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Crossing the Ecoline: a visual response to increasing levels of ocean acidification
No full textThis text is presented in conjunction with my exhibition Crossing the Ecoline and is a visual response to changing levels of ocean acidification. My art making is informed by the processes of dispersal and dissolution that occur at the point where the absorption of carbon dioxide takes place between the atmosphere and the ocean. This project is of an interdisciplinary nature and traverses art and science - both technically and through collaboration. By working in close consultation with marine scientists I hope to draw attention to the little-known issue of ocean acidification through creative means. Through the consideration of materials and processes I aim to bring attention to where billions of microorganisms called phytoplankton live. The project is concerned with the idea of the edge: boundary or border as a conceptual notion, as well as through my art making practice, its interdiscplinarity and subject matter
Erasing the object : sculptural manoeuvres into the sublime
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 63-85).During the Spring of 1969, as if adopting the guise of the explorer/adventurer of yesteryear, the American artist Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973) and his artist-wifeNancy Holt (1938 - )2 travelled to the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico (Roberts 2000: 552).Over a century earlier, in 1841, the American 'travel writer' John Lloyd Stephens(1805 -1852)3 had embarked on a similar voyage to the Yucatan peninsula and documented his encounters in his then celebrated book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan(1843). Smithson, aware of Stephens' travels and book, published his own account of his experiences on the Yucatan peninsula in an essay wryly entitled 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan41 in the September 1969 edition of the periodical Artforum
Claiming process : a strategy of production in approaching notions of self, biography and community in painting
No full textMy project is an exploration of process within the painting medium, themed round my experiences of 'self' and community, as located in my past and present circumstances. Throughout my work, my intention has been to explore my social, personal and political 'beliefs' in order to create a body of paintings that both reflects and challenges my 'belief' structures. In my work there are contradictory desires for change and stability, and an ongoing struggle between location and dislocation
Gutter Pop
Get PDFThis research project revolves around wax, an inherently mercurial and unstable medium, porous to contaminants, sensitive to temperature, and preservative by nature. In a series of artworks and a minor dissertation, I engage with wax as both material and metaphor; an analogy with which to explore the relationship between human and natural environments and the themes of temporality and disintegration within the context of the present climate crisis. Bees, the producers of natural wax, are attracted to my work and constitute an integral part of the project. Gradually removing wax from the studio to their hive, they have become co-producers. The resulting collaborative works gesture to a post-natural state where the unknown biodegradable effects of human production and waste — continuously synthesised materials and contagions that co-evolve with organic processes — create a hybrid ecosystem. In articulating my practice and its thematic resonances, I am guided by posthumanist theorists Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz. My engagement with wax explores a mediated materiality shaped by haptic, synthetic, and digital interventions. These interventions extend reflections on the tentative co-existence of the human and non-human world, and question the capacity for protection and preservation. My work envisions precarious futuristic environments by creating tensions between process, form, material, and colour, and collapsing previously held boundaries of pictorial space and interdisciplinarity. In a presentation of my methodologies, I discuss how my chance collaboration with bees has further informed my understanding of posthumanist thinking and expanded the field of my painting practice
The virus and the vaccine: curatorship and the disciplinary outsider
No full textIn the various departments of a university, researchers, lecturers and students exercise limitations on the objects or subjects they study through the disciplinary categorisations and processes they apply. These methods, taught in the curricula of their undergraduate programmes, promote a particular way of looking and of understanding that privileges certain characteristics over others. As students become assimilated into their respective academic communities, they become naturalised to the resulting biases, habits, norms and conventions and, subsequently, are unaware of lurking blind spots. This process limits the kinds of knowledge these disciplinary ‘insiders' are exposed to, and I argue that it can lead to the occlusion of ethical considerations, hinder discovery and perpetuate negative aspects of the hegemonic Western foundations of many of these disciplines. To support these claims, I focus on an object housed in the University of Cape Town (UCT) library, a Tabloid medicine chest. This chest has been rendered invisible in the library because it exhibits characteristics that fall outside of those privileged by the library's categorisation systems and its search engines. By conducting an object-study that delivers a wide range of findings – most quite separate from the chest's original intended use – the object becomes a prompt and a provocation to examine where else in the institution knowledge has been rendered invisible by insiders and their methods. I survey objects and collections resident in the departments of the university and discuss two collections in detail: the M.R. Drennan anatomical collection, actively used in science curricula, and the Kirby collection of indigenous instruments, almost invisible in its host department. These case studies illustrate how limits imposed by their respective insiders curtail the explanatory power of objects, limiting an understanding of the social and political pressures brought to bear on a discipline and that shape its practice. The case studies, particularly of the Drennan collection, also illustrate that outsider perspectives can help expose disciplinary limitations. The next part of this enquiry considers the outsider perspective as championed by a particular form of curatorship and artmaking introduced by lecturers at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT in the 1990s. The exhibition making format and curatorial strategies introduced by these individuals are shown to be effective in revealing limitations placed on objects, in surfacing blind spots within the university and its affiliated museums and in opening up collections and their disciplines to outside perspectives. The effects of such exhibitions are traced as they reverberate in the university and culminate in the introduction of an interdisciplinary initiative focused on examining the university's knowledge archives, the instatement of an honours programme in curatorship and various departmental installations. Lastly, to elucidate what is at stake when an object is limited by the constraints of its host department and to showcase the potential of artmaking and curatorship in combating these limitations, the invisible chest in the library is subjected to a range of my own artmaking and curatorial strategies. This process is conceptualised as a shift from object-as-virus to object-as-vaccine. The methods I employ celebrate a much wider resonance of the object and extend the results revealed by the object-study at the start of this thesis
Variations on a theme by John Herschel
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.Herschel resided in Cape Town until 1838. He set up a telescope in the orchard of their estate, Feldhausen, in Wynberg, and worked towards completing a systematic survey of the southern hemisphere for stars, nebulae and other celestial objects (Warner, 1996:55 & Buttmann, 1974:104). Herschel’s observations in the Cape were not only focused on astronomy. His scientific contributions included work in the fields of geology, meteorology and botany and this scope of diversity extended beyond the disciplines of science since he also pursued his interests in poetry, music and visual art (Buttmann, 1974:112 & Schaaf, 1989:10). Herschel played the flute and was also an avid draughtsman, evident in the extensive collection of sketches that he made of Cape botanicals and landscapes (Schaaf, 1989:10). In addition to these sketches, his diary entries from his stay in Cape Town, published in “Herschel at the Cape: diaries and correspondence of Sir John Herschel, 1834 to 1838” provide another affirmation of his variety of skills, since poetic descriptions and multi-sensory observations can be found amongst scientific and analytical inquiries. For example, in his diary entry March 1836 he commented on a nightjar’s song and included a music staff with an accurate notation of the bird’s melody. In a letter to William Henry Harvey in 1837 Herschel wrote about the scents of Cape flowers, applying perceptive metaphors for each flower species, such as cinnamon, pepper and ginger (Warner, 2011:34-35). He often created links between his observations from these different fields, such as applying his study of botany to that of photography by using Cape flower juices for photographic colour filters (Schaaf, 1992:98). The title of my MFA project references John Herschel as well as the Theme and Variation form in music in which a single musical theme, often written by a different composer, is followed by a series of developments of this theme through the employment of a range of compositional techniques (Lindsay, n.d.). The body of work that I created is structured according to this musical form. I used Herschel’s representations from and of the Cape as the basic theme which I then developed through a series of variations, employing media and methods across disciplines, time periods and sense modalities. By way of this process of mediation, the resulting art works become parallel records of my own specific experience of Cape Town
The cannibals' banquet
Get PDFIncludes bibliographical references.In this project I have attempted to determine and analyse my own "mechanisms of filtering, selecting and assembling" (Hoptman 2007: 128). The cannibals' banquet consists of a practical body of work and an artist's book. The function of the artist's book is to contextualise my creative practice within a theoretical and historical context. My area of interest is assemblage and its relation to consumption. A primary attribute of consumption is that it is premised upon the creation of a constant desire for new things. The corollary of this process is a mass of obsolete or 'dead' objects, which are discarded to make room for these recent acquisitions, ending up in scrap yards, second hand shops and flea markets. My interest is in what I perceive as an integral relationship between the origins and development of assemblage and that of a consumer society, since both function within object relations. With object relations I mean the interaction between people and objects as although objects themselves are lifeless, the relationship between an object and a person is animated through the assignment of meaning to an object by a person. In this sense the object stands in relation to the person who projects certain attributes onto it as the carrier of such meanings. The same object could conceivably hold completely different meanings assigned to it by different individuals at the same time
Post- Print: a moment of compression
No full text‘Post-Print' is a practice-led project that seeks to situate the emergence of the printmaking tradition - and the notion of the print as ‘reproduction' - as a pivotal Event which once shaped a past era's perception of reality, just as the ‘digital-multiple' template today functions as a contemporary reproduction of our Being. For this project, I will draw on Slavoj Žižek's philosophical reading of the notion of ‘Event' as a framework for my central thesis: I want to expand on how the moment of compression for a technology for looking (i.e., the introduction of the printing press and the digital device) may be considered a veritable Event. In the process, I will inevitably rely on Walter Benjamin's observations in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' as an inspiration for my discussion of the print as reproduction and the image as Event. Finally, I happily acknowledge the influence of Guy Debord's ‘The Society of the Spectacle' (1967), to which I will bring a particular focus on the notion of ‘the mediation of being through the image' in relation to my video installation, entitled ‘Image-Machine'. The progression of creative discourse - the transition from the ‘print' to the ‘post' as the means of infinite reproduction - is the core of my project, as this shift of mediums contextualises my own retrospective mediations of the avalanche of images that characterise the present Event. Rather than mere diversions, I consider historical thinking and anachronism to be practical methodologies in my work. These retroactive interventions are themselves closely informed for me by the philosophical strategies of fragmentation, reframing and détournement variously proposed by Benjamin, Žižek and Debord. Thus, I will discuss here how these philosophical ideas have shaped the critical processes and curatorial choices within my final exhibition, ‘Post – Print', whilst also referencing and cross-examining my video installation, ‘Image Machine', and an installation of press-like object works, titled ‘Fragmented Studio'
The Printer's Grey : alchemy, ritual and performance in fine art printmaking
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.Peter Zhang, in writing on the work of Deleuze and Guatarri, identifies what he calls Deleuzian minor rhetoric 1: namely the need to step outside of the major language and occupy the position of minority. This position of minority, which for Deleuze is a position of power, is achieved through the process of becoming, a constant state of mobility. In a sense this is one of the motivations for my project - understanding the language of printmaking I find myself invested in by considering the material qualities of printmaking as well as the process or act of printing through a number of visual forms. In order better to understand my own position within printmaking, I have used this project to explore the figure or persona of the printmaker and in doing so I am journeying towards the Deleuzian position of minority by questioning ways of thinking about print and the printmaker. This project is located within the fine arts practice of printmaking, but positions itself as an investigation of the liminal, in-between processes of printmaking in terms of alchemy and ritual through the figure of the printmaker. The project is everything in-between the initial idea for a print and the final product, a space I have come to refer to as The Printer's Grey. This reflects my own art-making methodology and my particular approach and thinking within printmaking, where my notebooks and proofs hold the same importance as the eventual printed product. These objects all reveal a creative process, which is flexible and shifting rather than one that merely renders an image in printed form. In drawing attention to the in-between processes during the act of making I assert both its instrumental role in the creation of the print as well as the importance of the process as a site of thinking through the visual. Specifically in relation to printmaking, The Printer's Grey speaks to and seeks to draw into the gallery space aspects of the in-studio process of making a print - aspects which often remain hidden when viewing a print
Creative Curatorial Practice as a Means of Reorientating Display Tropes in Museums of Natural History
No full textThis paper provides a critical analysis of natural history museums
and their display practices. It explores the contradictions
inherent in the concept of “natural history” and the dominance
over nature it implies. The paper argues that museums still
promote authoritative classification and knowledge systems that
reinforce hierarchical structures and colonial ideologies. The
author, an artist-curator and printmaker, shares her experiences
with three exhibitions that challenge traditional display
methods. By disrupting linear progression, introducing complex
interconnections, and emphasizing sensory experiences, the
exhibitions aim to create alternative models of display that
reflect the entangled and web-like nature of speciation. The
goal is to move beyond colonial narratives and imagine new
ways of representing and understanding the natural world
within museum spaces.CR202
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