My adaptive and gestural sculptural practice is both the driver and outcome of this Ph.D thesis, which investigates how dialogues of everyday life and commonplace sites are constructed and interpreted to form place identities. The research aims to unfold the stances and intersections of multiscalar sculptural approaches - both the practice of the individual artist and the artworks of official cultural regeneration projects - and therefore takes as its point of departure, issues surrounding mythmaking, the monumental and the hyperlocal. The hyperlocal, the baseline knowledge of place which is drawn upon to interpret other places (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981), is used here to reread the monumental, the official visual projections of community identities, in order to offer better understandings of the use of scale in contemporary sculptural projects. The study is a visual and verbal expression of my 'primal landscape', Teesside, a liminal, post-industrial geography in the North East of England, a sub-region often neglected in debates surrounding cultural practices (Proshansky et al 1978). Two case studies investigate: civic place-making and place-branding objectives via Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's Temenos (2010); and the hyperlocal via an exegegis of the practical submission offered alongside this thesis, the exhibition, Know Your Place (2012) at Platform A Gallery in Middlesbrough. These sculptural works use once local materials, which increasingly carry narratives of global production, to further investigate issues surrounding how identity is revealed and hidden in our engagement with objects and in places. Through re-visioning the monumental through the hyperlocal, this thesis demonstrates the potential of alternative place-making dialogues and processes and how they operate at various scales.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:613625 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | O'Donnell, Anne Langron Menzies |
| Publisher | University of Newcastle Upon Tyne |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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