Thesis (M.F.A.)--Boston University

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Warwick, 1990.

This project has visually explored the relationships between language, knowledge and subjectivity. Its conceptual foundations have been developed through an engagement with post-structural theory, literature and personal experience. Its visual language has been formed by adopting aspects of the theories of postproduction and relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud in tandem with early conceptual arts aesthetic of administration. The result of the project is a series of installations that focus on viewer experience and offer the possibility of developing new narratives about our relationship to language and knowledge. The installations incorporate already existing materials, cultural signs, objects and ideas associated with institutional practices of collecting, manipulating and disseminating information. The familiar language of bureaucracy has thus been used to create a network of seemingly interconnected scenarios that engage the viewer in the shifting roles of protagonist, subject, witness or voyeur. A sense of uncertainty and confusion is produced, evoking the idea of a fractured subjectivity in a state of limbo, a condition in which meaning is gained only through attempting to piece together the different narratives on offer. The nature of our relationship to language and knowledge is thus evoked through physical and psychological interaction as well as visual engagement with the work. The project's concern with language, knowledge and information systems harks back to the conceptual art movement of the1960s and to contemporary art's accompanying engagement with philosophy, in particular post-structuralism. Within this context, it has re-visited and re-assessed ideas about the role of language in defining contemporary subjectivity and has explored strategies for conveying those ideas through installation. From Kosuth to the Kabakovs, it references a broad spectrum of artists who have investigated related themes using an almost uncategorisable array of non-traditional materials, styles and strategies. The project has concluded that we are fragmented subjects in a state of limbo, our relationship to language and knowledge characterised by paradox, anxiety, complicity and challenge - and a continued search for meaning and wholeness despite their seeming absence. Ultimately, it has presented the viewer with an opening: a new network of possible narratives about language, knowledge and self. Although these narratives appear to be linked, they fail to come to a neat conclusion. Just as contemporary subjectivity is in a state of limbo, so too, are the scenarios depicted in the installations.

This research project investigates visual metaphors for aspects of the nature/ culture paradox. Modern human beings formalise nature, natural elements and natural processes by quantifying and qualifying the environment to better define themselves. A desire to comprehend and gain control over nature is expressed through the imposition of artificial systems and mathematical descriptions. However, the forces of entropy and decay are ever present. Despite attempts to suppress these physical processes, humans are necessarily bound to a common material existence. In response, attainment of a spiritual dimension is sought through cultural expression. The project explores how the nature/ culture paradox is manifested in the phenomenon of landscape design, especially formal gardens of 18th century Europe, including features such as Platonic forms, labyrinths, mazes and meanders. Particular attention is given to the work of Batty Langley. The investigation is located within an international field of artists concerned with the culture/ nature question. The enquiry considers artists who create visual representations of symbolic pathways, such as Jorgen Thordrup and Marianne Ewaldt. Land and environment art is examined with regard to concepts of order, disorder, entropy and stasis, emphasizing those artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Jurg Altherr, who contrast artificial constructions with natural settings. It also considers the appropriation of nature in a search for the sublime through the sculptural installations of Anja Gallaccio. Examination of formal garden features has informed new hybrid motifs which are developed in the work for this project. The application of these designs to the sculptural and installation mediums has involved innovative usage of materials and techniques. The development of a personal symbology to present metaphors for order and chaos/ entropy and stasis, has produced new juxtapositions of man made forms and natural elements. Exploration of the viewer's engagement with space and physical ambience, including smells, has also been an important element of the work. In addition, new methods have been developed to visualise concepts through computer generated virtual drawings and, to present the preparation and exhibition of sculptural installations through digital photography. Finally, the project considers the spiritual dimension within human culture, employing a number of universal symbols in new ways to create works, which echo both eastern and western sensibilities, for example, metaphorical methods for attainment and links between Buddhist and alchemical symbolism.

The project addresses issues of value and meaning in objects while at the same time considering more sustainable approaches to designing, making and consuming, through the reuse of already existing materials. By exploring concepts such as durability and ephemerality, the precious and the mundane, I have sought to show possibilities for reconciling the production of objects with reduced environmental effects of their production, use and disposal. This was an issue that tended to be neglected during the period of modernist design with its embracing of technology and the machine aesthetic. Since the 1960's with the emergence of designers and writers such as Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller there has been a growing concern to develop more sustainable approaches to design, and a broader consideration of meaning and engagement with objects. Some of the significant contemporary designers addressing these issues include Paolo Ulian, Hella Jongerius and Constantin and Laurene Boym. It is with reference to this field that I contextualise my practice. Through the research project I have recognised the importance of a local focus, in supporting more sustainable approaches and engagement with objects. In the process I have identified factors specific to designing with reuse materials, and have used them to guide the direction of the research. These include: material availability, perceived value of materials, time or cost required to achieve a high finish, design complexity and sophistication, and perceived value of the finished product. What has also emerged from the research is the importance of commercial considerations in designing for sustainability, as I believe economically viable objects contribute more than purely symbolic ones in influencing the perceptions and habits of designers and consumers. The project has shown that engagement with objects and sustainable approaches, when considered as integral to a design's development, can be mutually beneficial and lead to aesthetically sophisticated and highly valued objects.

This project investigates new ways to apprehend and visually reconfigure aspects of concealed or disputed pasts.' The intention of this work is to enable a viewer to experience obscured or nearly forgotten narrativesnarratives of memory, time, absence, location and representation. The works utilise found and constructed objects and techniques from the visual arts, the museum, the library, the shop, the garden. One common methodology is the arrangement of multiple objects to activate a surface optically, and encourage a viewer to read it as a means of temporarily holding the objects in place. In doing so they find themselves part of the work. These pieces are experiments in understanding how viewers can travel around an artwork and in this process move their position back and forth, flickering between past and present and personal and national memory. Most works incorporate ideas of movement or stasis either technically or in the story which they may be partially relating to the viewer. This suggestion of waiting or of motion summons a viewer to enter into the work as a timekeeper. This is an anxious position where many of the materials inviting curiosity, and initially implying the humorous, accrue a sinister edge as the viewer reaches a point of understanding his/her caged predicament within the work. For the first time all these works will be exhibited together. Showing them in different locations raised considerations of setting both spatial and conceptual - and recent works have developed that are about journeying across time and place. The investigation has emerged from very personal considerations of the place of memory, forgetting, loss, denial and the potency of the past within my own family. Artists who have explored similar terrain, visually reconfiguring the marginal or the textual, include Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Tracey Moffatt, Christian Boltanski and Fred Wilson. This project has been a journey through many stories across time. These have inevitably been incorporated into my own memory, my own life, and my own increasingly open narrative of deciphering self in the process of relating the past. Each work has been built from the outcomes of the last, and represents a claiming within a larger consideration of ways to personally invoke and involve nation, viewer and self in acknowledging our entangled histories.

Diss.--Lund.

Through eight experiments this thesis investigated the divergence in children’s abilities in the domain of tool making. Despite being excellent tool manufacturers following full instruction, children displayed great difficulty in innovating novel tools to solve problems. Experiments 1 to 3 found four-to-seven- year-olds’ tool-innovation difficulty to be a robust phenomenon that extended to new tasks requiring different tools made by a variety of methods and materials. Experiments 3 and 4 aimed to discover whether some tool-innovation tasks are harder for children than others. Together these experiments suggested that the difficulty of tool innovation is due to the type of transformation required. Experiments 5 to 8 investigated why children find tool innovation so difficult. Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out singular executive functions as limiting factors on children’s performance. Experiments 7 and 8 found that young children have great difficulty in generating and coordinating the components of a problem even if aspects of the task are highlighted for them. Overall this thesis led to the conclusion that tool-innovation difficulty is due the ill-structured nature of the task. Additionally this thesis provides new definitions and frameworks with which to study tool-related behaviour that will benefit both the developmental and comparative literatures.

This study explores the tension between text and image in the fashion spreads published in three magazines since 1980: The Face, Arena and Vogue. It takes as its starting part Roland Barthes' axiom that the magazine is 'a machine for making Fashion' and pursues his thesis that it is through 'represented clothing', rather than real garments themselves, that the meaning of Fashion is connoted. But it also contests his idea that the Fashion system is a vacuous or trivial form of signification, and in exploring both the verbal and pictorial elements of fashion spreads aims to uncover how they intersect with wider cultural events. The material under discussion has been arranged into three separate parts. Each one has its own discursive framework and diverse methodological perspective, yet it is also dialectically related to the others in a wider argument concerning the construction of the body in word and image in contemporary fashion photography. Part One serves to provide an overview of the evolution of the three chief titles consulted, considering the social, economic and aesthetic factors that have been instrumental in forging an identity for fashion photography since 1980. At the same time, it examines the preoccupation with a postmodern treatment of time and history in various spreads and assesses whether iconocentrism ipso facto renders fashion photography devoid of any deeper meaning. Part Two builds on this argument by analysing the ideas propounded in Roland Barthes' Systeme de la Mode, chiefly the distinction he makes between written clothing (le vetement ecrit) and image-clothing (le vetement-image), in the context of debates on logocentrism. Here I assess whether Barthes' predilection for written clothing is both viable and relevant when it comes to making sense of the symbolic content of represented clothing with particular reference to a fashion spread called 'Amoureuse' from Elle (June 1958). I also evince the same spread along with more contemporary examples to assess the way that Barthes deals with sex and gender in Systeme de la Mode. Part Three consolidates this exploration of gender and fashion by concentrating on the intense interest in sex and the body that has subtended much fashion imagery between 1980 and 1996. At this point, I deal with the objectification of female and male sexualities by mobilising the central tropes of the 'girl' and the phallic body respectively. In the process, I raise a diverse and complex intersection of related issues concerning identity formation and otherness, power, and visual pleasure. Thus I examine the investment that different producers and spectators might have in the fashion image: male and female; straight and gay; and white and non-white. In particular, I draw heavily on the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan, as well as more recent writing by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler and Diana Fuss.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-37).