This project draws on aspects of research into the plight of women prostitutes working in Lal Batti areas of India. The project considers historical, contemporary and personal texts that form the basis of a creative synthesis. This synthesis is manifest in the design of five fabric-based artworks that seek to interpret issues of manipulation, entrapment, belonging, spirituality and demise. The project is located beyond the boundaries of fashion design. However, it involves an artistic fusion of garment construction, fabric and surface treatment. In doing this, the thesis seeks to give ‘voice’ to a political commentary that reaches beyond commercial uses of garments for display and protection.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Visual Art education, in an increasingly globalized visual world, is gaining significance for its contribution to the intuitive, critical and creative aspects of student learning and meaning-making. This awareness is foregrounded by a realization that tomorrow’s world will be increasingly dominated by the triumph of the image, multi-modal practices, technologies and visual culture. In this context, the development of an ethico-aesthetic disposition through visual contemporary communicative capacities might be regarded as essential to modern meaning-making. The research seeks to reveal the impact of studying Visual Art for the adolescent student and its value to them in terms of its contribution to their personal, social and cultural understandings beyond the classroom. This research represents a qualitative examination of a post-compulsory Visual Art curriculum in New South Wales, Australia that has shifted from a modernist perspective to a conceptual framework informed by contemporary art practices and by a Habermasian theory of communicative knowing. The research presents its findings in the form of, first a meta-analysis of a longitudinal study of the ARTEXPRESS exhibition spanning 15 years of student learning outcomes from the Visual Art curriculum and, second, a case study of 7 students who reflect on the value of the Visual Art learning to them beyond school. The study employs a critical hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, using image and text analysis as data. The methodology bridges traditional educational research methods with Visual Art practices by employing arts-inquiry as a qualitative research method. It uses the montage as a visual communicative platform informed by narrative perspectives to present the results. In the 21st century, educators, together with the entire world community, are growing in consciousness of the arts as a significant player in developing the attributes and skills that citizens will require in order to be effective participants of tomorrow’s rapidly evolving world. The public welfare benefits that accrue from the arts' intrinsic values are increasingly being seen to constitute a central role in generating wider benefits (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaris & Brooks, 2004; National Review of Visual Education, 2006). Through analysis of ARTEXPRESS student artworks, reflective journals and interviews, the research identified that the skill of visual communicative proficiency links explicitly to the performative act as it emerges from each student’s desire and affectivity. In turn, this act is demonstrated to be beyond the knowledge of Visual Art cultural practices, being shaped by critique and power relationships in society. Self-portrait as narrative and subjectivity production were seen by the students as legitimate means of communicating meaning about self and other. The understanding of the logic of the relationships between visual technical activity, embodied material processes and conceptual understandings as contemporary communicative practices was valued by students and parents for its capacity to mediate societal and cultural values, as well as ethical practice and citizenship. Visual and performative communicative practice links identity, image and meaning. In this study these practices supported self-agency and the creative development of multiple, reflective returns. Visual artmaking is presented as supporting the development of creative possibilities. In turn, an understanding of the endless ways in which imaging and communicating can represent self, truth, reality and existence benefit the individual and society quite beyond the bounds of the traditional classroom.

The Reformed tradition, following Zwingli and especially Calvin, excluded images from the churches. Calvin rejected the sacred images of his day as idolatrous on the grounds that they were treated as making God present, that the necessary distinction between God and God’s material creation was not maintained, and because an image, which rightly was to be mimetic of visible reality, could not truthfully depict God. Calvin approved the Renaissance notion of visual art as mimetic and he understood that artists’ abilities were gifts of God and were to be used rightly. He also had a very keenly developed visual aesthetic sense in relation to nature as the “mirror” of God’s glory. However, the strong human tendency towards idolatry before images, he believed, meant that it was not expedient to place any pictures in the churches. Reinterpretation of key biblical passages, particularly the first and second commandments (Calvin’s numbering), together with changes in the understanding of what constitutes visual art, of the relationships between words and visual images, and of the processes of interpretation and reception not only of texts but of all perceived reality, lead to a re-thinking of the issues. The biblical narrative with its theological insights can be interpreted into a visual language and used by the church as complementary to, but never replacing, biblical preaching and teaching in words. Attention to the visual aesthetic dimensions of the worship space is important to allow for this space to function as an invitation and call to worship. Its form, colour, light and adorning may give aesthetic delight, which leads to praise and thanksgiving, or it may provoke other response which helps people prepare to offer worship to God. The world and its people depicted in visual art/image may inform the praying of the church and the visual representation of the church (the saints) may provide congregations with an awareness of the breadth of the church at worship in heaven and on earth. In the present diversity of views about visual art and the work of the artist there is freedom for the artist to re-think the question of vocation and artists may find new opportunities for understanding and exercising their vocation not only in secular art establishments and the community but also in relation to the worship of the church.

This study examined the effectiveness of a combination of seven different visual art activities, hat decoration, collage, embossing, painting, ceramics, photography, and printmaking, on quality of life for eight veterans with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The eight veterans were selected from the population of residents at the Thomson‐ Hood Veterans facility in Wilmore, Kentucky. These veterans were administered the seven art activities mentioned above, which ranged from less difficult to increasing difficulty. Three standard self‐reporting instruments, the Quality of Life‐AD, the Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale, and the Smiley‐Face Mood Assessment, as well as systematic observation and surveys were used to explore the effectiveness of the activities in improving quality of life and to identify other relevant domains. The results suggest that the combination of art activities improved the quality of life of the participants, including observed domains of focus and concentration, problem‐solving skills, memory, imagination, motor skills, self‐esteem, mood, and social interaction. The educational approach used simple to more complex problem‐solving skills and seemed to enhance cognitive performance and contribute to improved quality of life.

The purpose of this document is to design and record a Kindergarten visual arts unit using the Activboard to determine how student achievement, motivation, and interest are impacted. Methods of data collection include both observational recording and student interviews. The Activboard facilitates a highly interactive study of the art curriculum and data collected throughout the unit indicates a positive impact on student achievement, motivation, and interest.

This thesis revolves around an obvious fact: printed (or otherwise two- or three-dimensional) poetry is always and inevitably visual. By analysing a representative selection of poems, including conspicuously experimental and image-like poems as well as examples of more conventional poetry, the thesis points out that visual iconicity is an equally inevitable consequence of the visuality of printed poetry. The analysis applies terminology relating to iconicity and intermediality (presented by Lars Elleström, whose theoretical basis is the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce) to the selected poems, while avoiding making too specific interpretations, in order to maintain a discussion of the ever-present phenomenon of visual iconicity as such, and not just the individual examples. Rather than introducing visual iconicity specifically to confirm more or less specific interpretations of poetic texts, this method of approaching poems as two-dimensional works of art is what this paper mainly aims to propose, as a productive starting point for literary analyses in general; as is concluded in the theoretical framework by Elleström, the actual modal and iconic properties of printed poetry contradict mutually exclusive dichotomies such as verbal/visual and text/image. While indirectly visually iconic poems tend to have a wider range of possible interpretations at the outset, the existence of iconic potential, however, does not depend on any specific interpretation.

THE INDEFINITIVE SELF: subject as process in visual art This doctoral study is comprised of both creative work and accompanying critical study and exegesis, each comprising 50 per cent of the total weight of submission. The body of research develops a feminist genealogical methodology to explore the study’s central idea: that envisioning the feminine subject as process rather than a fixed entity enables political agency without recourse to rigid essentialism. The creative work, a public space installation in South Brisbane Cemetery at Dutton Park, is titled Last Drinks Gentlemen Please and traces the life and character of my great, great aunt Cecilia Mary Tennant (1875-1938). Documentation and discussion of this work is included in the exegesis and can also be viewed online at the web address http://www.GMTplus10.info/. The thesis presents a critical contextualisation analysing the work of the artists Tracey Moffatt, Mona Hatoum and Pipilotti Rist, as well as my own practice, and identifies key strategies enabling the representation of identity as process. Finally, this study proposes the figure of the Aunt as an elective relationship that enables both intimacy and agency beyond patriarchal constructions of the feminine.

This project draws on aspects of research into the plight of women prostitutes working in Lal Batti areas of India. The project considers historical, contemporary and personal texts that form the basis of a creative synthesis. This synthesis is manifest in the design of five fabric-based artworks that seek to interpret issues of manipulation, entrapment, belonging, spirituality and demise. The project is located beyond the boundaries of fashion design. However, it involves an artistic fusion of garment construction, fabric and surface treatment. In doing this, the thesis seeks to give ‘voice’ to a political commentary that reaches beyond commercial uses of garments for display and protection.

The expanding potential for the dissemination and archiving of aphorisms is explored in this practice-based research thesis. An aphorism is a short statement that communicates an insight about the world (and can sometimes function as a guide to action). Eric McLuhan, interviewed in Signs of the Times: The History of Writing (Goëss Video, 1996), suggests that the future of the book is the aphoristic statement. Aphoristic knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through texts and through libraries, but this project brings into play various modes of recirculating aphoristic texts using contemporary distribution networks and digital media such as moving image, projection on to urban screens, artists’ books, archival digital photography and glazed ceramics. Texts ‘virally inhabit’ a number of sites and languages in a series of works situated in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary text art and artists’ books. The sayings rejoin the cultural river of ideas in local and international incarnations. Practice-based work (80%) and exegesis (20%)

This thesis examines works by the British interwar writers W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice in the context of their relationship with the contemporary style of visual art known as Art Deco or the Moderne. It is my contention that, having absorbed many of the Art Deco idioms as an accepted part of the world they experience, these are reflected in the writers' works, firmly relating the work to a unique historical moment, place and social and cultural environment. In my reading of their work I identify sources of inspiration in their themes, idioms and imagery common to the artistic style, and investigate the extent to which their work has been informed in content and composition by visual art. Using diaries, travelogues, letters, essays, prose and poetry, I will argue that if Art Deco characterised the interwar period, it follows that it will also characterise the work of Auden and MacNeice. As such, I seek to reframe their work in an entirely new context, one seemingly unnoticed by earlier critics. My project also considers the ways in which a worldview is formed and environments are learned from childhood, with reference to early twentieth-century psychologists Erich Fromm, Lev Vygotsky and Maria Montessori, in order to posit the notion that growing up in the heyday of Art Deco, Auden and MacNeice may have subceived a great many of its motifs. I also identify the ways in which the writers engage visual art with intent, and establish a relationship between the writers and Art Deco's politics, imagery and composition through discussion of individual poems and their co-authored book Letters From Iceland (1937). In particular, the thesis examines the presence and impact of Art Deco elements in their work, such as Cubism (using both visual and literary examples), Futurism, the cinema, the Ballets Russes, and interwar attempts at producing what Wagner termed gesamtkunstwerk, the 'total work of art'.