Contemporary artists such as Thomas Rentmeister, Ian Davenport or Jessica Stockholder, to name just a few, could be seen to fit here. On the function of paint and surface Stockholder writes: The paint functions both to alter existing surfaces and as a very flat object in its own right placed over or alongside other objects. The surface of the object conceals the mass of the object from us; it is also the part of the object revealed to our sight, it is an area where we are vulnerable to deception and also a site poignantly ripe for the development of fiction. The surface becomes a tenuous site where fiction and reality struggle with notions of subjectivity and objectivity to find boundaries or to determine difference. / Stockholder talks here about the fundamental ability of paint to alter the visual and tactile characteristics of the 'thing' being painted, making its reality somewhat indeterminate by imposing a different quality. She speaks about paint in terms of surface substance, surface quality and surface manipulation. Paint is a substance separate from the object it is applied to; like a skin yet capable of transforming its visual and tactile presence in extreme ways, rendering the object less certain. It is this potential of paint as a plastic material capable of contradictory functions that underlies this research project and defines my use of the term 'uncertainty' in the title of my thesis. / Surface - as a kind of fluid, organic, and mobile skin applied over a structure or even as 'structure' itself - can be seen to be a key operative concern within several important architecture and design practices of the past ten years. This development is itself influenced largely by the potential of recent technological developments in software design tools and new materials and manufacturing techniques, which now enable complex, topographically located objects and structures to be readily designed and manufactured. / My research set out to focus mainly on recent comtemporary painting, sculpture and installation practices which, through the use of new materials and methods of making, engage primarily with the manipulation of a surface in a way that emphasises a largely visual engagement with the work. The exegesis will look at the historical relationship of such work to a largely modernist tradition of material-based practice, in an attempt to suggest there exists today a particular attitude that has a positive and openly indexical relationship to the surfaces of our everyday urban environment. This will be supported and extended by references made to particular contemporary design and architectural practices that share concerns for uncertain surfaces or surfaces that suggest ambiguity and flux. / The major focus of my research into this topic has been the development in the studio of a body of artefacts that have been exhibited at various points during my candidature. The written exegesis attempts to position these studio artefacts within a wider critical/cultural context, through discussion of the studio work as situated in relation to ideas and works developed largely by other visual artists, but also by designers and architects which share similar concerns and aesthetic sensibilities with the particular notion of surface that I am attempting to define. / Thesis (MVisualArts) - University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (Masters) -- University of Ballarat, 2008. / Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Visual Arts), Arts Academy. Bibliography: leaves 56-58.

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.