Through processes of making and breaking in sculpture and writing I explore experiences, concepts and perceptions of breaking. ‘Breaking’ is the main theme running through my work but it arises in many different contexts and I deal with it on different planes. My research simultaneously explores and draws parallels between personal experiences in life: breaking bones, making/breaking sculpture and philosophical concepts of the break. In addition, breaking has become my methodology. Since both methodology and subject are ‘breaking’, each contributes to the understanding of the other. In 2006 I broke my collarbone three times, my wrist and my hand and when I returned to making sculpture I could only relate to my previous artwork by breaking it. By using autoethnographic approaches to foreground my subjectivity I describe a shift from health to injury. A corresponding change in my aesthetic understanding reflects a shift from a sense of a whole self to a fragile, broken one and a further perception of the coherence of the whole as inauthentic. The physical act of breaking in my sculptures then creates a further new subject position, that of the breaker, and that is in tension with my normative social position as a woman. In reflecting on the unexpected experience of power through breaking I explore the creative potential of this position for the female artist. I propose that physical breaking can shift the self towards the uncertainty of the ‘void’ by introducing the new subject positions of breaker and broken. The void is articulated as the break between established structures. Its relative freedom creates both risk and creativity, and evidences multiple subject positions associated with lived and de-centred experience. Giving to others the experience of breaking reciprocally benefits my artwork by introducing multiple subject positions and shifting it towards the void.

This research arises out of my situated experience and the subsequent indeterminate positioning of my practice in-between the traditional disciplinary fields of textiles and fine art. Through a body of studio enquiry and accompanying theoretical and reflective commentary, the research questions whether a practice and knowledge base that is historically grounded in the interrogation of medium specific conventions can continue to be viable within a post medium/ postmodern contemporary art context. Implicit within this are two further considerations concerning the relationship between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic contexts and the tensions between subjective and material agency that arise in negotiating these positions. Through a sculptural and installational practice I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in conjunction with other materials, in terms of material agency and ‘productive indeterminacy’, where boundaries become blurred, meaning is unable to settle and fundamental categorical divisions between subject and object are destabilised. The processual inter-relational model of ‘attachment/detachment’ is offered as a conceptual framework and overarching practice methodology that maintains these productive tensions and opens up a complexity through which the medium specific can be mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Three interdisciplinary concepts; ‘camouflage’ (Neal Leach/architecture), mimetic comportment (Theodor Adorno/philosophy) and ‘complicity’ (Johanna Drucker/contemporary art) provide theoretical models which allow for assimilation and differentiation and embodied adaptive behaviour. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s notion of mimetic comportment, the research involves a mode of behaviour that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter in a way that overturns the centrality of the subject. This is manifest through a range of practice strategies - ‘thingness’, ‘staging’ and the confluence of ‘sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment’ - which forge connections where distinctions remain mutable and mobilise a productive tension between subjective attachment and detachment. The research takes the ‘affective turn’, and increasing interest in the agency of material across the arts, humanities and social sciences over the course of the last decade, as contexts which mark a shift away from concerns with signification and which focus instead on the corporeal intensities of material/matter. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile in terms of signifying agency, the project is notable in placing an emphasis on materially embodied experience that privileges aesthetic artifice, complicit formalism and an ambiguous abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation. The research offers a reinscription of medium specificity in terms of material agency, where contrary to modernist conceptions of self-contained aesthetic autonomy there is a simultaneous concern with the distinct material properties of the medium and what they do in the social world. The research reveals that it is the ontological condition of textile as simultaneously social and material that has paradoxically accounted for its historical cultural ambivalence and its cultural significance. Moreover, it demonstrates that it is the interweaving of the sensuous and semantic so effectively mobilised through textile that gives rise to its affective indeterminacy. This affords it agential capacity as a transformative sensuous mode of knowledge production and artistic medium where boundaries between subject and object are destabilised and aesthetic considerations can be continuous with an engagement with social, historical and cultural contexts.

No description available.

Mémoire (M.A.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1994. / Résumé disponible sur Internet. CaQCU Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (M.F.A)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 2, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

Thèse (M. A.)--Université Laval, 2007. / Bibliogr.: f. 54-56. Publié aussi en version électronique dans la Collection Mémoires et thèses électroniques.

Diss.--Philosophischen Fakultät--Saarbrücken--Universität des Saarlandes, 1988. / Bibliogr. p. 205-220.

No description available.

My proposition developed in this thesis is that photographs have changed the way the past is conceived and therefore the way the past is remembered. Just as the inventions of the telescope and microscope radically changed our understanding of distance and space on a macro and micro level, the invention of the photograph has radically altered our concepts of the past, memory and time. My starting point is a collection of photographs taken by my grandfather, Albert Edward Ingham, which is used both in my studio work and as a basis for my theoretical writing. My concerns as an artist are with the ways in which familiar photographs and their relation to ideas of personal memory can be incorporated in an art practice. The written element begins with a reflection into my motivation for using this collection and its usefulness to both my written and studio work. I include a short biography of my grandfather, leading me to consider biography and autobiography, and their relation through photography to autobiographical memory. This is followed by an in depth discussion on autobiographical memory and how it differs from other forms and processes of memory. With this I have placed a discussion of contemporary ideas on photographs. Finally I look closely at ‘external memory systems’ and how these relate to changes in the way autobiographical memory operates in relation to photographs. The emphasis of this thesis is to explore ways to elucidate my own practice as an artist and to offer a commentary on those issues which have been central to its development over the past several years. This has been, and continues to be, a process of making explicit and of clarifying those influences that have resulted in me pursuing autobiography as the major concern of my practice as an artist.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Keith Kovach. Includes bibliographical references (p. 36).