Meztiso is an exploration of the artist’s identity as an individual born and raised in Guatemala; which is a country rich in natural resources where the majority of the population is native Maya yet the ruling class is majority white and poverty is widespread. The artist takes on this stunning contradiction using her own influences and views which were shaped by the political and economic upheaval and instability of her youth in Guatemala. The artist comments on her own identity as a person of mixed ancestry, a Meztiso, and because of her own family’s involvement in the capitalist government that has marginalized the Maya indigenous to this day.

This thesis is an exploration of hospitality, sharing and acclimation within a studio art practice as a means of fostering consideration of others. I employ a practice whereby I disrupt the typical gallery context, and through the production and dissemination of consumable items from the Middle East, I examine how resources can be used, valued, and shared to accommodate various and unspecified others and provide opportunities for crossing thresholds of guest and host relationships.

What is not discussed becomes veiled in denial. And as a woman, what becomes veiled in denial exists as oppression. And what exists as oppression, when confronted becomes taboo, irrational, and improper. This is my body, my mind and my drive. Fresh Expression: A Guide to Cultural Reclamation is a performative, installation that explores subversion, indulgence and the female lactating body in a sociological context; where the audience becomes active participants within a live and changing environment. This live event documents the extrication of my breast milk and recontextualizes the breast milk outside of my body. The event not only explores my personal investment in questioning my experience as a lactating woman in western culture, but also challenges the audience to reflect on topics related to lactation, bodily fluids, consumption, and sexuality.

The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.

The need and longing to connect to another is a fundamental desire of the human heart, enforcing a sense of movement toward social and personal security and, moreover, the future. Yet it is paradoxical that, where people are the most closely crowded together, feelings of alienation and loneliness are often the greatest. We live in times of busy isolation, on streets where we dont know our neighbours, in societies where our lives are lived behind closed doors. As the global village grows, our personal worlds shrink, both by circumstance and by choice. Our innate, gregarious nature faces its greatest challenge, or ultimate defeat.<p> The story of my hometown, New Waterford, is a substantial element in the story of my life as well as my art. The woodcuts and many of the paintings in the exhibition, Slag, are documentations of this place, its inhabitants and their way of life. It is a town with a unique character resulting from the circumstances surrounding its relationship to coalmininga town that is withering away now that the mines are gone. Other paintings in the exhibition depict people and spaces from other places that I have lived. Though the environments change, there are similarities in the pathos of the human subjects that remain constant. In my work, whether I am depicting the inhabitants of a hollowed out town or the solitary subway commuter, they are united as those things that have been lost or left behind in the name of progressthe leftovers and waste: the slag.

Auras is a series of illustrations of Carlos Fuentes’s novella, Aura, a horror love story about memory, obsession, desire, corporeality and immortality. Defying narrative conventions, the story is told through second person. You are the protagonist, Felipe Montero, and are employed by a 109-year old widow to edit her husband's memoirs. Inside the pitchblack house, you fall in love with her beautiful and bizarre green-eyed niece, Aura. The gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion. The story seems to take place within the confines of the widow’s mind. The plot mimics the obsessive, hypnotic quality of nostalgia and memory. Much of my illustrative content and artistic process reflects a personal obsessive nostalgia I have for my grandmother and her life. It is her image, young and old, coupled with the complex and repetitive processes of printmaking, both traditional and current, that inform my illustration and personal interpretation of Aura. My thesis research conculs a series of artistic processes and theories behind image-making that relish the synthesis of new and old. I look at early horror illustration by Harry Clarke and Francesco Goya, and analyze images and practices in early digital graphic design and April Greiman, reappropriated inkjet and woodblock prints (Anselm Kiefer), and my own lasercut woodblock prints.

The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.

The need and longing to connect to another is a fundamental desire of the human heart, enforcing a sense of movement toward social and personal security and, moreover, the future. Yet it is paradoxical that, where people are the most closely crowded together, feelings of alienation and loneliness are often the greatest. We live in times of busy isolation, on streets where we dont know our neighbours, in societies where our lives are lived behind closed doors. As the global village grows, our personal worlds shrink, both by circumstance and by choice. Our innate, gregarious nature faces its greatest challenge, or ultimate defeat.<p> The story of my hometown, New Waterford, is a substantial element in the story of my life as well as my art. The woodcuts and many of the paintings in the exhibition, Slag, are documentations of this place, its inhabitants and their way of life. It is a town with a unique character resulting from the circumstances surrounding its relationship to coalmininga town that is withering away now that the mines are gone. Other paintings in the exhibition depict people and spaces from other places that I have lived. Though the environments change, there are similarities in the pathos of the human subjects that remain constant. In my work, whether I am depicting the inhabitants of a hollowed out town or the solitary subway commuter, they are united as those things that have been lost or left behind in the name of progressthe leftovers and waste: the slag.

Out of the Shadows: The Mezzotints of Graeme Peebles investigates Victorian printmaker Graeme Peebles' engagement with the mezzotint medium since the early 1970s. Over fifty works from the artist's oeuvre of nearly 300 mezzotints are examined to demonstrate Peebles' high quality technical skills and his unique approach to subject matter. This has ranged from enigmatic, surrealist-inspired subject matter to landscapes of the Lake Eucumbene region in the Kosciusko National Park, which range from the ominous and foreboding to the romantic and sublime. In this thesis I explore the intellectual groundwork on which much of Peebles work is based. In doing so I am redressing the imbalance between the popularity of Peebles' work and the lack of critical writing about his art. While his work has been widely collected (see for instance the list of Public Collections that contain holdings of Peebles' work, on page 96), to date his work has not received the attention as deserved by a master of their chosen medium. In reviewing his work in such a manner I believe that Peebles deserves greater recognition in contemporary Australian Art. In conjunction with this thesis I have curated an exhibition bearing the same title, which was displayed at the QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 12 March - 30 May 2004. It then toured to the Latrobe Regional Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Geelong Gallery, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. A 16-page colour catalogue was also produced to accompany the exhibition.

Esta pesquisa apresenta uma investigação sobre a série de xilogravuras de minha autoria, intitulada Brumas, realizada entre 2009 e 2011. Parte das relações entre fotografia e gravura para averiguar como os procedimentos de marcar superfícies e transferir imagens trazem problematizações conceituais para a produção. São articuladas relações entre as linguagens adotadas, através da maneira como elas incitam a presença de um outro. O uso da paisagem se constituiu como fio condutor entre os trabalhos, nos quais procurou-se apontar um estado de suspensão decorrente do velar e revelar imagens. Por fim, para a verificação da estrutura da produção foram identificadas considerações sobre as relações que envolvem tempo e memória durante o processo de criação. / This research project investigates my print series Brumas produced between 2009 and 2011. Based on the relationships between photography and printmaking, it investigates how procedures of marking surfaces and transferring images also involve conceptual issues for production. The relationships between these languages are addressed through the way in which they instigate the presence of an other. The common thread of these works is the use of landscape, which seeks to indicate a state of suspension arising out of concealment and revelation of images. The structure of production was verified by identifying considerations about relationships which involve time and memory during the creative process.