This thesis traces the trajectory of Chen Gu’s work over a three year period, looking at major influences such as Bustos and Saville, on her painting and film projects. She explores the concept of childhood, memory, and portraiture.

Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

<p>Bilaga 1:</p><p><em></em>Ljudfil <em>der Landebahn</em>. Dokumentation i stereoformat av musiken som spelades på Kungliga Musikhögskolan i Stockholm. Total längd 11 min. Maria Lindström: <em>der Landebahn</em> (2018)</p>

My final thesis exhibition, Effluvia and Aporia, explores impermanence, loss and uncertainty. I use materials and images in a poetic way, where there is a link between what the work is and what it means. I use looped videos with images of water, light, and dissolving clay to invite a meditative state. I also use materials like tissue paper, paper-mache, and paper thin porcelain tiles to invite fragility and complexity into the viewer's experience. I am concerned with creating an interactive environment that allows for a multiplicity of responses and interpretations from each viewer depending on their unique perceptions. I am interested in impermanence, loss and uncertainty as themes because I find that they are ever present in life. My intention is to explore these ideas and create an experience that allows for the viewer to reflect on them as well.

My ongoing series of assemblages are an expression my modern mythology through the juxtaposition of esoteric symbols and my collection of beloved action figures. Though myth is founded in partial truths and allegories, it has the unique capability to speak about our relationships to one another and the universe. My artwork conceives of anime, comics, and videos games as part of our contemporary mythology. Inspired by a fusion of pop culture and spirituality, I also draw on the magical properties attributed to flowers, gemstones and other materials to create shrines, altars, and other objects. Juxtaposing these properties, found in my research of esotericism and mythology, with action figures establishes symbolic connections that act as an interface to the spiritual symbolism explored in each piece. The collision of masking tape, shoe polish, flowers; gemstones and repurposed objects result in re-contextualizations of characters from popular culture. My practice suggests new possibilities for cultural symbolism reflective of my own unique experiences and values and as an active expression of creative freedom in our experiences of the divine. My assemblages re-examine traditional categorizations in art and culture, such as sacred and profane and high and low, while attempting to demystify the veil that separates the experiential from the transcendent.

I am learning through these lessons. The following document includes my convoluted musings about my work, making process, and body leading up to my thesis exhibition, Avoidance Kitchen. My struggle with my reflected image comes from my struggle with my self-perceived physical image. What does it mean for a piece to disappear, only to find the reflection of someone else's work or body in its place? Is my craft rendered obsolete if all you want to do is take a funny selfie? Is my work unacknowledged if all you see is the sculpture across the room, in reverse? What happens when an object or installation is elevated and ignored within the same space?

The Building Breathes Together presents a realm of speculative, industrial habitation and alchemical production. In my instillation, I look to raise questions surrounding romantic notions of production and utility. The work introduces a surreal and haunted space of decomposition and regeneration.

The procession is an exhibition of sculpture which expresses the birth and continuity of life. It uses mixed material such as cloting, balloon, latex, epoxy, nylon and oil paint. The writen project is part of the exhibition.

Masters Research - Master of Philosophy / This exegesis is a supportive document to the Sculptural Installation works produced in response to a visual exploration of the tall timber forests of northern NSW. Personal lived experience of the forest environment underpins this investigation and adds to the final presentation of the creative works of art. This particular landscape in the valley of Tanban, Eungai Creek in the Nambucca Shire holds the marks and traces of past human endeavor and is one of many coastal forest sources of the magnificent timber tree – red cedar, and the mythic tales of cedar getters who worked the forests. This place of trees is imbued with memories deeply seated in the cultural identity of the region and is a site of conflict, survival and settlement. Past and present timber practices have left their mark and the landscape bears the scars. Today Indigenous peoples within the region are reclaiming once lost sacred sites within the forest landscape and the once contested forestry practices and blockades have made way for the preservation of old growth, rainforests and cultural sites of significance into reserves and national parks. The sculptural installation works presented here are a reflection of my personal connection to this landscape of trees and the deeply embedded histories the forest contains.

The Unsettled Object is an installational art project that considers the instability of objects in regards to their assembly, classification, and presentation, underpinned by the context of the museum and supported by Michel Foucault’s notion of the classificatory grids he discusses in The Order of Things: an archaeology of the Human Sciences. (Foucault,1970) The artefacts are being fabricated as a response to the corporeal body-on-display; its surfaces, spaces and volumes. An underlying notion of temporality and mutability is indicated in the processes of making, the objects, material responsiveness and the devices employed in the presentation of the work.