My interest in oneirism grew out of my search for a concept that would encapsulate my concerns in painting at the start of this project, namely the formal values I exploited, the quotidian subject matter I favoured, and the sense of contemplation I wished to convey. The correlations I perceived between my concerns and oneirism became more emphatic as my research progressed. The more I read about oneirism, the more I became aware of how the concept could be translated into painted form, a process which in turn inspired my practice. This document serves as a means to reflect on something of this complementary process. Within this framework, my discussion of theories related to oneirism is presented to amplify my painting practice. As a reflection on oneirism, the body of work submitted for my MFA comprised paintings in ink and oil. Many pieces were based on snapshots of views and objects in my surroundings. I often cropped the photographs to focus on a single object or a minor detail of a view. My approach was figurative, although it verged on abstraction depending on the source imagery I selected. I used a close-value palette that was dominated by chromatic greys. The structure of my paintings is quite simple in formal terms and my work is generally small in scale. I used these features and selected my subject matter to parallel theories about the oneiric zone that I discovered in my research. In terms of my aims in this project, and the media and approach I used in my practice, the figurative paintings of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and contemporary Belgian painter Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) were most compelling. I responded to their muted palettes and, for me, their work shares a contemplative quality, despite differences in subject matter and approach. However, I was also intrigued by certain artists who used media other than paint to produce work that related to my concerns. I thus touch on the work of some of these artists, in addition to Tuymans and Morandi.

Bibliography: pages 61-63. / The content and form of the work completed for this degree is intended as a narrative. This narrative is constructed to tell stories of my family, and of myself, in a way that openly stresses the playful, mythical, and fictional nature of such narratives in the family and in history. These narratives are not always easily recognisable, believable, or unified, and are read through an arrangement of details. Initially, I intended my tableaux to function as 'emblematic' portraits. In other words, I intended to describe the members of my family by distilling their essential characteristics into a descriptive arrangement of symbolic objects. Although I became aware of the limitations of symbolism, and became more interested in narrative and display, the content of my work has remained personal and descriptive, even though I have emphasised the fictional over the elegiac. My family is not really one of collectors - my grandmother tore up and burnt many of our family photographs when my grandfather died, before she went into an old-age home. She wanted to 'travel light'. What we have left are the stories, the anecdotes and the proverbs: an oral history, or a ·postmemory'. These inherited tales are told through the snapshots that did survive, as they are in all families who take pictures. I have retold and reconstructed my own narratives, because this is the nature of the family romance for everyone - it resides in a world of images, incidental details, and surfaces.

This project attempts to tie together different threads of my experience. It begins with the memory of looking through the garden fence and hedge of my childhood and considers the simultaneously separate and enmeshed lives of my immediate family and those outside of it. In this project I have engaged with the garden as a point of connection, a means by which to consider the possibility of more Edenic, sustainable futures rooted in concepts of care. An investigation into care, through my making, has been central to my research. Under the harsh structures of apartheid, the natural world carried on in spite of the social and environmental restrictions implemented by the apartheid government. I am interested primarily in human experiences of care, belonging and relationship against the backdrop of migrancy, the displacement of discarded people to infertile land, and the loss of indigenous cultures and natural areas. My intention in this work is for the viewer to be reminded of the unending cycles of nature - seasons, joy, nurturance and recurrence - in their silent yet peripatetic way. In this turning towards nature there is a recognition of the spiritual essence of the world as separate and distinct from humankind's inhumanity to each other. In a contemporary context, the prevalence of people from across Africa displaced into South Africa demands a closer consideration of human connections to the land, as does the recent crisis of Syrian migrants in Europe and the ensuing ethnic xenophobia. At present there are 60 million people displaced due to war, religious tension, politics and race. However, there is hope in the care provided by non-governmental organisations, the United Nations, governments and grassroots initiatives; people who want to help those with a bag and a child on their back.

Absences in archives render as impossible access to the fullness of the past. Yet, within the post-apartheid sociopolitical milieu, demands are made of the slivers of evidence in colonial archives to yield more than they contain, to provide material from which counter-colonial narratives may be fashioned. I understand these demands as pressure exerted on archives. In this thesis, I consider this pressure in relation to historical narrations of the lives of two women from the colonial period of the Cape: Krotoa and Anne. Krotoa was a Goringhaicona woman who acted as an interpreter between the Dutch and the Khoekhoe in the early colonial period at the Cape (from 1652). I examine extant literature on Krotoa to show the various ways in which authors have responded to the pressure on the archives in which she appears and how they have dealt with absences within them. I then discuss a number of instances in the archives to demonstrate that the imprint of absence is clearly visible in these archives. Anne was a Scottish noblewoman who lived at the Cape from 1797 to 1802. I investigate the literature about Anne to show how scholars have responded to the pressure on her archive primarily by overlooking the absences within it. I then consider two aspects of Anne’s archive to demonstrate that it, too, bears the imprint of absence. In contrast to approaches to absence that seek to fill in the gaps in archives, I argue that paying attention to the imprints of absence enables us to begin to grasp something of absence in its own right, that is, the negative space of an archive that constitutes a form of absolute absence. I have named this absolute absence in archives the “anarchive”. Identifying the imprints of absences as indicative of the anarchive has led me to instantiate the anarchive through figuration. This is achieved via visual art methodologies in which I systematically avoid reconstruction and instead convene an archive of photographs whose subject, and the curatorial rationale behind their display, is emptiness and transience. My figuring situates the anarchive centre stage and proposes engagement with it as a means of escaping the constraints of archives. When the full extent of the anarchive is brought into view, the limitations of archives are sharply delineated and their ability to control our understanding of the past is rendered absurd.

Employing the media of video and installation, Homunculi of the digital city explores what it means to live in a digitally-mediated city. In my work, I personify both the city and city dwellers as cyborgian characters, by drawing on Donna Haraway's definition of the cyborg. I expand my personification further by employing the Homunculus from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust II (1950, originally published in 1832). I utilise Matthew Gandy, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie's discussions around the broader city so to consider the material and immaterial elements that constitute it. The screens that populate contemporary cities embody both these elements: they are physical objects that perform invisible data, in the vein of Boris Groĭs' analogy of an image file being analogous to a piece of music that needs to be performed in order to be sensible. By drawing on these frameworks, I position the city as a high density of screens that are physically ubiquitous, often a prosthetic, and function as a gateway to the immaterial elements of the city.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / This debut short story collection includes three fiction pieces: "Still Lives," "The Last Best Place," and "Neighbors."

No description available.

No description available.

abstract: These five stories present and trouble a question that has been posed in literature from courtly love poetry to Romantic anti-heroes to the writing born of Twentieth Century human and civil rights movements: what if one's individual desires are greater than or different from what she is allowed by her world, or half her conscience? Where should her fidelity lie? Unrepentant transgression and the penance one must endure after such a choice: in one way or another that recognition and impulse, and the aftermath of following it, is the force that moves characters through these stories. The stories are of romantic love, and the love is both literal unto itself and an allegory: the question of fidelity has to do with the self, as the characters' choice to attain the lover, in each case, is also an attainment of the self because it is an assertion of the "rightness" of individual desire against the decrees of a greater system. The "crossing" thus refers to that of boundaries: the characters make choices to push or break through what is sanctioned and what is untried; they transform; they become from one self into another as they resolve to defy, love, and simply be, drawing new lines through and around their worlds. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2012

A collection of short stories / n/a / 2031-01-01