Installation — MFA assignments

Studio 4
Assignment 3
Major Presentation of Artworks

FLOW

Embodying aesthetic responses to lived experience through process-based analogue photography

This heuristic investigation[1] uses process-based analogue photography to embody my aesthetic responses to my life experiences. Informed by theoretical readings in cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and art, the research aims to harness the merging of my body, mind, lifeworld[2] and artistic practice to engage with photography in terms of an embodied object. The artwork included in my final folio presentation – Respite, Trust, Possibilities, and Truth – exploits the interconnected relationship between my lived body, lifeworld and creative practice. Applying a blended or meta-methodological approach to my practice-led study, each artwork speaks back to each to reflect an interconnected narrative of my aesthetic experiences, united in FLOW, my final folio presentation for the Master of Fine Art program, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2023.

The title of this practice-led study, FLOW, denotes movement and continuity in my creative process, which “[results] through the embodied reconstruction of meanings and relationships in activity … proposing that mind, body and world are interwoven in agency” (Banfield and Burgess 2013, 64 and 65). Conceptually, Flow is situated at a juncture where creative process and material converge to explore the expressive potentiality of uncertainty and chaos. “Chaotic systems [that] demonstrate healthy flexibility, adaptability, readiness for change, resistance to environmental entrapment, autonomy, and openness to new information” (Schuldberg 2011, 188).

In terms of introspective heuristic investigation, German philosopher Dr Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provides further context to the methods and methodologies discussed in this exegesis, asserting that the purpose of art "is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are" (Houlgate 2020).

Respite

Respite explores the immediacy and uncensored material experience of making as a meaningful element of my creative process.

Trust

Trust cultivates novelty and chance to elicit the uncensored and unrepeatable occurrence of my aesthetic responses to my life experiences in real-time. Due to the artwork being on show at the Museum of Australian Photography as a shortlisted work for the Bowness Prize 2023, it was not presented in my final folio presentation

Possibilities

Possibilities combines the methods of methodologies deployed in the making of Respite and Trust to explore the phenomenology of ‘doing’ and notions of embodied knowledge through material agency and the act of ‘being’.

Truth

Truth is a new work created in place of Trust, which, at the time of my Master of Fine Art presentation, was on display as a Bowness Prize finalist at the Museum of Australian Photography group exhibition 2023. Created by exposing one 35mm negative sequentially across a continuous roll of panchromatic gelatin silver black and white paper, the artwork challenges the illusion of representational truth in photography. What emerges from beneath the emulsion is not a conventional image, as the exposure would suggest, but rather the embodiment of my skewed vision of the world. Find out more here.

Footnotes

A heuristic learning method applies discovery and problem-solving grounded in reasoning and experience (Sultan 2019).
Lifeworld is a phenomenological term that “refer[s] to the idea that ‘individuals’ realities are invariably influenced by the world in which they live” (Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 2019, 94).

Bibliography

Banfield, Janet, and Mark Burgess. 2013. “A Phenomenology of Artistic Doing: Flow as Embodied Knowing in 2D and 3D Professional Artists.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 44 (1): 60–91. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691624-12341245.

Houlgate, Stephen. 2020. “Hegel’s Aesthetics.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/#:~:text=Art.

Schuldberg, David. 2011. “Chaos Theory and Creativity.” In Encyclopedia of Creativity, edited by Mark A. Runco and Steven R. Pritzker, 183–91. London: Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-375038-9.00037-6.

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MFA S4: Major Presentation of Artworks