A Many Splendored Thing is a summation of my artistic production during my masters.

This paper is a reflection on my research into line in space, and how the contemporary Modernist white cube gallery operates as a inhabited space for this research.

My work is concerned with perception and presentness. Using digital video I am employing a notion of “perceptualism” put forward by artist Jack Chambers. Acknowledging HD television and high speed internet, this work challenges the pace and expectations of a contemporary screen event. It ranges in focus from the domestic to the rural, the intimate and sublime. These works, structured in various conceptual configurations of the 5 - 7 - 5 haiku poem, form an immersive gallery installation. Seventeen haiku videos in this series stretch a primary perceptual impact of various circumstances using superimpositions and quick edits in order to reconsider an immediate present and evoke a sense of wonder.

Behavioural Enrichment is a series of paintings of fictional zoo exhibits; the body of work as a whole creates a silent zoo. The paintings merge imagery and draw comparisons between the stage-like sets of mid-century interior design photographs and Western zoos exhibits. The paintings present curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the ideal home. The contained curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the painted environments are complete with props of still-lifes, behavioural enrichment devices from zoos, and animal actors. These strange worlds of artifice are constructed with images within images: odd compositions and disintegrating spaces that balance between an illusion of depth and an abstract flatness. The work provides a space for the imagination to contemplate many possible metaphors.

“A Strange Loop” explores abstraction through a series of paintings that begin from a single point and evolve infinitely to create a self-contained, self-referential, and yet endlessly self-generating world. The series was created through an elaborate and repetitive process of tracing the marks, drips and forms from an existing painting. These traced drawings archive the act of painting, and serve as a map that reconstructs the space of the subsequent layers, which in turn generate future paintings. The drawings work in a symbiotic relationship with the paintings, each evolving in relation to each other and perpetuating each others’ existence. The resulting paintings are fictional spaces which emerge out of the painting process itself.

'Galore' is a series of drawings that celebrate the urge to reproduce and multiply ‘beauty’. Working from a collection of appropriated photographs, I have produced a suite of small-scale ballpoint pen drawings that explore issues of desire and mortality through the rendered idealization and categorization of beautiful male types. This work is framed within a theoretical discussion of productive desire and the question of beauty as motivation to copy. Metaphorical associations of the cut flower with the disembodied human head are also examined in relation to the vanitas genre of art.

Behavioural Enrichment is a series of paintings of fictional zoo exhibits; the body of work as a whole creates a silent zoo. The paintings merge imagery and draw comparisons between the stage-like sets of mid-century interior design photographs and Western zoos exhibits. The paintings present curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the ideal home. The contained curious new worlds that comment upon the artificiality that is in both zoos and the painted environments are complete with props of still-lifes, behavioural enrichment devices from zoos, and animal actors. These strange worlds of artifice are constructed with images within images: odd compositions and disintegrating spaces that balance between an illusion of depth and an abstract flatness. The work provides a space for the imagination to contemplate many possible metaphors.

“A Strange Loop” explores abstraction through a series of paintings that begin from a single point and evolve infinitely to create a self-contained, self-referential, and yet endlessly self-generating world. The series was created through an elaborate and repetitive process of tracing the marks, drips and forms from an existing painting. These traced drawings archive the act of painting, and serve as a map that reconstructs the space of the subsequent layers, which in turn generate future paintings. The drawings work in a symbiotic relationship with the paintings, each evolving in relation to each other and perpetuating each others’ existence. The resulting paintings are fictional spaces which emerge out of the painting process itself.

'Galore' is a series of drawings that celebrate the urge to reproduce and multiply ‘beauty’. Working from a collection of appropriated photographs, I have produced a suite of small-scale ballpoint pen drawings that explore issues of desire and mortality through the rendered idealization and categorization of beautiful male types. This work is framed within a theoretical discussion of productive desire and the question of beauty as motivation to copy. Metaphorical associations of the cut flower with the disembodied human head are also examined in relation to the vanitas genre of art.

Passing Through, an installation of photography, encourages the nature of memory through an engagement with the materiality of photographic images. Considering memory as an ephemeral phenomenon, I am interested in exploring the emotional and psychological affects that images have on the body and mind. Strategies of collecting and tracing are employed as a means of forming connections between people, places, materials, objects, and images. Recounting personal history, storytelling and participating in the immediate present, I actively seek out images as a means for re-experiencing memory. Triggers reveal themselves during the collection and deconstruction of both personal and found photographic material. Re-assembling this information produces an archive consisting of real and re-imagined fragments of spaces and narratives. Together, these processes produce a body of work that considers the image as an experiential entity that is inherently memory based; triggering memory to create an emotive response in the viewer.