RESONANCES OF DIFFERENCE:

Creative Diplomacy in the

Multidimensional and Transcultural Aesthetics of an

Indigenous Photomedia Practice

Leah King-Smith Bachelor of Fine Art (Victoria College)

Master of Arts (Research) (QUT)

Thesis submitted as partial fulfilment of the award of

Doctor of Philosophy

2006

Creative Industries Faculty, Visual Arts

QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Keywords: multiverse, multidimensional aesthetics,

transcultural aesthetics, multidimensional psyche, indigenous

photomedia, creative diplomacy, transpersonal, quantum

model, practice-led research, digital media, photography,

animation.

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ABSTRACT

Multidimensional aesthetics in photomedia practice shift the

emphasis away from the culturally dominating singularity of the

camera’s eye-piece towards a supple interplay of semi-transparent

image planes and shifting positions. Using various image-capture

devices that can produce digital, film, still or moving pictures, I create

bodies of work that invite the viewer to see many perspectives

simultaneously. The challenge is to implement the effectiveness of

the technologies and simultaneously dislodge those principles and

values fundamental to their imperialist cultural backgrounds. My

practice investigates a diplomatic negotiability of aesthetic language

to accommodate conceptual and cultural difference/s. Located on

the print surface or in animated sequences are symbolic

representations that disclose histories, cultures, times and places in

subtle and ambiguous ways. The interplay of allure and resistance,

repetition and change, are strategies that reveal the delicate and

paradoxical nature of the multidimensional psyche.

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The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted

to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher

education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the

thesis contains no material previously published or written by another

person except where due reference is made.

Signature _______________________________________

Date ____________________________________________

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend a huge thank you to the following colleagues, friends and family members whose presence and assistance has made this Doctoral degree possible: Dr. Victoria Garnons-Williams, Principal Supervisor, Visual Arts Department, QUT: For your endlessly patient supervisory role in my PhD Candidature and your generous support and valuable expertise on all my project outcomes. Dr. Helen Yeates, Associate Supervisor, Film and TV Department, QUT: For your generous editing input and being there for me. Duncan King-Smith, sound designer, and partner: For your creative audio contribution, your sound archive, your proof reading and the care you have given me and our family. Christine Peacock: For your generosity, support and hugely appreciated indigenous perspectives. QUT Creative Industries Faculty of Research and Visual Arts Department: For financial assistance and access to office and printing facilities, equipment and personnel. At QUT: Prof. Brad Haseman and A.O. Leanne Blazely: For management and administration of my academic research journey. Jill Standfield, Operations Manager QUT Precincts: For access management of printing facilities and personnel. The QUT Art Museum: For access to the venue and exhibition administration and management. Amanda King and Peter Riesz: For your digital animation skills. The LaTrobe Library Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne: For the use of the 19th century photographic fragments. The Adelaide Fringe Festival and South Australia Museum: For the Adelaide venue and exhibition management. Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi and Jan Manton Gallery: For the Melbourne and Brisbane venues and exhibition management. Dr. Michel de la Fontaine and Siew Lan Moh at the Goethe Institut, Singapore: For your management and administration of the Singapore residency program.

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Renate Elsaesser and Monique Phillips at the Goethe Institut, Melbourne: For your management and administration of the Melbourne residency program. Suzanne Davies and Helen Rayment at the RMIT Gallery, Melbourne: For your curatorial and managerial roles in the Melbourne residency program. My Family: Lel Black, Phillipa King, Wayne King and Rose King: For your generous support and assistance with the Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide stages of this project. And to my children, Mirren and Kaia for keeping me real – love to you always.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract i

Preface 1

SECTION 1

CONTEXT OF THE STUDY 2

Introduction 2

Creative Diplomacy For Cultural Difference 3

Practice led Research 6

Multidimensional and Transcultural Concepts 8

Forming a Methodology 11

Cultural Contexts: Indigeneity and Imperialism 12

Issues of Language 14

Creative Diplomacy: Overcoming Cultural Conflict 17

My Creative Practice in Context 21

The Quantum Model 29

Transpersonal Research Methods 33

Creative Practice as an Investigative Tool 35

Conclusion 25

SECTION 2

CREATIVE WORK: METHODS AND OUTCOMES 40

Introduction 40

Bodies of Work 46

Flicker: Examining Temporalities 46

Beyond Capture: The Artist and the Artefact 54

Moving on from Flicker 55

Looking Back: the Postcolonialism of

Patterns of Connection 56

Fragmenting the Archive 58

Liminal Interstices: The Crevice in Ambiguous Space 66

The Resolution 66

Source Gathering and Works 68

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REFERENCES 81

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Flicker series, 2003. List of Works 89

Appendix B: Beyond Capture series, 2004. List of Works 91

Appendix C: Liminal Interstices series, 2005. List of Works 94

Appendix D: Liminal Interstices series. Sound and Image Sources 95

Appendix E: Liminal Interstices series. DVD (inside back cover)

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Exhibition still. Liminal Interstices Q.U.T. Art Museum, 2005 43

2. Film frames from Merge/Submerge & Flicker 46

3. Film frames from Merge/Submerge & Flicker 47

4. Dress, Flicker 47

5. Boy, Flicker 48

6. Water, Flicker 50

7. Sun, Flicker 50

8. Boy with Bike, Flicker 51

9. Arm, Flicker 52

10. Exhibition still, Flicker, South Australian Museum, 2004 53

11. Drawing from a rock photograph 54

12. Ferns, from Beyond Capture 54

13. Untitled #11, from Patterns of Connection 58

14. Untitled #10, from Patterns of Connection 58

15. Fragment from the LaTrobe Library Picture Collection 60

16. Buttons 1, Beyond Capture 61

17. Dresses, Beyond Capture 64

18. Hands, Beyond Capture 64

19. Tree, Beyond Capture 65

20. Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore 68

21. Singapore exhibition, Little India studio 69

22. Pig charm lighter 70

23. Exhibition still – work-in-progress, Singapore 2004 70

24. Native grasses, Royal Park, Melbourne 71

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25. Big Leaves, Liminal Interstices 74

26. Rose in Hand, Liminal Interstices 75

27. Ship and Sand, Liminal Interstices 76

28. Tree Leaves, Liminal Interstices 77

29. Pavement, Liminal Interstices 78

30. Night Trees, Liminal Interstices 78

31. Sky, Liminal Interstices 79

32. Instrument, Liminal Interstices 80

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Preface

This document is an exegesis describing and clarifying a course of

investigation that considers certain philosophical arguments

proposed by a photomedia-based creative practice. Creative practice

is the principal investigative tool of this PhD research and comprises

75% of the study component. The remaining 25% is this written

component. The percentage distribution implies that the creative

practice is, and develops even further as an important knowledge

base. The creative practice has identifiable procedures, structures

and theoretical underpinnings that are capable of containing and/or

advancing philosophical and/or conceptual propositions.

The exegesis is in two sections. Section One, Context of the Study,

outlines the background and scope of the study, defining terms and

describing methodological and contextual environments. Section

Two, Creative Work, details the processes, developments and

outcomes of the practice. Section Two also identifies the

philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of the practice as it

develops and manifests its final outcomes.

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SECTION 1

CONTEXT OF THE STUDY

Introduction

When I was in my early twenties I was accepted into an art school in

Melbourne (Victoria College, Prahran1984) with a photographic folio

“about relativity”. In the work - which looked curiously conceptual

although highly intuited - I presented several series of two

photographs of the same setting, photographed a few seconds apart,

each with and without an object or person. The object or person

represented a single central idea or character that vacillated between

presence and absence across the two pictures. In considering it now,

the body of work was attempting to represent the mutability or

variance of identity across physical relationships and time.

Paradoxically the efficacy of communication depended on the

accuracy of the photograph to render a singular objective truth

despite the representations of multiple meanings.

My intuitive method of enquiry was a photographic medium which in

the 1980’s was analogue and pre-digital. I was curious about psychic

spaces: the psychologies of spaces, bodies and events, and was

attempting to ask questions that were not altogether appropriate to

the technology nor could rely on traditional photographic truths and

canons such as British imperialist perspectives.

In those early days before I started university education I enjoyed

picture-taking as an engaging experience connected with nature.

Grazia Marchiano (2001) discusses the heart-felt approach and the

importance of re-contextualizing aesthetics in an “epistemology of

feeling”. In describing the numinous and potent heart/mind of rasa

aesthetics Marchiano states that, “an epistemology of aesthetic

experience has in fact solid reasons to found itself primarily on

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archaeology of feeling” (p. 28). An archaeology of feeling “transforms

one’s glimpse of the potency inherent in aesthetic experience into a

far wider vision” (p. 29). She continues her explanation by quoting an

ancient Chinese philosopher: “Zhuangzi illustrates it well when he

says: “The One and the word make two.” If I say “the one”, I have

already distanced myself; the thought that thinks the One blurs the

instantaneous perception of unity” (p. 29). The failure of the “thought

that thinks the One” could refer to the limits of mainstream aesthetic

cultures, which tend towards reductionism.

Creative Diplomacy For Cultural Difference

I have experienced mainstream art education at various stages over

the past 20 years and have often been attracted to positions of

alterity that might perhaps challenge the hegemonic sentiments of

mainstream cultural perspectives. Regarding the diplomatic and

multidimensional thesis this study presents, a paradox has emerged

from the diplomatic need to privilege all difference whilst not being in

brutal opposition that would be perhaps unethical in matters of

cultural exchange. Conflict in its violent manifestation is not an

essentialist problem-solving approach.

To address and perhaps alleviate conflict of difference, modern and

post modern practices have used stylistic methods such as comedy

and irony to create odd juxtapositions of dissimilar contexts (e.g.,

Modernist Surrealism of the early 20th century or the Post Modern

exhibition The Aberrant Object at the Museum of Contemporary Art

at Heide, Melbourne, 1993). This study has specifically developed

strategies for negotiating difference as a diplomatic methodology.

The diplomatic strategies have allowed difference to drift across

temporal and cultural regions. As an indigenous creative practitioner,

I have preferred diplomacy as an approach to explore in my work

because I am dealing with personal and social cultural differences.

Dr. Cynthia P. Schneider from the Centre of Arts and Culture,

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Washington DC says that cultural diplomacy is an essential method

in dealing with cultural difference. “Cultural diplomacy in all its variety

provides a critical, maybe even the best tool to communicate the

intangibles …: individual freedoms; justice and opportunity for all;

diversity and tolerance.” (Schneider, 2003, p. 2)

In a series of encounters with the remote Ngaanyatjarra communities

at Patjarr, in the Gibson Desert of Western Australia, Dr Michael

Tawa from the University of New South Wales considers ethical

issues of maintaining cultural difference specifically for him and his

colleagues in the Built Environment department. Tawas’ experiences

articulate strategies for dealing with cultural difference.

There was never a question of seeking common ground or

reducing alterity to sameness or agreement. Our differences

conditioned the relationship through a kind of silent and elegant

reserve – an acknowledgement of radical otherness, but which

never threatened the collaboration. Silent acknowledgment of

the radical alterity of the other – and yet speech, and laughter,

and many plans. (Tawa, 2002, para. 2)

Tawa identifies with theorists Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben

and Jean-Luc Nancy who all consider the necessity and discomfort of

maintaining radical otherness. Tawa makes a clear distinction

between ethics as the proper management of alterity and

reconciliation which seeks an erasure of alterity.

The surprising thing is to realise that what one has prepared for

is in fact the unpredictable… This experience entails very

specific and rigorous skills and tactics - not unlike those used by

a tracker, who sees presence in terms of absence, in terms of

the traces, shadows and echoes of disturbance, which unsettle

the known and the familiar. Tracking is important in the Western

Desert, and to be streetwise in the city is equally important. It

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means you get to know a place, how it works. You become

flexible and accommodating. You operate efficaciously,

efficiently, effectively. You make place work for you. But a good

tracker can track unknown country, and the streetwise can map

an unknown city. It isn't that kind of knowing. Rather, it is a

matter of disposition, comportment, restraint, attentiveness. It is

a matter of ethics... The media will have us seek unification,

integration, erasure of difference, agreement, reconciliation: one

people - and one people under God, since this is the actual

context of the term. To seek reconciliation is to acknowledge a

prior waywardness, a distance and difference, which separates

the human being and the divine. Beyond its Judeo-Christian

implications however, the term is problematic for another

reason. It seeks the erasure of alterity and difference - the very

quality which constitutes community…” (Tawa, 2002, para. 7)

Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on the ethical duty that the “other” has to

the “Other” are diplomatic. Levinas, who experienced the destruction

of his family by the Nazis during WW2, formed an influential Western

philosophical doctrine that addressed the issues of human conflict.

Using a diplomatic and ethical approach, fullness and freedom of the

other as an ideal depends for Levinas on maintaining the unutterable

otherness of the Other: "The Other precisely reveals himself in his

alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial

phenomenon of gentleness." (Levinas, 1969, p. 150)

In my own situation, having a black mother and white father – whose

families were in conflict with their marriage - has led me to address

issues of cultural discord. Both my parents have spoken about the

hostilities of their families toward the other. My parents’ union of

difference was felt by both their relatives as a disturbance, a rupture

of cultural values. And yet it is possible that my parents revelled in

that rupture because it was not so much a breaking away of tradition

but a development or adaptation of it. They both maintained their

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distance from their families, living in various rural communities for

many years where my father taught primary school children. Since

my parents’ union was my upbringing - I was taught by my father in

my primary school years - it is not surprising that the approach I take

as an artist is influenced by issues of uniting difference on the fringes

of cultural regions.

My early approach to photography was instinctive and innocent of

problematizing the scientific and cultural traditions associated with

photographic representation. I was also side-stepping at that time the

context of my indigenous background by not making conscious

reference to it in the discussion of my work. I realize now that the

indigenous aspect is important to consider on many levels. Some

years after my undergraduate degree I had become well known as

an indigenous photomedia artist when I exhibited the photographic

series titled Patterns of Connection (1992) which made poetic and

evocative references to the connection of Aboriginal ancestors to

their land. Since that series, despite the conscious shift in my work

away from its essentially postcolonial arguments about

representation - my work has continued to be characterized and

contextualised within the general culture of indigeneity. The issue

remains however and has become increasingly problematic

contextually, given that since Patterns my work has developed in

different directions, and speaks of the richness of the spirit, the soul,

the artistic and aesthetic endeavour, and especially in my current

investigation, the equitable empowerment of the multiple disparity of

voice.

Practice-led Research

It is important that the creative investigation is both practice-led and

conceptual. My creative practice has undergone experimentations

and processes to produce cultural artefacts while the conceptual

aspects have dealt with analysis and interpretation of those works of

art in their cultural contexts. Both physically and conceptually the

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investigative designs have to have recognized cultural biases in

order to strategize alternative modes of communication.

Analysing the camera’s effectiveness as a tool of enquiry requires

several contextual considerations. These considerations fall into two

key categories: one identifies the cultural, economic and scientific

traditions of the camera – those conditions that relate to economic

and technological imperialist events (the photographs’ European

histories); the other recognizes the cultural and aesthetic values that

relate to me, my creative practice, and the ideas and intentions I

bring to a photo-media practice. These two categories have an

intrinsic relationship since the former considers the cultural, aesthetic

and economic margins of photo-media technologies and the latter

considers how those margins might be ineffective in allowing alterity

and difference to European and Western mechanisms of “sight” and

“vision”. These are epistemic horizons that we recognize only too

well – in newspapers, in the histories of photography, and in the

photographs of histories. Alternatives such as Grazia Marchiano’s

heart/mind rasa aesthetics are apposite in this case, exemplifying the

potential for broadening cultural perspectives.

In the early days of my photography I took it for granted that if I

probed with enough curiosity and depth of feeling, the work would

rouse the issues in an appropriate manner. I was unaware at the time

that my inquisitive nature might become unfulfilled by the nature of

the camera’s Imperialist horizons. The work of this study has

problematized the imperialism of photography and transmuted it into

hybridized forms with the adoption and adaptation of digitization and

hand-drawn methods. A photomedia practice is the more appropriate

term that best applies to my case.

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Multidimensional and Transcultural Concepts

The Imperialist idea of an historical event uses the past tense to

distance an object to a singular past. A multidimensional expression

of time proposes multiplicities of pasts (and futures) and brings into

question the notion of the past as an idealized cultural moment.

Elizabeth Edwards’ considerations are apt to this concern when she

discusses issues of loss and renewal in historical photographs:

However to reduce photographs to ineffable nostalgia and

pastness merely repeats oppositions of lost past and active

present, links photographs to one past time only and restates

the trope of the disappeared ‘authentic’. Within the contexts of

re-engagement and re-cognition photographs have the cultural

potential for being about not Barthesian loss, but instead regain,

empowerment, renewal and contestation… While in one

register, there is loss, a cultural dispossession, increasingly

archives and museums have become not places only of

exclusion and disappearance, temples of cultural loss, but

spaces of contested histories and contesting practices,

negotiation, restatement and repossession. (Edwards, 2001, p.

11)

If photographs are sites of negotiation as Edwards suggests, there is

the potential for new multidimensional and transcultural meanings to

be inscribed in them. Broadly, the issues are that multidimensional

meanings conceptualise time as simultaneous – multiple events

occurring simultaneously in presents, pasts and futures.

Transcultural meanings allow equitable agency of difference. Finding

the means to visually present the issues was the major research

question of this study.

Issues of transtemporal time-frames cannot be given full expression

in the writings of this document. Grammatically present and past

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tenses are utilized, or perhaps required, since the research process

is an activity of looking back. Given an established research period,

future developments cannot be documented, although there are

developments that have already happened that silently affect the

theoretical nature of this investigative process which is a “looking

back” procedure (King-Smith, 2005).

Since addressing simultaneous time is an important aspect of this

study, how should the experiential passing of moments be

considered? Roberts’ ‘inner senses’ tune in to the concepts of

multidimensional time. “The Inner Senses reveal to us our own

independence from physical matter, and let us recognize our unique,

individual multidimensional identity” (Hughes, 2005, part 5). When

Jane Roberts uses the term “sense plateau” in The Individual and the

Nature of Mass Events (Roberts, 1995, p. 174), she is referring to the

consensus reality of a mass or collective nature that identifies the

universe as primarily an objective manifestation. Beyond her ‘sense

plateau’ a multidimensional universe is either “- and you can pick

your terms – a spiritual or mental or psychological manifestation…”

(Roberts, p. 233). The multidimensional universe has psychological

properties, “…following the logic of the psyche…” (Roberts, p. 233).

The notion that all particles contain consciousness “must be the

basis for any new scientific theories that hope to accomplish any

performances at all leading to an acquisition of knowledge.” (Roberts,

p. 234).

The twin ideas that the multidimensional universe is psychological

and that particles contain consciousness are tantalizing to present or

address in creative practice. James Hillman has associated

psychological manifestations with the soul by suggesting that “all

activities of the psyche, whatever psychic faculty they originate in or

whatever academic faculty they are manifested in, become means of

soul-making” (Hillman, 1975, p.152). Roberts discusses the

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emotional depths beyond the objectivity of artistic processes as a

way of describing the multidimensional universe:

For in art, the elements of surprise and unpredictability reign –

within a certain framework, however. Techniques are used,

mediums and supplies, but they are used in a completely

different mental and emotional context, in which art’s meaning is

often nowhere specifically apparent but felt and emotionally

perceived. Indeed, the senses are appealed to in a different

fashion. This is a highly important point, so here I would like to

briefly compare the universe to a model of a multidimensional

work of art, rather than, say to a mechanical machine whose

components, examined, will inevitably yield an understanding of

its parts and overall purpose (Roberts, 1978, p. 87).

Post modern theories have considered the issues of identity and

difference as commensurate with contemporary cultural and social

conditions. Richard P. Richter’s review of Best and Kellner’s

Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (as cited in Richter, 1991)

considers the writers’ position on identity and difference:

Nevertheless, Best and Kellner allow that "the postmodern

politics of identity and difference" has had the positive effect of

responding to new global social transformations. In this

dimension, postmodern insights into plurality, multiplicity,

openness, contextuality are positive (p. 286). "The postmodern

theory of decentred power...allows for the multiplication of

possibilities for political struggle, no longer confined simply to

the realm of production or the state" (p. 286). (Richter, 1991,

8.3, para. 3)

Creative practice is the principal method of investigation here,

however it is related to transpersonal methods of enquiry. The

interesting point is that notions of a transcendental psyche would

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normally be contextualized within mystical frameworks, and indeed

these are relevant to some degree. However, I am linking the

conscious sensate with the spiritual as a psychological environment

or event within the methodology of an art practice. It is in the manner

that I produce my creative works, in striving to address notions of a

multidimensional psyche, which sets this study apart from

transpersonal research practices as they are commonly known.

Forming a Methodology

This investigation examines the developmental experiments and

processes as well as the outcomes of my creative investigations.

David Bohm has suggested a holistic approach to both the end and

the means is involved in making every aspect fit (Bohm,1998). This is

coherency that begins with ideas and actions which develop into

outcomes that lead to new ideas and actions, and so on. The

experimental developments of my creative practice have had cyclic

phases where work has developed into outcomes that have led to

further experiments and further outcomes: a common cycle of events

for creative practitioners.

This document reviews and clarifies the methodological

developments of the experiments and processes involved, and

considers the three bodies of work that have ensued as the research

outcomes. These outcomes comprise a large interim body of

photomedia work exhibited at the Adelaide Fringe Festival Flicker

(South Australian Museum) in 2003, and two final bodies of work,

Beyond Capture, (first exhibited at Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery,

Melbourne, 2004), then alongside Liminal Interstices, (Q.U.T. Art

Museum) exhibited together in Brisbane in 2005.

As the principal investigative tool, the creative practice in this study

uses a range of photo-based technologies. Holger Kalweit proposes

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a new science for methodologies dealing with cultural perspectives of

the Other.

The theoretical repertoire for this investigation comes, in the

main, from a new scientific orientation; one that has lost its

specifically Western character, because it gives full recognition

to the psychologies and philosophies of other cultures and

strives to bring these into harmony with our modern knowledge.

(Kalweit, 1984 p. xv)

Upon embarking on this study, I had already experimented with

methods that disrupt the authority of the camera’s fixed window

frame. The frame of the camera creates a singular perspective of a

moment in place and time – an enduring slice of space/time in a nice

neat frame. I was interested in the idea that the space/time

teleological perspective of the tool might be sequestered, ironically,

to explore the possibilities of a challenging but diplomatic “take” on

itself. This meant destabilizing the sharp-edged 2:3 aspect ratio of

the frame by reformatting and rounding its edges. It also meant re-

working multiple pictures into a single image (since the media in this

case is the photographic print) using a semi-reflective surface. This

photographic mirror technique uses refraction, reflection and

transmission simultaneously. It is a performance of frames on

multiple planes in a non-edged undefined field. The reflections

suggest that the illusory becomes a psychological notion and they

also symbolize an infinite light-play of frames within frames. The

psychology of the camera shifted to engage simultaneous multiplicity

and difference.

Cultural Contexts: Indigeneity and Imperialism

Creative practice could be defined as the application of a set of tools

and concepts to solve creative dilemmas. The methodological

approaches of the creative investigations focus on the cultural and

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conceptual effectiveness of the technologies being used. The issue

with the camera that has been problematized is in its British

imperialist past. During the first several decades of photography the

camera’s single eye-piece had been instrumental in producing

admiring perspectives of colonial accomplishments in grand and

exotic locations. State and national libraries proudly demonstrate the

civilizing act of the colonial camera by the careful preservation of

their photographic collections (e.g. the John Oxley Library Picture

Collection in the State Library of Queensland or the LaTrobe Picture

Collection in the State Library of Victoria).

James Ryan has suggested that colonial photographs of Other

cultures enabled British Victorians to take ownership of those

regions:

Despite claims for its accuracy and trustworthiness however,

photography did not so much record the real as signify and

construct it. Through various rhetorical and pictorial devices,

from ideas of the picturesque to schemes of scientific

classification, and different visual themes, from landscapes to

‘racial types’, photographers represented the imaginative

geographies of Empire. Indeed, as a practice of representation,

photography did more than merely familiarize Victorians with

foreign views; it enabled them symbolically to travel through,

explore and even possess those spaces. (Ryan, 1997, p. 214)

The processes and the results of this study have manifested as a

hybridization of technologies and cultural contexts to distinctly

challenge the space of possession. My indigenous cultural

background is undoubtedly fused into the mix, bringing to the work

postcolonial and indigenous concerns and connections. It may be

that the multidimensional nature of the study relates specifically to

my indigeneity, although I am not accentuating the connection,

especially since my cultural influences are mixed. My work has been

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consistently contextualized in the sphere of indigenous art practices

in the past, which is certainly a context that cannot be ignored here.

My approach will be to review the common threads operating across

my work and the work of some other contemporary indigenous artists

in Australia. My work deals with issues of technology, alterity and

decolonization although there is no evidence of an indigenous

practitioner in Australia at present who is voicing issues of time and

psychology in precisely the same way as I am. Indeed, rather than

emphasise a significantly indigenous voice, this study makes a claim

for hybridization where potentially disparate cultural perspectives

retain their potency whilst accommodating the Other in an ethical

space of neutrality and diplomacy. Tawa’s approach of “silent and

elegant reserve” (Tawa, 2002, para. 2) makes this point.

Issues of Language

The issues of an indigenous voice under the rule of an imperial

government are clearly defined in English Literature. “The historical

moment which saw the emergence of ‘English’ as an academic

discipline also produced the 19th century colonial form of imperialism”

(Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989, p. 3).

English is like the camera. English words have the power to destroy

and challenge cultural otherness.

This is not to say that the English language is inherently

incapable of accounting for post-colonial experience, but that it

needs to develop an ‘appropriate’ usage in order to do so (by

becoming a distinct and unique form of english). The energizing

feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate and

subvert the imperial cultural formations.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, &

Tiffin, 1989, p. 11)

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Aboriginal writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal are able to use

English language effectively by appropriating it for their own

political and cultural purposes - as a means of empowerment

and to effect changes in cultural perspectives. They have to

walk a fine line methodologically between the limitations of the

language they are appropriating and the effective methods they

must design to disrupt its hegemony (e.g., Ah Kee, 2004).

James Hillman suggests the potential in words to resonate with

deeply embedded archetypal information:

A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once

again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in

the word – and angel means originally ‘emissary,’ ‘message-

bearer’- how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things

made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth

and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a

conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are

not carried in the depths of our words?...Words, like angels, are

powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal

presences which have whole mythologies: genders,

genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations),

histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming,

creating, and annihilating effects. (Hillman, 1975, p. 9)

The naming associated with “image capture” devices emphasise

violence and control. A camera shoots. It fires off. A picture is

achieved with an image-capture device. It is then manipulated,

burned, cropped or trashed. This language suggests the barbaric

violation and containment of an original, intact, untouched state.

Susan Sontag (1973, as cited in Landau, n.d., p. 3) describes the

military and hunting references inherent to the camera’s terms:

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Susan Sontag has pointed out how photography and hunting

overlap in the vocabularies of their practices. She has traced

this correspondence between “shooting” and shooting to the

capacious appetite of photography for “capturing” the world.

Loading, stalking, aiming, cocking and shooting are all

appropriate examples, and “snap shot” designated a military

technique before the turn of the century. The connection

between violence, guns, and camera-work in the period of the

new imperialism allows us to extend Sontag’s observations

further. (Landau, p. 3)

From an indigenous perspective the colonial camera has been a

weapon of mass destruction. Is Aboriginal spirit present in the

sanitised government libraries where many 19th century photographs

of Aborigines are held? For Aboriginal people spirit is everywhere in

everything, however historical photographs reveal the imperialist

conquest in the photographic studios and Aboriginal missions and

Government Reserves.

Kelly Gellatly, who curated the exhibition Re-Take, Contemporary

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Photography at the National

Gallery of Australia (1998) expressed the following in her curatorial

statement:

It is not until the 1980’s however that Aboriginal photographers

assumed a prominent position in both the Australian and

international art scene. Taking the camera into their own hands,

these artists re-take, re-present, re-claim, and largely re-

configure photographic representation of Aboriginality. (Gellatly,

para. 2)

17

Creative Diplomacy: Overcoming Cultural Conflict

Grazia Marchiano’s advocacy for transcultural aesthetics sees the

potential - if not the imperative - for aesthetic practices to bridge

cultural difference:

…the problem…[is] to ask ourselves whether the aesthetic

factor might not possibly be the only one that a patently divided

ethnic, ethical, ideological, linguistic and religious context allows

us all to share. (Marchiano, 2001, p.31)

Feminist American black theorist, bell hooks, has spoken about the

role of black women in post modern theories (bell hooks, 1990). She

is critical of most post modern theories despite their concerns with

political and racial hegemonies, because there is very little presence

of black women adding empowered voices to the collective

arguments.

Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more

conscious of the way in which the focus on "otherness and

difference" that is often alluded to in these works seems to have

little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might

change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. Since

much of this theory has been constructed in reaction to and

against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of black

experience or writings by black people in this work, specifically

black women. (bell hooks, para. 3)

bell hooks supports what she terms a “radical postmodernism”

because such a stance has the potential to be a space for both

action and equity:

Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities

which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and

race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of

18

empathy-ties that would promote recognition of common

commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.

(bell hooks, 1990, para. 8)

Chicana feminist writer and activist Gloria Anzaldua describes herself

as a woman on the border between two cultures: the Indian Mexican

and the Anglo. Cultural difference is extreme at the borderlands that

edge psychological and racial difference:

The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the

spiritual borderlands…the Borderlands are physically present

wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people

of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower

middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two

individuals shrinks with intimacy. (Anzaldua, 1991, preface)

Anzaldua’s writing significantly influenced a group of women artists

who referred to themselves as Las Comrades and who operated in

the San Diego-Tijuana area during the years 1988 to 1992.

Representing a diversity of ethnic and economic backgrounds, the

artists came together initially to response to the cultural tensions at

the U.S./Mexican border regions. “Fundamentally, we were

committed to perceiving the border experience as a bridge rather

than a barrier to dialogue, a foundation on which to build a discussion

of art making and activism” (Mancillas, Wallen & Waller, 1999,

p.107). Their treatise is exemplary of both transcultural aesthetics

and the position of the creative practice research outlined in this

exegesis.

From Ken Wilber’s point of view, an integral theory of art advocates

equity and innovative approaches to art theory:

In integral theory of art and literary interpretation is thus the

multidimensional analysis of the various contexts in which, and

19

by which art exists and speaks to us: in the artist, the artwork,

the viewer, and the world at large. Privileging no single context

it invites us to be unendingly open to ever-new horizons, which

broaden our own horizons in the process, liberating us from the

narrow straits of our favourite ideology and the prison of our

isolated selves. (Wilber, 2001, p. 134)

The collaborative UK team of Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons

known as Glorious Ninth were invited in 1995 to respond to a

discussion titled Crossing Borders for [-empyre-] - an Australian-run

internet activity that publishes ‘posts’ from artists on invited themes.

Southworth replies:

Within Bracha Ettinger’s Matrix Theory, borderlines, thresholds

and limits are continually transgressed and dissolved, allowing

new borderlines to emerge, to be crossed and to be faced. Our

work comes about through an inter-weaving of ethics and

aesthetics. Aurally, visually and conceptually our pieces ebb

and flow, and the elements within the pieces co-emerge and co-

face in ever-changing patterns that constantly shift focus.

(Southworth, 2005, para. 3)

How has my creative practice considered methodological models for

multidimensionality and transculturality? Do these strategies

challenge the imperialist model? Creative diplomacy, which is not

necessarily peaceful nor easily digested, disrupts cultural

hegemonies, doing so by aesthetic means. A creative diplomatic

approach needs to create a neutral stage to accommodate

difference. A contradiction may appear to arise however and thus,

like the borderlands, a place or base of no particular inscription can

have contingency, intensity, value and difference. This methodology

is inherently paradoxical in its simultaneous and equitable

accommodation of difference.

20

The methodology of creative diplomacy configures a number of

creative tools - especially technologically enabled devices - as

spiritual, symbolic and psychic implements. This methodology takes

into account that these technologies had previously come with

ruthless canons and cultural values. Inevitably the challenge is to

utilize the technology’s effectiveness to communicate

multidimensional and transcultural concepts and thus transcend the

epistemic foundations fundamental to their imperial cultural currency.

When hegemonic modes of aesthetic language are unethical and

seemingly not negotiable, Otherness is subsumed. In this study,

contradiction is not expressed in spoken opposition but in what I

have termed diplomacy, by which is meant a subtle interplay of

counter propositions.

The theme for the 4th Gwangju Biennale named Pause – held in

Gwangju, South Korea in 2002 - speaks of an ‘other’ place which is

neutral and independent in a bid to digest the full-blown assault of

post modern cultural conditions on contemporary thought:

From a certain perspective, Pause brings a temporary halt on

the rapidity of our 20th Century, a century that we ran through

without taking a breath. We can stop at least for this time, look

behind the past, reverse, or even recreate. Anthropologically,

culturally, and politically radical reflection and criticism on

history, capitalism, logic of development, concept of progress,

western rationalism, colonialism, globalism, new liberalism,

technology and engineering, spectacles, rhythm of

consumerism, speed, and insanity can be blended into the time.

Pause itself is neutral and independent, but at the same time

maintains its interrelationships with everyday reality. (Pause is

the theme for the 4th Gwangju Biennale, 2001)

21

My Creative Practice in Context

The camera is a rational device, providing documentary evidence for

a vast number of disciplines and practices such as science,

medicine, history, journalism, education and law. In artistic practices

the camera has more flexibility. The photograph’s indexicality is a

photographic truth that is currency for that which can be believed to

have existed or occurred. Photomedia artists in Australia exploit this

faith by creating fictional narratives and scenes to address issues of

cultural identity - using formal photographic devices such as fine

detail, lighting, colour, print surface etc. (Moffatt, 1989; Ortega,

2001). The power of the fictitious to be rendered truthful relies on the

mechanical virtues of the camera. Truth can become self-evidently

opaque even slightly sinister (Henson,1983-2003). When truth and

fiction collide the duplicitous scenario draws attention to itself in a

reflexive bid to be contextualized within post modern practices.

The digital camera has the potential to free truth from its imperialist

background. Digitization of pictures provides unlimited image

adjustment capabilities. Photomedia artists work with digitization

exploiting historical perspectives of the camera as an unassailable

recording device. Digitization also allows artists to manipulate the

truth in unlimited fashion (e.g., Everton, 2005; & Taylor, 2006, are

excellent examples of seamless digital fantasy worlds that artists

have created). Digitization disrupts the safety and assurance of

photography according to Susan Fereday and Stuart Koop:

The sure relations once thought to be embodied in/by

photography - the position of subject and object, the certainty of

appearances, and so on – are abrogated by the convenience

and mutability of digital mass media. Indeed, in the

conceptualisation of new media, photography seems to

represent an entirely outmoded episteme. (Fereday and Koop,

1995, p. vii)

22

Fereday and Koop use the term “postphotography” in association

with digitization because to them it is:

…a keyword in contemporary photography; not because it

defines some fulcrum moment in the history and development

of photography, but because – like many other applications of

the prefix ‘post-‘ – it designates a space or moment in social

discourse for reconsidering the meaning of key terms. The

phrase then, contains a proposition about the past and future of

photography issued from the present, a proposition extended

through the series’ title ‘Photography Post Photography’. It

confronts photography with its antecedents and its present

tendencies, and nominates the differences between them.

(Fereday and Koop, 1995, p. vii)

A creative practice that uses digital means has the potential to

combine many aesthetic and cultural perspectives. Sachsse claims

that this environment, which includes the digital and moving image,

“increases the complexity of what is being offered exponentially”

(Sachsse, 2002, p. 265). Interplay of allure and resistance, repetition

and change in a transcultural mix has the potential to symbolize the

delicate and paradoxical nature of the multidimensional psyche. My

digital still and moving imaging in Liminal Interstices, for instance,

allows cross cultural interplays while the ambiguous nature of many

visual references take on a diplomatic broadness or openness to the

privileged one-voice.

Indigenous artists must necessarily challenge established means if

these means have been instrumental in vanquishing their cultural

positions - as bell hooks would propose with a “postmodernism of

resistance”:

23

(The) creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective

of a postmodern opposition sensibility – work that is abstract,

fragmented, non-linear narrative – is constantly rejected by

editors and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the

type of writing they think black women should be doing or the

type of writing they believe will sell. Certainly I do not think I am

the only black person engaged in forms of cultural production,

especially experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of

an audience for certain kinds of work….To change the

exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to

enact a postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention

entails black intellectual participation in the discourse (bell

hooks, 1990, para. 13).

A contextual analysis of the relationship that my work has to creative

practices indicates a broad range of media and cultures as relevant

to the multidimensional and transcultural themes in my work:

Australian indigenous practices, photomedia, digital media, video,

feature film and performance. There are aspects of the work of

others that have connections to this study’s conceptual frameworks.

Certain correlations and associations can be made, for instance, in

the case of films or video pieces (e.g., Sokurov, 2003; Hill, 1989;

Marker, 1966). There are also cultural or theoretical associations with

other artists’ practices although there are some issues of stylistic

difference that complicates the comparative relationship. The artists I

draw a comparison with in relation to my practice are from both

international and national contexts.

Chris Marker’s animations have explored the themes of “time,

memory, and the passage of history” (Kear, 2003, p. 219). Marker’s

seminal animation piece La Jetee (Marker, 1964) is comprised

entirely of photo-stills edited together:

24

…that not only break down the rational order of chronology but

also unravel the conventional demarcations of time and

establish instead “irrational” divisions and probabilistic

connections that present an image of time as a heterogeneous

duration. (Kear, 2003, p. 221)

Marker’s animation La Jetee addresses issues of temporality in the

film’s relationship to memory and perception. As Kear points out,

“one might call Marker’s cinema a machine for time travel” (Kear,

2003, p. 219) because his photo-stills “constitute evocative fragments

of the protagonist’s reimagined past, forming a montage whose

associational rhythms allude to the thought processes of memory

itself” (p. 221).

Saskia Olde Wolbers is a Dutch video artist living now in London,

who “has a taste for stories where the characters become victims of

their own imagination and end up not being able to tell the difference

between their dreams and the reality” (Saskia Olde Wolbers: Now

That Part of Me Has Become Fiction, n.d.).

Olde Wolbers creates evocative spaces and objects that appear and

disappear continuously. The scenography is a mysterious land of

contours that she constructs in miniature scale. The ambiguity of the

landscapes entices the viewer’s imagination to put the ‘whole picture’

together from the scene and narration combination. Her technique is

to superimpose with her constructed visual worlds rather disturbing

and outrageous human stories that are a mix of fact and fiction – in

the form of a voice-over narration. The combination of human story

and surreal scenes produces psychological landscapes that take

meaning as much in the viewer’s imagination as from the intention of

the artist herself.

Alaxander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2003) is a multidimensional

historic drama whose protagonist (the filmmaker) is disembodied yet

25

conscious and travelling in a stream-of-consciousness procession

across famous historical moments, places and artworks in the

Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. Although filmed entirely using

one take, the film suggests the simultaneous coinciding of

transtemporal events. In an interview with Sokurov he was

questioned about the ‘one take’ approach and what significance it

had:

Breathing. One has to live a specific amount of time in a single

breath…. I wanted to try and fit myself into the very flowing of

time, without remaking it according to my wishes. I wanted to try

and have a natural collaboration with time, to live that one and a

half-hours as if it were merely breathing in...and out. (Sokurov, An Interview with Alexander Sokurov, para. 2)

When questioned about what times the action takes place in,

Sokurov replied:

In different times. The time of Peter the Great and Catherine the

Great, of Nicholas I and Nicholas II…For me it is all a single

temporal space. I live in those times. For me, not one of those

times has ever stopped or ended. Historical time cannot depart,

cannot collapse. (Sokurov, An Interview with Alexander

Sokurov, para. 5)

The disembodied consciousness of the filmmaker in Russian Ark

who travels across times and spaces in a ‘single moment’ is an apt

and vivid metaphor for the multidimensional transtemporal psyche.

The cinematic device of the single take juxtaposed with the array of

characters, artworks and events across different times establishes a

powerful discourse on time. In a film review in Art and America (July,

2003) James Gambrell gives an insightful account of the film’s

temporalities:

26

The film was shot in "real time"- but what is "real" time? This

question lies at the heart of Sokurov's new work. It is hard to

imagine a more "unreal time" than that of Russian Ark. The

centuries and their inhabitants exist simultaneously, because in

a museum like the Hermitage (as in human memory and

consciousness, the film argues), there is no such thing as ‘the

past’. Or rather, the past is always present. (Gambrell, 2003,

para. 5)

Situated across photography, film and performance is Matthew

Barneys’s rhythmic, esoteric Cremaster Cycle, The Order (Barney,

2003). Barney’s broad and evocative language creates psychological

landscapes in which visual symbols depict transtemporal and

transcultural meanings. His symbology carries mobility and

multiplicity that stretches across artistic genres such as

conceptualism and modernism - utilizing rather than refuting these, to

create an evocative elasticity of meanings, temporalities and spaces.

The work could be termed multidimensional since the

multidimensional qualities of the psyche navigate shifting

temporalities and embodiments.

Malgorzata Zurakowska, is a Polish printmaker residing in the U.S.A..

There is an aesthetic in her beautiful monochromatic prints that use

the visual effect of form and light emerging out of darkness,

establishing scenes where form and spirit collide. Her mezzotint

process is painstaking – taking her hundreds of hours to produce one

image. The quality of the light in her work contrasts against rich and

evocative blacks producing a powerful effect where the identity of

form struggles to emerge from the other-worldliness of the depths

In her essay titled The Fourth Dimension of Art Malgorzata

Zurakowska attempts to “address the question of what art is for and

what it does, through the prism of new paradigms in science, from

quantum mechanics on the one hand to the relativity of time on the

27

other” (Zurakowska, 2002, p. 219). Taking a spiritual and quantum

approach to her art making, Zurakowska condemns Western

preoccupations with linear time, and positions herself as a magician

who “masters time to amalgamate matter and form.” The greatest

power of the work is in the exquisite results of laborious and

specialized mezzotint process that allows the images to emerge

delicately from darkness to light. Zurakowska’s work manages to

strike a pose between form and formless, light and dark, temporality

and stasis - two sides of the spinning coin.

Using photography to reveal psychological landscapes, Jila Nikpay,

an Iranian photographer now living in the U.S.A., uses toy figures

and constructed environments to explore themes of temporal and

psychological displacement. Her scenography mediates between

scientific absolutes and personal intuitions to investigate the

“psychological state of being suspended between the worlds of

knowledge and mystery” (Jila Nikpay, para. 1).

Zurakowska and Nikpay have similar intentions although stylistically

their work differs. Zurakowska’s prints are beguiling textural abstracts

and Nikpay’s black and white photographs portray figures in surreal

urban environments.

To use an example of traditional painterly methods, the Australian

artist Anne Williams has painted illustrations for the Chinese I-Ching,

The Book of Change (Williams, 1987). Ralph Metzner describes

Williams’ visual I-Ching paintings as “an absorbing series of interior,

visionary landscapes, pregnant with symbolic meanings” (Metzner,

1987, p. 13). The paintings of nature and spiritual forms are meant to

be contemplative on multidimensional and spiritual levels. They are

visual meditations that explore depths of knowledge representing a

repertoire of ancient wisdom.

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In further reference to contemporary photomedia practice, the work

of artist, Harry Nankin, extends his photo-based practice to include

interventions from nature and Nankin on the surface of his large-

scale black and white photographic prints. Nankin began exploring

ways to "reduce the emotional and material distance between

ecosystem, emulsion and artist" (Nankin, n.d., para.1) and has turned

the landscape itself into the camera by making photograms or

shadowgrams to record ecological phenomena. In The Wave

(Nankin,1996-97) with the aid of a number of volunteers, large sheets

of unexposed photographic paper were attached to a raft in

moonlight on a remote beach in the Mornington Peninsula National

Park in Victoria. Taking the raft out to sea, the paper was exposed to

short bursts of flash light to record the life-size impressions of waves

hitting the print surface. After the chemical development of the prints

in the studio, Nankin applied mixed media to the surfaces of the

shadowgrams. In Contact (Nankin, 2003-04) Nankin continued with

the art and nature theme by using, instead of waves, the shadow

impressions of Mallee woodland by exposing luminous translucent

film rather than opaque paper. The outdoor originals were contact

printed and inscribed by hand in the studio to make 'positives' that

were then sandwiched together to create multi-layered manuscripts.

His current work-in-progress titled The Rain (2006) has involved

recording rainfall hitting large sheets of photographic paper in a

Tasmanian rainforest. Nankin crosses boundaries of nature and

photography to create a multidimensional assemblage of concepts

and methods to produce visually arresting large-scale abstract

photographs.

The Australian indigenous photomedia artist and filmmaker Michael

Riley has created beautiful images throughout his career - often

using a Pictorialist style – that address the impact of British rule on

Aboriginal culture. His evocative photography represents the spiritual

value of the land.

29

What I was trying to do was show in those images how farmers

or graziers or whatever, people, have changed the surface of

the land, country, but to try and give an idea that Aboriginal

spirits – ramadi – is still there within that land, even though the

surface has changed. You know, there’s still a sense of beauty

and a spiritual feeling there. (Riley, Wungguli–Shadow:

Photographing the spirit and Michael Riley, para. 22)

His photographic and cinematic work is a poetic expression of

Indigenous struggle and human sensitivity.

In the context of video work that has stylistic and spiritual resonance

to my work Bill Viola’s abstract videos of the 1970’s and Gary Hill’s

Site/Recite (1989) are both relevant. Hill’s use of a poetic voice-over

and the shifting of the camera in and out of focus examine in

forensic-like manner objects on a revolving table. As the objects

precariously shift in and out of view an alluring yet ambiguous

landscape is created with the poetic juxtapositions of voice-over and

minute detail.

The Quantum Model

Quantum mechanics is a great deal more than a theory; it is a

whole new way of looking at the world. When it was developed

in the 1920s, quantum mechanics was viewed primarily as a

way of making sense of the host of observations at the level of

single electrons, atoms or molecules that could not be

explained in terms of Newtonian mechanics. (Leggett, 1999,

para. 2)

I had initially sought quantum scientific theories to provide theoretical

frameworks for multidimensional concepts of time and the psyche.

The various explanations of quantum behaviour are known as the

many interpretations of quantum theory. Quantum laws of physics

30

and mathematics indicate that there is not one universe, there is the

“multiverse” (deWitt, Everett, Deutsch) which is comprised of an

infinite number of universes and variations of an object or action – all

operating simultaneously. David Deutsch, a quantum physicist

working now in quantum computation, is well known for his support of

the multiverse theory of reality. Deutsch’s description of multiverse is

analogous to Roberts’ “multidimensional reality”:

A growing number of physicists, myself included, are convinced

that the thing we call ‘the universe’ — namely space, with all the

matter and energy it contains — is not the whole of reality.

According to quantum theory — the deepest theory known to

physics — our universe is only a tiny facet of a larger

multiverse, a highly structured continuum containing many

universes. Everything in our universe — including you and me,

every atom and every galaxy — has counterparts in these other

universes. (Deutsch, 1998, para. 1)

David Deutsch ventures to describe the multiverse theory in

analogous terms, such as his ‘present’ moment of drinking a cup of

tea - where in another universe he would be simultaneously having a

cup of coffee:

For instance, as I write this, I am having the experience of

drinking tea. Quantum theory implies that vast numbers of other

experiences of mine, including the experience of drinking coffee

at this moment, are also taking place. The reason why I do not

have an experience of having all those experiences

simultaneously is that the laws of quantum mechanics restrict

the operation of our brains… (Deutsch, 1996, para. 2)

Trivial tea or coffee moments aside, at the complex level of

computational science, the multiverse theory of quantum science has

been leading research into artificial intelligence. Deutsch describes

31

the multiverse system as a “layering structure” because all possible

infinite versions are stacked on to each other simultaneously, much

like how invisible layers in the layer palette of the Photoshop program

are latently present in the layer mix.

I began to consider quantum theoretical interpretations in an effort to

conceptually frame my creative ideas and support Roberts’ literary

description of the multidimensional psyche. The scientific concepts

are considerable and relevant to creative practices (Shlain, 1993) –

although it has concerned me that interpretative scientific theories

could over-dominate this research at the expense of creative

exploration and experimentation.

Most physicists are confident that quantum mechanics is a

fundamental and general description of the physical world.

Indeed, serious attempts have been made to apply quantum

ideas not merely to laboratory-scale inanimate matter but also,

for example, to the workings of human consciousness and to

the universe as a whole. (Leggett, para. 3)

Placing my creative practice within a quantum theoretical paradigm

has been appropriate since creative practice and quantum theories

interpret reality and challenge established or conventional models of

reality.

The source of all quantum paradoxes appears to lie in the fact

that human perceptions create a world of unique actualities –

our experience is inevitably “classical” – while quantum reality is

simply not that way at all. (Herbert, 1985, p. 248).

Quantum physicists since Hugh Everett (deWitt, Everett & Graham

1973, Deutsch 1997) have produced mathematical equations to

represent a multiverse picture of reality. In philosophical terms a

multiverse multiplies the self and all phenomena to an infinite

32

probability of co-existing universes (Roberts, 1997). It is a sub

phenomenal and subliminal framework beyond the temporal and

spatial parameters of the phenomenal world. Deutsch continues his

discussion of the quantum implications of infinite ‘probable’ events

happening simultaneously:

I have just said both that I cannot see the coffee (on the table)

and that I am having the perception of seeing coffee. This is not

a contradiction, merely two different uses of the word ‘I’. The

problem here is that ordinary language implicitly makes the

false assumption that our experiences (and observable events

in general) have a single-valued history. To help resolve the

ambiguities created by this assumption, Lockwood introduces

the term ‘Mind’ to denote the multiple entity that is having all the

(“maximal”) experiences that I am in reality having, and

reserves the term mind for an entity that is having any one of

those experiences. So I (the Mind) am both seeing tea and

seeing coffee, and am simultaneously reporting both

experiences, but I (the mind), who am writing “tea”, am seeing

only tea. Similarly we call multi-valued physical reality as a

whole the multiverse, to distinguish it from the universe of

classical physics in which observables can take only one value

at a time. (Deutsch, 1996, para. 4)

The examples already given – Sokurov’s Russian Ark for instance –

set paradigmatic precedence for a multiverse of selves in a small

number of contemporary arts practice. However, certain pockets of

practices and studies are relevant to the multiverse model

(Shlain,1995; Gray, 1995) as are the current ubiquitous domains of

multimedia and virtual reality. In the social sciences ethnographic

accounts of creative and transpersonal practices have a bearing in a

quantum investigation (Kalweit, 1991). Certainly with multimedia and

VR, quantum theory relates to hyper-textual events, however a

distinct paradigm for multiversal selves – quantum selves (Goswami,

33

2001; Zohar, 1990) – in creative practice has not been distinctly

evident. The quantum theoretical debates can suggest a model for

creative practice beyond postmodernity by positioning the creative

self in a psychological system of reality which recognizes

transtemporal, transcultural and multidimensional layers of meaning.

Transpersonal Research Methods

Using the Inner Senses, we simply increase our entire range of

perception. The point of learning how to use the Inner Senses is

that you will learn what reality is... This self-investigation initiates

states of consciousness with which you are not usually familiar,

and these senses can be used as investigative tools. (Hughes,

n.d., para. 15).

Transpersonal research methods investigate the transpersonal

dimensions of human nature by recognizing the myriad states of

consciousness that the human psyche experiences. In

ethnopsychology, tribal shamanic experiences are studied (Kalweit

1988). In transpersonal psychology, a range of methods are utilized

and studied, e.g. dream work, meditation, creative expression, bodily

cues, emotional states, exceptional experiences. (Braud & Anderson,

1988; Hunt, 1995; Valle, 1998; Walsh & Vaughan, 1980). In

philosophy, the correlation of quantum theory and Eastern religions is

well documented. (Capra, 1992; Goswami, 1999; Krisnamurti &

Bohm, 1999).

A broad classification of research disciplines adopts transpersonal

methods to expand the conventionally limiting scope of their

practices, e.g. Psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, sociology,

ecology, ethnography and anthropology. These disciplines often use

the term transpersonal to describe a research paradigm that seeks to

enlarge and enrich the scope of formal knowledge systems with a

multidimensional view of the human or living condition. They consider

34

consciousness in state-specific terms, giving credibility to the

plasticity and multiplicity of consciousness states.

In creative practices, transpersonal methods have been used in

holistic and feminist contexts. Gablik’s seminal work, The Re-

enchantment of Art (Gablik, 1991) offers a championing portrayal of

feminist and holistic art practices of the 1980’s in North America to

counteract the nihilism of post modern practices. In current art

practices, a distinctly transpersonal approach has increasingly

become a research approach. There is a link often drawn between

Eastern religions and art practices, especially in modernism (Shlain,

1993; Armstrong, 1997; Riley 1998; Perlmutter & Koppman,1999),

and also between psychology and art (Shlain 1993; Lomas 2000;

Davis 1998; Kallet & Cofer eds., 1999). “In exploring the vast and

multidimensional nature of human experience, our methods need to

be as dynamic as the experiences studied.” (Braud and Anderson,

1998).

Kalweit discusses the shortfalls of the scientific community to

investigate “indefinable, unknown, parapsychic phenomena” and “the

idea of an emptied consciousness…irregular time intervals, the

feeling of timelessness, or time neutrality experienced in states of

altered consciousness.” Much of Kalweit’s far-reaching study was

conducted in the 1980’s and extended to remote indigenous regions

world-wide, including Australian Aboriginal communities (Kalweit,

1988). Kalweit has made a significant contribution to the social

sciences and to research methods generally. Studies into the

“exceptional human experience” have since become more localized

and common in the social sciences, thus demonstrating the broad

application of transpersonal methods. (Walsh & Vaughan, 1980;

Valle, 1998).

Transpersonal psychology provides a methodological framework that

explains and honours the transegoic experiences of Jane Roberts.

35

Transpersonal research methods became popular in psychology as a

means of studying the extraordinary nature of the psyche rather than

studying psychological pathology. Roberts’ work is simultaneously

creative in multidimensional terms, potentially self-actualizing in

content, transpersonal in psychological terms and evocative in

description on levels of philosophy, psychology, science and

creativity. Though Roberts is not trained in science or psychology,

her theories and methods express quantum scientific theories and

transpersonal research findings. Roberts’ insights provide a model of

reality that is transpersonal and transegoic, which suggests a

paradigm of practice that recognizes the self as a transtemporal

multidimensional psyche.

Creative Practice as an Investigative Tool

Creative practice as the investigative tool is a process of constant

experimentation with materials to achieve creative outcomes that

disclose the conceptual concerns. The process of this study began

as conceptual, cultural and aesthetic dilemmas to “solve”.

Developments and experiments unfolded in an effort to resolve the

situation in some way. Making creative choices was a reflexive

investigation into the communicative effectiveness of chosen

materials and methods. When final pictures or animations had been

created, the reflexive process continued with an assessment of how

well the intended goals were achieved. Success was measured in

terms of my intentions and the work’s internal coherence to represent

conceptual concerns. It was also measured by whether the work

suggested further experiments and developments. As a creative

practitioner I engaged a repertoire of techniques that altered if the

need arose, when new challenges were being met. The experimental

journey does not cease necessarily, although finished works need to

give clarity to my aesthetic and cultural concerns.

36

For me there are cultural, aesthetic, philosophical and psychological

agendas, all of which need to be integrated into the completed works.

The integration of parts, including the technologies being used, was

successfully managed when the work demonstrated internal

coherence. Making the finished products - which may be one image

or an entire body of work - is a methodology of integrating various

processes and meanings. Internal coherence required the consistent

use of methods that reflected appropriate arrangements of cultural,

aesthetic, philosophical and psychological ideas.

Experimentation – trial and error – was necessary in order to achieve

a coherent practice. My creative practice oscillated between tried and

tested methods, and trusting in the unknown and contingent. When

tackling the creative problems, there was often an instinct to try

something not yet explored, to experiment, which meant trying

methods that might have been appropriate although there was some

uncertainty as to their effectiveness. The procedure was to ask,

“What if…” and to work with the method until an interesting or

satisfying result was achieved. Chance encounters were often at play

because they express the unforeseen or what might otherwise be

inexpressible. This measure of uncertainty and experimentation was

very important because the discoveries were delightful and surprising

and led to finished work that retained a lightness of touch, a

mysterious quality, and an aspect that is somewhat ineffable yet

perfectly suited to the task.

Looking at the outcomes of my project, it may seem that I have

worked entirely in the digital domain. Digital imaging and output are

major processes in my creative practice and are seen as

technological developments that have specific cultural and aesthetic

issues for me. However, the inclusion of non-digital technologies is

very important to the reading of the work, especially the traditional

photographic aspect which is always present as a subtext of

historical dimensions. Photography is fundamental to my practice,

37

although my use of it is deliberately removed from the classic role of

the photograph as unassailable evidence of legitimacy. The interest

in photography concerns its cultural entanglements with truth and

with time; with the epistemological attributes of photography to

represent a present that is contingent, embalmed, archived and

industrialized (Doane, 2003). Photography’s ubiquitous appeal lies in

its exquisite record of the present which is often unpredictable or

surprising. The fleeting present cannot be humanly experienced as

an isolated event in Time’s continuum, however in the photographic

document it becomes preserved as a fragile illusion of eternity.

Photography has an allegiance to chronology, to an historical

temporality, and whilst the notion of timelessness is conjured since

the present is captured forever, photographs represent that which

has already passed.

The economic reality of the technology of photography is as a

socialized and industrialized phenomenon. Like the illusion of an

eternal present, the allure of the photograph’s indexical faithfulness

assures its social and industrial use which self-perpetuates the

economic condition in which it plays an integral role. The idea that

photography is fundamental to economic hegemonies emphasises

the limits of its aesthetic potential to present multidimensional and

transcultural concepts. Wrestling with the rationality of the

photographic document, photographic artists throughout the 19th and

20th centuries have produced beautiful pictures that considerably

emulate traditional fine art media, especially that of painting. Indeed

whilst painting has been hugely influenced by photography, there

were no aesthetic or technological restraints on painting to be aligned

with photography. Yet photographic artists, who wished to be

painterly in their approach, must carry the technological burden of

producing work that is a mechanical reproduction, and an expression

of economic power to temporalize in the context of work time.

38

Pictorialism and certain painterly aspects are genres that are present

in my work but only as a part of a larger framework. It is not enough

to simply suggest a meaningful marriage between painting and

photography in order to uncouple the technological resoluteness of

the camera. Indeed that resoluteness does have an important role in

the multidimensional scenario. The importance is that the camera’s

cultural and economic implications are challenged to meet an

expanded scenario that inevitably disrupts its hegemonic

foundations. The industrialized time and the representation of the

single viewpoint have been confronted in my photographic practice.

The bodies of work presented here have raised issues about certain

limiting cultural expectations concerning photographic and digital

media, whilst proposing alternative modes of practice that suit

multidimensional and transcultural issues. This exegesis and body of

work aims to demonstrate that to create multidimensional work is to

represent the language of the psyche, or psychological landscapes

and transcultural concepts. This is not to say that identity, culture and

place have been denied or subsumed in a multidimensional

paradigm. On the contrary, the uniqueness and richness of identity to

connect and shift across times, places and personas is preserved.

My creative practice has involved the creation of hybridized works

that combine and at times confront the attributes of the various

technologies being used. I have worked with pastels, film, digital

media, single, multiple and sequential imaging, from the still to

moving image, and from the hand drawn to the projected to the

digitally printed surface.

Conclusion

As a photomedia artist I have considered the proposition that the

psyche is a multidimensional transtemporal instrument. The essential

task has been to bring this proposition into the production of work so

39

that a multidimensional blueprint is manifest in some way. Underlying

the task is the problematic nature of the photomedia technologies to

generate only ideas within the confines of their particular cultural

canons. For instance, time in the modern world can be viewed as a

construct that is economic and cinematic. The significance of this

creative investigation has been to challenge photomedia’s canons

and constructs – in fact, to try to present a distinctly ‘other’

alternative. If time is a cultural and economic construct, there is good

reason for me as an artist working with temporal media to address

those concerns. It has been interesting that in addressing those

concerns, the experimental designs have needed to find some way of

irritating the comfort zones of hegemony to subvert those implicit

temporalities and cultures.

40

SECTION 2:

CREATIVE WORK: METHODS AND OUTCOMES

Introduction

This section outlines the creative journeys taken and in particular

focuses on the choices that were made in terms of media and

methods for each of the three major bodies of work. In the making of

the bodies of work, there are sequences of events and scores of

choices where impulses or techniques or ideas have been pursued

over others to create a methodology of practice that advances the

theoretical, cultural and aesthetic principles being proposed.

This study represents a distinct and rigorous period of creative

activity, in which the creative practice undertaken was focussed

primarily on providing solutions to a set of particular problems. There

was a considerable experimental phase where ideas that had been

developed were reworked or re-examined in some way because they

were appropriate to the questions, yet required processes that

needed development. The final outcomes are three bodies of work

that take their cue from previous experiments, yet stand

fundamentally alone in presenting unique conclusive creative

endeavours. The titles of the work done as part of this study have

been underlined in the text to distinguish between this work and work

that was not part of the study.

The creative journeys are a continual process of genesis (impulse),

trial (experimentation), evaluation (interpretation) and re-trial (more

experimentation). The process never stops, for even if a visual piece

feels complete or resolved, the next piece, no matter how seemingly

removed in theme or subject matter, will employ a previous

experiment, either to re-work or add to, or to specifically challenge in

some way. As an example, for a series made in 2000 (Powerhouse

41

series) figures shaped like cut-outs were stencilled in (although it is

perhaps preferable to call them ‘cut-ins’) – abstract shapes that

outlined bodies dancing, sitting, crawling and suspended upside-

down etc. Their keyhole nature symbolized portals between ‘worlds’.

Current work (Dancelines series, 2006) repeats the Powerhouse

technique of connecting two distinct places via a moving figure, but in

place of outlines, the figure is fleshed out, the human presence of a

young beautiful black female dancer takes centre stage. She

becomes the portal between nature and her urban studio

environment. The technique alludes to the soul of the dancer (like the

performers in the Powerhouse series) who speaks a

multidimensional language of beauty in body and nature.

These two bodies of work are officially outside the scope of this

study, because they come before and after. In other words, the

creative practices presented here begin with a re-working of previous

experimentations and after three bodies of work (Flicker, Beyond

Capture and Liminal Interstices) are extended into work that

references all previous developments (Dancelines series, 2006). The

enquiry itself is the constant and the bodies of work are the myriad of

ways the investigations materialize, although the final two outcomes

distinguish themselves by their level of rigour and success in

addressing the research questions.

The methodology used in this study consists principally of the

process and production of ongoing artwork that reflects a

multidimensional model of reality. Consequently there could not be a

fixed position or authoritative universal voice aiming for domination in

the practice. If there is any element of this imposition,

notwithstanding the work being taken as an historical artefact, it is

fleeting and cannot fundamentally threaten the many voices, the

many temporalities, the many cultures at the work’s interface –

especially evident in my Liminal Interstices series.

42

The beginning of this study marks an experimental period where new

work was trialled on the basis of two previous works, firstly a Super 8

abstract video piece that was subsequently retitled and exhibited with

the first of the PhD exhibitions, Flicker (Merge/Submerge) and

secondly the Powerhouse series, five of which were also exhibited in

Flicker (Vein Veil, Dream, Rewiring, Look Up, and Baby Diving).

The study begins with experimenting with Super 8 which leads into

disengaging the picture’s motion and positioning certain frames on

the print surface, using digital means of scanning, image-adjustment

and inkjet printing. After Flicker, iconic pictures are referenced from

the Patterns of Connection series (1992) by taking fragments of the

source pictures from the LaTrobe Library Melbourne and merging

them with a series of drawings of landscape photographs – again,

using digital means of scanning, image-adjustment and inkjet printing

(Beyond Capture). The third in the trilogy advances the technological

ideas of the previous two in an exponentially complex manner. There

is a similar double layering of landscapes and fragments of cultural

icons from which inkjet prints emerge; but in addition, the layers are

in motion with sound. Digital photographs were taken in sequences

and edited together by means of computer animation technologies.

Liminal Interstices comprises a series of inkjet prints and a sound

and picture animation on DVD.

The final work of the trilogy, Liminal Interstices, represents the

quintessential proposition, that in a quantum multidimensional

framework, stills of moving pictures are moving, and doing so

simultaneously, while maintaining a distinct individual sense of

stillness. There are many attributes that could be suggestive of a

multidimensional psyche. Some of these are: change, subtlety,

interconnection, infinite choice (Deutsch, Roberts), synchronicity

(Jung, Roberts), beauty (Hillman), rhythm, cycles and value fulfilment

(Roberts).

43

Liminal Interstices is the culmination of three years of

experimentation dealing with time, spirit, identity, history, place,

nature, technologies, and psyche (soul). In her review of the show,

O’Rielly acknowledges the potential of the works to address the

underlying concepts; “By consciously constructing a sense of

ambiguity the artist intends a conceptual and perhaps political

strategy of movement around and through categories of identity, and

multiple historical truths, as much as an abstraction away from them”

(O’Reilly, 2005, para. 8).

Figure 1. Exhibition still. Liminal Interstices,Q.U.T. Art Museum 2005

It is in respect to such flexibility of movement that transtemporal

methods are relevant to this creative practice. Transtemporal

psychology, especially, recognizes psychologising (Hillman, 1975) as

an activity of the psyche that is more to do with soul language and

less to do with empirical data. The rationalizing of the soul in modern

industrialized societies, with their sound economies and pedagogies,

denies the soul’s multidimensional psychologising existence

(Hillman, 1975). The more disposable and technological modern

cultures are becoming, the more urgent are the issues for human

values of individuation. This study is not about denying identity;

rather it is about denying a brand of identity and suggesting

multidimensional alternatives. Earlier work has been suggesting this;

however, this study is distinct from prior work because it is

44

purposefully acknowledging the ideological and philosophical

challenges taking place for the soul in photo-based technologies. The

outcomes of this study use these technologies in somewhat

uncharacteristic ways to present a coherent medley of different

approaches - a framework of many layers simultaneously operating

to create a multidimensional picture in a creative sense.

Given the time-based nature of the technologies used, the

rationalization of time is equally relevant here (Doane, 2003)

because soul time is not clock time or machine time. As Doane

points out, photography and cinema are implicated in an

industrialization process that places constraints on their otherwise

aberrant features. So how might the notion of rationalization be

presented when it is a transparent feature of our media events? Or

should it be asked how the anomalies can be raised without

prejudice from the rational point of view? For Doane, irregularities do

appear in the contingency factor – the chance occurrences that

photographic or cinematic events both bring. The important point

however is that the creative use of these tools has the ability to

create rich and evocative landscapes of the psyche (e.g., The

psychic landscapes of Olde Wolbers and Jila Nikpay that are referred

to in Section 1).

This section of the document sets out to clarify, in detail, how the

materials and techniques have attended to the philosophical

propositions. Hybridized works are created that combine and

confront the attributes of the various technologies used, from pastels

to film to digital media, from single to multiple to sequential imaging,

from the still to moving image, and from the hand drawn to the

projected to the digitally printed surface.

The journey taken to get to the three major bodies of work that are

being presented as the outcomes of this study begins, in the early

stages of the program, with skills and knowledge already at the

45

experimental table. This is the technological ground from which

research develops. The place of origin for the methods discussed

here is a photomedia practice engaged with cultural, temporal and

spiritual mediation. As well as technological skills, at this

experimental table is a research enquiry that fundamentally asks

whether photomedia can represent soul in multidimensional terms.

Since the creative practice uses methodologies of time, the research

begins with this aspect in problematizing the idioms and attributes of

the technologies in use.

Time is simultaneous (Roberts, 1995). Time is multidimensional

(Deutsch, 1997). These two statements are paradoxical in the human

experience of time. Why not try to represent a paradoxical notion of

time? Art embodies paradoxes (Shlain, 1993). The conundrum is

quite apt for a photomedia practice since the technologies of

photomedia are about time, one way or another. If time is

multidimensional and simultaneous, then that idea has logic highly

alien to how we believe we experience time, as the “continuum par

excellence” (Doane, 2003, p. 8). If time is both controlled and

contingent in film and cinema according to Doane, then our creative

tools that represent time will need to be problematized (probably as

outmoded). But can time-based media tell any version of time other

than the industrialized mode? Such questions are the foundations of

the creative practice outlined in this section.

46

Bodies of Work

Flicker: Examining temporalities

Figure 2. Film frames from Merge/Submerge 1993 & Flicker print series 2003/04

The enquiry leads to scrutinizing the visual media by making work

that will in some way disclose that the media itself is under scrutiny.

To investigate assumptions about how photomedia and time-based

visual media represent time, it was necessary to show, as time-

based (in video format), filmic sequences that dealt explicitly with

passages of time. In an attempt at variance, selecting the frames

revealed them in their static state. On a print surface, a split second

can be eternalized, embalmed as a frame or sequence of frames. If a

sequence is revealed, the film frame is presented relative to its

sequence, or its field, and therefore ideas of the relativity of the

single frame to sequence to series can be contemplated and/or

evaluated.

The experimentation began by re-viewing a previous Super 8 film

that dealt with change, transition, and variations on passages of time

via different camera and body shifts and two different frame speeds

(‘normal and slow motion). The medium of Super 8 embodies a

photographic quality quite unlike that of digital video, especially when

the camera is moving rapidly such as it was at times in this work. The

effects are fluid and serial, even despite the jerky and chaotic

movements of the camera as it is racing alongside or around the

male figure that is jogging and then disrobing.

47

Figure 3. Film frames from Merge/Submerge 1993 & Flicker print series 2003/04

Merge/Submerge, the previous Super 8 work was the starting point.

In making a new set of Super 8 sequences, filming was done with

similar chaotic movements around moving bodies. These bodies

(either of myself running or of my two boys jumping and riding a

bicycle) are equally abstracted, blurry and yet far more ambiguous in

their indication of action and scene. After processing the new film

work, the next step was to deny their cinematic privileges of

movement by digitally scanning in selected frame sequences of

various lengths, making image adjustments like enlarging by about a

hundred times, and presenting them on a print surface - in this case

onto digital cotton rag which perfectly suited the blurry abstract

Pictorialist effects of the work.

Figure 4. Dress, cotton rag print, 97 x 64 cm, Flicker (2003/04)

48

Figure 5. Boy, cotton rag print, 114 x 40 cm, Flicker (2003/04)

In Boy, four sequential frames are presented. As with many of these

selected sequences, in order to loosen up the limitation of the frame

edge, edges of the film including parts of the film sprockets and the

previous and subsequent frames are revealed. Filming at 25 frames

a second – where one second equals 25 frames - this sequence is

representing a time interval of four 25ths of a second. Now of course

the ordinary lived experience of this does not ponder such a time

interval as four 25ths of a second – perhaps to an athlete, fractions of

seconds make vital differences, or indeed to a photographer making

a manual setting adjustment on a camera. Photographers take

pictures at speeds such as this (it is an 8th of a second on a typical

manual SLR camera), which in photographic terms is a slow

exposure that requires, if camera movement is not wanted, a very

steady camera. But the camera in these Super 8 pictures is not

steady, nor is the film as it hurtles past the film gate and nor are the

bodies being filmed. It is interesting to note the huge contingency

factor in operation here as each trajectory of movement collides with

the others in random fashion, creating a synchronous pattern of

various space/time indices.

But how does the time interval make sense when the sequence is

presented as one or many still photographic images? No longer is

the sequence motion film, but neither is it strictly a still photograph,

since film and camera and body are all in motion, creating blur and

abstraction in framed sequences. At what point does the celluloid film

49

stop representing movement and start representing the photograph?

Does playing back the film in motion mean that it is no longer

photographic? With these questions arising, creative experimentation

attempts to deal with them in one way or another.

A further enigma is that there may be speculation about the tensions

existing between the latent cinematic qualities of the sequences and

the stasis occurring on the print surface. Why display the pictures out

of cinematic context? What is the point of halting that which moves?

The stillness of the pictures force a photographic reading. However,

simultaneously, the latency of the frames’ motion and their

appearance as sequentially relative identities betray a larger

framework in operation that is suggestive of the multidimensional.

The enigmatic and ambiguous nature of the pictures as a record of

an event or alternatively a symbolic gesture creates an elusive

scenario. Viewing becomes a guessing game, firstly as to what the

pictures are representing. The descriptive titling gives an indication to

the viewers who will probably try to find, for instance, recognition of

“boyness” in the rather abstract sequence titled Boy.

The use of abstraction is by no means a new ‘pictorial’ device.

Abstraction has been a significant genre in the painting and

photographic arts since the turn of the 20th century, establishing a

language for the unknowable or the ambiguous in representation.

Apart from the historical/aesthetic references to abstraction that may

seem obvious to the viewer, there is a use of abstract and

ambiguous strategies within a greater framework of devices in order

to symbolize macro/micro scale relationships. These relationships

are in operation to explore differences and similarities between two

or more temporal and or spatial versions of the ‘same’ thing.

Paradoxes abound in the universe. The Ionian philosopher Zeno of

Elea (c.490–c.430 BC) is known for observing paradoxes, one of

which he conveys as the impossibility of completing a linear journey

50

conducted as a series of movements, each covering half the distance

remaining to the journey’s destination. This paradox is apt to the

discussion of linear and non-linear time (Deutsch, 1997; Doane,

2003).

Figure 6. Water, cotton rag print, 105 x 31 cm, Flicker (2003/04)

Figure 7. Sun, cotton rag print, 87x42 cm, Flicker (2003/04)

Sun is a sequence of three film frames representing the reflection of

the sun on wave-swept sand. The differences from one frame to the

next generate a poetic differentiation that is occurring over a very

short interval. As for all the sequences, in the lived experience of the

very short intervals of time during the ‘exposure’ (three 25ths of a

second in Sun’s case), slight variations go relatively unnoticed to the

human eye – at least consciously. The sand was filmed while a wave

51

gushed in and then receded, taking about 10 seconds, which

approximates 250 frames of film. But the rescaled static

representations of each frame that comprise that larger event reveal

distinct picture differences and frame identities. Each frame has

discrete compositional and formal qualities; its individuation creates

poetic differentiation from one frame to the next. In larger terms there

is the sequence of the wave coming and going, where each tiny

frame plays its part in the succession to generate what makes it the

event that it is, in cinematic terms. The frame possesses

individuation, is unique, but it is simultaneously a part of a larger

event that is the sequence, which in turn is a fractional part of an

even larger event from which that sequence is derived. Parts are

wholes and wholes are parts in an interchangeable relativity of value

and meaning.

Figure 8. Boy with Bike, Flicker , cotton rag, 61 cm x 77 cm (2003/04)

52

Figure 9. Arm, cotton rag print, 57 x 76 cm, Flicker (2003/04)

The five single picture frames in this exhibition demand a

quintessential photographic reading, being single representations of

the cinematic event. But the singularity is an aberration in the

sequence of events, just as the photographic still is an illusion of time

arrested. The grander cinematic context is present and shifting in

latent form, as is the grander experiential context, emphasising the

illusory nature of the single photographic image.

The exhibition installation of this work at the South Australian

Museum presented variations of temporalities and image outputs.

Some rag prints comprised sequences from three to 17 frames in

length. Some showed only one picture, where the tiny Super 8 film

frame was significantly enlarged. Some frames were shown

separately, out of order but in proximity to other sequences that were

displayed separately and out of order.

53

Figure 10. Exhibition still, Flicker, South Australian Museum, 2004.

The 17-frame sequence was folded concertina-style in such a

manner that the folds did not match the frame edges, giving the

effect of subverting the monotony of the frame spacing and adding a

literal depth to the flatness that was dominating the exhibition. The

video Exchange (1993) was included, having been dubbed with its

sound track (Duncan King-Smith 1993) and retitled Merge/Submerge

(2004) for Flicker.

Flicker studies movement arrested, whereas what is studied later in

Liminal Interstices is the stationary in motion. Hence the trajectory

that this study takes over its three bodies of work is comparative and

exponential in its methodological development.

Work-in-progress for Flicker was exhibited in Brisbane for Wake at

the Palace Gallery (Brisbane 2003) where several large prints and

the video Exchange were shown. In early 2004, Flicker was exhibited

at the South Australian Museum for the Adelaide Fringe Festival.

54

Beyond Capture: The Artist and the Artefact

Figure 11. Drawing from a rock photograph: defining a painterly layer in Ferns,

Beyond Capture (2004)

This section examines in detail the processes of Beyond Capture so

as to specify its multidimensional nature, reflected in the physical,

material, aesthetic, cultural and philosophical systems that make up

the body of work. Particular reference is made to aspects of its

compositional layers, in an effort to present the multidimensional

frameworks operating across all of them.

Figure 12. Ferns, Beyond Capture series 2004. Digital print (archival dyes) on

cotton rag, 115 cm x 78 cm.

55

Moving on from Flicker.

Flicker dealt with the variety of temporal attributes in cinematic

frames to suggest the multidimensional nature of time and space.

The next step in the creative investigative journey was to concentrate

particularly on the print media that had been successful in Flicker as

a surface hybrid for evoking the painterly and the photographic.

Applying the technique of double layering pictures on the print

surface meant that one of the layers for the new work could be a

drawing on a rough surface which would faithfully render in textured

form on the rag print. Since in Flicker the enlarging and Pictorialist

effects had sat comfortably on the textured rag surface, it seemed

this surface could potentially act as a platform of exchange - a

boundary crossing for hand-drawn, photographic and digital work.

This hybridizing technique would suggest a multidimensional

interface of simultaneously discrete yet interconnected aesthetic and

representational variables.

There had already been much experimentation with double-layering

in the past, initially layering ‘in the camera’ by photographing

reflective surfaces and more recently using digital photo layering

techniques such as those that were being applied to this new body of

work. The potential for using an additional layer in the new work

would add another dimension of reference. Since the surface of the

print is meant to be an interface of temporal and representational

differences, historical representation is presented as a relative

variable that connects with the temporalities and epistemologies both

within and outside its historical frames of reference. Indeed Flicker

referenced film work from 1993 because of the temporal messages

embedded in it, and now there was referencing of double-layer work

from 1992, namely the Patterns of Connection series - past work that

deals with an indigenous historical context - because of its significant

contribution to Australian art and the issues of indigeneity, historicity,

spirituality and land that the series refers to.

56

Looking back: the postcolonialism of Patterns of Connection.

In the continuum of the practice it is worthwhile making reference to

past work, especially that which has had an impact on indigenous

perspectives in Australian creative arts culture. The series Patterns

of Connection (1992) dealt specifically with colonial impact on

Aboriginal culture. For that series, reworking and re-contextualizing

State Government archival photographs was done to signal the

hegemonic entanglements in colonial photography that perpetuated

cultural dominance. The re-photography and re-use of the nine

Aboriginal 19th century photographs was not meant to be an

indictment of Aboriginal material culture, but rather the cropping and

re-photography of the library material was taking issue with the

continuation of cultural dominance over Aboriginal culture -

symbolized partially today in the management of archives by public

institutions that maintain ownership and copyright of their collections.

Use of Aboriginal material at the LaTrobe library requires approval to

ensure that sensitive material is managed properly. In the case of

reworking the source photographs for Patterns of Connection,

approval was granted by the Museum of Victoria’s Koori committee

who were a body of representatives responsible for the indigenous

collections in both the library and the museum. The LaTrobe Library’s

Picture Collection librarian, Christine Downer, was also supportive of

the work, being well aware of what it was suggesting conceptually

and politically. Downer suggested printing the series large-scale and

exhibiting them at the Victorian Centre for Photography in Melbourne.

Since Patterns of Connection was first shown at the V.C.P. in 1992,

the series (of nine cibachrome prints) has made a significant impact

on visual arts culture in Australia because it raises the debate about

the representation of indigenous people in the colonial context, and it

does so by referencing the confines of the very technology (the

57

camera) it employs as a creative tool. The painterly allure of the work

adds a further dimension suggesting that the spiritual and evocative

elements of the ‘arguments’ are equally important, in fact vital to the

claiming of an alternative perspective, especially an indigenous voice

speaking of land. The allure of the photographic yet ethereal

presence of both Aboriginal ancestors in the colonial context and the

landscape attests to photographic ‘truths’ but simultaneously softens

the rationality and hard-bed factuality of the historical past. The work

is delicately erasing the white man’s past and bringing through a

spiritual presence that is in the now, in the eternal present.

Aborigines are, and will always be the rightful custodians of their

country, the Australian land.

Images from the Patterns of Connection series continue to be

requested by curators of group exhibitions who are dealing with

themes such as contemporary urban indigeneity (New Trends 2004),

Australian indigeneity (Aratjara 1993-94), Spirit and Nature (Before

Night - After Nature 2004; Art and Land 2000; Spirit and Place 1997;

Voices of the Earth 1996), postcolonialism (Colonial - Post Colonial

1996), history (The Changing Face of Victoria 2005; Sweet Damper

and Gossip 1994), contemporary indigenous photomedia (Black

Photography 2005; Blackspot 2004; Retake 1998-2000) and

contemporary art (Extra-Aesthetic 2005; Urban Icons 1996).

58

Figure 13. Untitled #11from Patterns of Connection, 1992.

(LaTrobe library 19th century stereograph: girls at Coranderrk settlement)

Photographic cibachrome 100 cm x 100 cm

Figure 14. #10 from Patterns of Connection, 1992

(LaTrobe Library 19th Century photograph: Geelong Tribe)

Photographic cibachrome 100 cm x 100 cm

Fragmenting the archive.

The intention to reference Patterns of Connection was not to repeat

the work technically so much as to take the work as a cue for further

development. The continual selection of images from the series for

group exhibitions and the presence of them in publications such as

59

art text books for Australian high school students (Israel, 2004) show

that the series retains its currency in the Australian cultural context.

New work referencing Patterns of Connection would need to advance

or foreground its postcolonial positions by refining the historical and

cultural aspects of its endeavours. Beyond Capture expands on what

had been achieved previously by refining quintessential aspects that

disclose historical and cultural assumptions whilst also endeavouring

to advance notions of multidimensional aesthetics through the modes

of mechanical and hand-crafted forms of representation that

converge and shift at its surface interface.

The Flicker series had led to the digital cotton rag surface and to

massively enlarging, and thus abstracting, small source pictures

(Super 8 film frames). Continuing with this exaggerated rescaling, the

extremity of the magnification can symbolize the integral connection

between part and ‘whole’. (Bohm 1983; Wilber 2001)

Before starting the process of working with these historical pictures

again, permission was sought from the LaTrobe Library Picture

Collection to use fragments of several of their photographs from their

19th century photographic collection. It was explained to their

exhibitions curator, Clare Williamson, that the project was a

reworking of Patterns of Connection, that the re-use of the archival

documents would be ‘miniscule’ but at the same time considerably

magnified. Small snippets of dress codes and studio accoutrements

were to be taken as quintessential expressions of colonial presence

in 19th century photographs.

Interestingly, there is a condition for use of the library’s photographic

material that pictures are not cropped. This requirement

characterizes the governmental attitude toward historical

preservation. To crop a photograph in their collection would

desecrate its value as an object of ownership, and potentially expose

60

the imperialist project evident in the protection and conservation of

their colonial history.

Figure 15. Fragment from the LaTrobe Library Picture Collection, 19th century

archives

In the mid 1990’s the Picture Collection had acquired five of the

Patterns of Connection cibachromes, all of which they have currently

put on display in the library’s Dome gallery in an extensive exhibition

presenting an historical overview of Victoria (The Changing Face of

Victoria, 2005) – an exhibition that essentially celebrates the archival

value of its collection. Given the prominence of the series in the

library and elsewhere, and given the highly abstracted aesthetic

nature of the request where no person or place would be revealed,

permission was granted and the copyright fee was waived. Yet the

principles of re-capture are there in the fragments, quite evident,

though somewhat obscured in the layering process with the

drawings.

Landscape photographs form the basis of these drawings, in

particular wide-angle photographs of rocks from the coastal regions

of Far East Gippsland, Victoria. In the first place, the intention of

photographing rocks is an interest on the aesthetic level in the

textural and sculptural characteristics of rock surface and contour.

Rocks can be valued for their formal aesthetic and photographic

qualities, especially given that particles of film grain and rock texture

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have complementary characteristics. The graphic nature of rock

surface texture is symbolic of earthiness. Nature photography

celebrates earth’s beauty. It also celebrates spirit of earth. Because

of this, photographic earth symbology is a powerful aesthetic and

political mechanism for the indigenous voice - indigenous country

versus crown land is the political (and economic) implication. The

Australian landscape bears a psychology that is deeply embedded

with spirit, especially in ‘wilderness’ and other protected regions.

The photographic aspect is the representational tool that starts this

work, by way of photographic landscape and historical archive,

although both sources become superseded by the hand-drawn and

the fragmented. Yet as much as these sources disappear, they

remain as indistinct impressions to become something of a

probability rather than a stated ‘quantity’ – their presence is implicit in

the work though not presented fully. There is tension between the

indexical privileging of a visual symbol, albeit fragmentary, and the

considerable diffusion of the source document’s photographic origins.

Figure 16. Buttons 1, Beyond Capture (2004)

88 cm x 86 cm

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In the image titled Buttons - whose photographic origins are the most

easily discernible in the series - a coat with buttons such as a

policeman, tracker or soldier might have worn conjures up 19th

century government agency. The hand-drawn tree and curved lens

barrel represent the artist’s photographic signature. In the past, many

photographic landscapes have been taken by the artist with a wide-

angle lens barrel that includes its edges in the picture. The fish-eye

lens is held over the camera lens that cannot be viewed through

when the photograph is taken, resulting in an effect that is not

altogether controllable, and the lens curvature can end up in the

frame in a variety of ways. The contingency factor is high, allowing

for surprise and edge differentiation while the effect of a curved edge

allows for a disruption of the straight edge of the window frame.

The processes of drawing, photography and digital imaging are

fused, blurring the technological boundaries and creating overlaid

images drawn from the material world and the institutional archive.

Rescaling very minute details of the backdrops, furnishings, clothing

and scenery from the archives, and affiliating them with richly

textured drawings of rock faces and landscapes creates images that

oscillate delicately between abstraction and pictorial reference and

between digital and hand-crafted processes. The abstracted visual

references are revealed by the works' titles but can also be

recognized if the pictures are viewed from long range. When the

viewer moves closer into the work, the presence of the hand-drawn

techniques can be discerned and appear to be impressed within the

rag surface. However, because the surface has taken on the

appearance of having been drawn onto rather than digitally printed,

technological and pictorial boundaries are blurred.

When drawing and fragment are fused together, there is a delicate

marriage, a blurring of boundaries where the work is not so much

denying its elements, but rather allowing a cultural exchange

between its compositional parts. In this case, meeting at the border

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crossing is a philosophical dialogue involving drawing, photograph,

digital process, and historical fragment. The philosophical and

conceptual frameworks of this crossing scenario propose what is

being termed a diplomatic approach that presents political and

cultural issues via an artistic resolution. Strong issues and presences

are both apparent and whispered, making the liminality of their

presence all the more resonant and deeply embedded. The textured

surfaces of the final pieces are strikingly evident and embodied,

especially if scrutinized at close-range for their surface detail. At long

range, the photographic/historical aspects of the subject are more

apparent. These fragments consist of a school window, school door,

dresses, a hat, ribbons, ferns, buttons, tree, hand and branch.

As far as referencing the Patterns of Connection series (as Flicker

references Exchange conceptually), Beyond Capture attempts to

draw further attention to the colonial cultural trappings evident in

photographs of Aborigines in the 19th century, specifically by

revealing colonial dress codes and studio accessories. Fake

backdrops and potted foliage such as ferns were very common

accoutrements in colonial studio photography. Many of the pictures

of Aborigines held by the LaTrobe Library are taken in classic studio

settings. The fragments are carefully selected as a point of cultural

nexus in the original images and the artefacts open up a space for

multidimensional readings.

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Figure 17. Dresses, Beyond Capture, 2004. Digital print (archival dyes)

on cotton rag, 97 cm x 64cm

What Beyond Capture eventually accomplishes, in the twelve prints

that comprise the series, is a diplomatic approach as well as a critical

reconsideration of the politics of representation of indigenous

cultures that are perpetrated to this day in governmental archives.

Diplomacy is suggested as well in the exchange between the hand-

drawn, the photographic and the digital methods, which are

synthesized on the surface, but retain their difference enough to

bring their epistemologies into play.

Figure 18. Hands, Beyond Capture 2004. Digital print (archival dyes) on cotton rag

97 cm x 64cm

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The process of creating these prints involved the digital printing of a

photograph of landscape detail onto Colourfix card, whose highly

textured screen-printed surface imbeds silica sand. Charcoal and

pastel is easily ground to a powder in the tooth of the sandpaper

finish, emphasising their pigment and earthy qualities. The union of

photograph and pigment is completed with the scanning and inkjet

printing of the resulting surface. The result is photographic, with all

the elements re-presented as a layer in the final image. A close look

reveals the original photograph, the hand drawn elements and their

subsequent pigments (a photographic likeness), as well as a

photographic likeness of the sand in the surface of the Colourfix (Art

Spectrum) paper.

Figure 19. Tree, Beyond Capture 2004. Digital print (archival dyes)

on cotton rag. 134 cm x 90 cm

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Liminal Interstices: The Crevice in Ambiguous Space

The Resolution

Liminality not only pertains to the space between cultural

collectives but between historical periods, between politics and

aesthetics, between theory and application. In a discussion of a

museum instalment by African-American artist Renee Green,

for instance, Bhabha describes the exhibit’s postmodern

stairwell (which, apparently, connected the exhibit’s upper and

lower halves) as a ‘liminal space, in-between the designations

of identity (that) becomes the process of symbolic interaction,

the connective tissue that constructs the difference between

upper and lower, black and white’ (Graves, 1998, para. 3).

The series of animations, prints and sounds that comprise Liminal

Interstices represents a refinement as a finished body of work

resulting from the research development stages of the study

program. As the final outcome of the study, the work presents a

multidimensional aesthetic methodology that is a creative exploration

of a philosophical and spiritual nature, using methods to generate

transtemporal, transcultural and trans-spatial ideas.

In Liminal Interstices there are nine sequences, each being

represented by both a fine art print and an animation sequence. Each

sequence is a field, a pattern, a set of interconnected cycles within

cycles of repeating trance-like sound and picture rhythms. The

relationship of still to moving is accentuated by the similarities in

content between them, while the rhythm and repetition that are

integral features of the motion are latent in the stillness of the

pictures and reflected in the sound. Latencies and actualities are

simultaneously linked.

67

This section examines in detail the processes of Liminal Interstices

so as to discuss its multidimensional nature, reflected in the physical,

material, temporal, aesthetic, cultural and philosophical systems that

make up the body of work. Particular reference is made to its

achievements in developing and amalgamating the investigative

processes coming before it, in an effort to present the

multidimensional frameworks operating across all that comprises the

body of work. While some descriptions will deconstruct individual

processes, it is more in the combinations and permutations that the

range of meanings needs to be unfolded. “Since no form of

organization, no matter how encyclopaedic, can give complete

access to the diversity of existing or imagined things, analogy provide

opportunities to travel back into history, to spring forward in time, to

leap across continents” (Stafford, 1999, p. 55).

This exhibition at the QUT Art Museum represents the final

presentation of the doctoral research. The exhibition fundamentally

entailed using a creative practice in photomedia as an investigative

tool to explore issues that are volatile in nature and rather precarious

for a photo media practice. The exhibition comprises digital

photographic works on paper, and video projection of a DVD. The

media used in the process includes drawings, analogue and digital

photographs, digital prints, Super 8 film, video, animation technology

and sound. The DVD comprises digitally created sequences

depicting looped layers of animated photographs and sounds. Each

sequence plays for a varying length of time, within an entire running

time of twelve minutes.

I interpret liminal interstices as places, albeit unstable, at the

threshold of perceptibility. One interpretation of an interstice is a

crevice, an intervening space that parcels references within its

transitory movement to create an illusion of constancy and form. An

hypothesis of the intangible, the crevice is potent with references that

can invite a network of interpretations. The symbologies within this

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body of work are shifting repertoires of cultural and aesthetic

meanings and references, and include nature, archives, figures,

aesthetic representation, families, histories and environments.

Source Gathering and Works

In 2004, during a Goethe Institut residency in Singapore, I explored

my experience as cultural outsider – a transitory and privileged visitor

experiencing icons of tourist locations and shopping centres. At

home in Australia, my work dealt with the land and with cultural roots

that included both indigenous and white Australian. Visiting a society

with little natural wilderness and much orderliness led to considering

the impact of industrialization on spirit and cultural integrity. At the

tourist stalls on Orchard Road mementoes purportedly endowed with

cultural and spiritual potency are cheap and in abundance. There are

postcards that are digital facsimiles of antique curios in which ancient

legacies of Chinese culture are used to endorse cigarettes and

insurance. Nature in Singapore is neat and well-maintained at the

Botanical Gardens, yet in the old and derelict Chinese Cemetery at

Bukit Brown there is a strong and eerie ancestral presence

expressed in the unkempt nature and the many decaying and

overgrown gravesites of Chinese histories from ages past.

Figure 20. Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore.

In Singapore, I compiled a large library of photographic sequences

representing nature, historical paintings on postcards, tourist trinkets

69

and city buildings. At the end of the three week period the artists on

the cultural exchange project were invited to exhibit their work-in-

progress at a gallery space that was rented out and transformed by a

collective of Singaporean artists into a well-presented exhibition

space in Little India which is a large suburb of Singapore populated

largely by expatriates from the Indian sub-continent.

Figure 21. Singapore exhibition, Little India studio: work-in-progress – projected

animation sequence, A4 bubble jet prints and trinkets.

Pages of contact sheets showing many animation sequences in

readiness for the final pieces were presented at this first exhibition of

work-in-progress. After making one small experimental animation

which involved a shiny brass pig cigarette lighter spinning over a

repeated animation sequence of leaves, a three minute double-

layered sequence involving the leaves and Budda trinkets was

compiled for this ‘show and tell’. The work was hardly realized at this

point, yet the animation experiments revealed enough to show that

the use of simultaneously animated sequences of still images could

be experimented with further to potentially create interesting

interplays of juxtaposed pictures and sounds.

70

Figure 22. Pig charm lighter sourced from tourist stalls.

Figure 23. Exhibition still – work-in-progress, Singapore 2004.

In 2005 in Melbourne, the experience of working in Singapore was

contrasted by photographing in the native Australian gardens at the

Royal Melbourne Park. At this central city location, and occupying

what might otherwise be considered prime real estate (as does Bukit

Brown Cemetery), there is a huge expanse of native grasses and

trees. Some windy days produced pictures of grasses and trees

being inscribed by the motion of the wind, allowing rhythmic patterns

made by the joint cooperation of wind, grass and camera to come

into play.

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Figure 24. Native grasses, Royal Park, Melbourne

Visual sequences of source material for the project continued to be

gathered during a two week period at Yuraygir National Park in

coastal New South Wales between the Singapore and Melbourne

residencies.

For the collaboration on the sound elements with Duncan King-

Smith, broad terms of reference were specified such as “fields”,

“loops”, “rhythms”, “patterns”, and “trance states”. Duncan

approached the sound sequences as psychological settings that

engage the body’s memories of place within a recombinant, virtual

field. The location recordings make material reference to varieties of

nature, presence, culture and history: “Breath and doors, Old

Melbourne Gaol; Currawongs, Corringle, Victoria” (see Appendix X

for sound sources). In the new abstracted formations that comprise

the sound fields, there is interplay between the aura of the recorded

original, and a new set of readings that arise from cross-mixed

interactions of the sound layers, creating a visceral and abstracted

jumble of disparate audible qualities that synchronize poetically and

rhythmically at every moment.

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When the images and sounds were sourced, both artists developed

methods of gathering as acts of embodiment. Presence is embodied

in the heavy breathing in the Old Melbourne Goal; in doors being

closed; in sticks broken to make a fire; in the movement of the

camera around or across an object, scene or postcard; or in the

gathering of souvenirs. The photographer’s shadow, seen in two of

the sequences, Pavement and Ship & Sand makes particular

reference to presence which is both a subjective and a mechanical

observation of an ‘original’ moment.

The animation sequences are single photographs taken and edited in

sequence. There is an intention to place the frames on the borderline

between the photographic and the cinematic in an effort to create

‘locations’ that are multidimensional intersections of varying

temporalities and spatialities. Sound plays a part as a

complementary audio aesthetic. When the sound’s rhythms and

psychological spaces interact with the randomly constructed patterns

and locations of visual rhythms, the chance encounters, the random

patterns of combinations, synchronize delicately and poetically at

their borderline locations.

Each sequence has its own set of internal rhythms whose parts also

have their own internal rhythm. Three temporal recreations – two

visual and one sound – are randomly combined, making a potent

relationship where indices, textures, shadings, rhythms, movements

and temporal roles cross over. Hybrid events occur within hybrid

events since each flickering frame bears yet another accidental

permutation that while it resembles its previous frame, is different at

every pixel and every ‘second’.

Beyond the disconnected historicity of these references it is

possible to detect a tentative narrative interconnecting the

notion of chance and the interpenetration of (visual) cultural

languages (Indigenous/settler, ‘Pacific’, ‘Singaporean’), with a

73

philosophy of perception in which the past is coexistent with the

present. Soundscapes… shift from tranquil environmental

ambience–birds, insects, grasses and foraging noises–to more

ominous, momentous sounds of church bells, drumming and

thunder. The interplay between sound and image constructs a

presence beyond the frame, thereby building upon the sense of

ambiguity and the experiments with under-representation

evident in the artist’s double-exposed digital cotton rag prints

(O’Reilly, 2005, para. 1).

Temporalities and indices collide, combine and disperse at every

millisecond and pixel, while at the macro level representations of

picture or place are portrayed. These representations are part of an

even larger event that once was a cultural exchange of some sort, be

it violently colonial or culturally peaceful. Nevertheless, the layering

technique tempers the original proclamation of time and location. In

Sky European soldiers occupy a Singapore port although the foggy

effect of the clouds taken through a wider frame diminishes the

certitude of the representation. The painting’s historical event

disperses. What remains is a potent distillation that juxtaposes

poetically with the sky-scape, with its references to smoke, barred

windows and effervescent atmosphere. In Sand and Ship the H.M.S.

Lady Nelson (Gregory, 1879) is beached and motionless. The

painting’s original attribute of sombre tranquillity is compromised

somewhat by being juxtaposed with a playful sequence of sand

drawings, reminiscent of compasses, maps and the imaginative

processes of childhood.

Big Leaves sets up a bold drum-beat pattern. There is a delicate

inter-play between the colourful palette of the postcard and the

monochromatic tones of the garden leaves as the two moving

sequences interact. In this piece, building structure that is both

interior and exterior, in the postcard, plays across the big leaves of a

plant from the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The plant expresses

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fecund nature, beautiful and bold. A woman is neither fully present

nor completely absent from the edge, one eye gazing back at the

viewer. She is rendered as a painting, however questions about

whether she and her interior/exterior space are fictitious or imaginary

are integral to the work’s meaning. Indeed she and her surroundings

are encountering a digital realm where identity and representation

have much flexibility.

Figure 25. Big Leaves, Liminal Interstices, animation sequence on DVD and digital

composition on cotton rag.

Layer 1: Leaves at the Botanical Gardens, Singapore.

Layer 2: Postcard from street stall, Singapore.

Rose in Hand is a quiet piece, in which the rhythmic pulses of cricket

calls conjure up the atmosphere of a hot summer evening. Splashes

of colour comprising the form of a figure – an elegant Chinese

gentleman holding a rose in his hand – relieve the dryness of the

monochromatic leaves and act like coloured filters through which

leaves are presented. The abstract fragmentation of the postcard

gives the piece a curious blend of ambiguity as the colour fields

blend with the indexical nature of the leaves amassed on the ground.

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Figure 26. Rose in Hand, Liminal Interstices, animation sequence on DVD and

digital composition on cotton rag.

Layer 1: Leaves, Botanical Gardens, Singapore.

Layer 2: Postcard from street stalls, Singapore.

In Sand and Ship the photographer’s shadow hovers at the edge of

the frame, creating a visual dance where the shadow comes into

contact with the beach. The painting (Gregory, 1879) depicts the

H.M.S. Lady Nelson, a vessel used for the exploration of the coast of

Australia in the early years of the 19th century. The ship’s most

famous southern voyage was in early 1802 when John Murray,

having been given command of the Lady Nelson, discovered the

entrance to Port Phillip Bay, after which time the city of Melbourne

rapidly developed.

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Figure 27. Ship and Sand, Liminal Interstices. Animation sequence (DVD) and

digital composition on cotton rag

Layer 1: Drawings in the sand, Yuraygir National Park, New South Wales.

Layer 2: Painting: “H.M.S. Lady Nelson” 1879, George F. Gregory, LaTrobe

Library Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria.

In Arms the cotton rag print depicting the two layers has been

fragmented further in the animation sequence to create a visual

rhythm that depicts grass patterns blowing in the breeze juxtaposed

with the big red lips of the seated woman. The women in the original

postcard are sophisticated (e.g., dress and gesture codes), educated

(e.g., the hand touching the book) and modern (e.g., they wear time-

keepers on their wrists). In the animation piece these aspects of the

women in the postcard are concealed. Australian native grasses

shimmer at the interface of a big pair of lips that in their iconic way

represent desire and beauty.

77

Figure 28. Tree Leaves, Liminal Interstices, animation sequence on DVD and

digital composition on cotton rag.

Layer 1: Trees, Royal Park, Melbourne.

Layer 2: Postcard from street stalls

The Pavement sequence in contrast to Arms is less fluid rhythmically

and visually, giving an visceral effect. The photographer is present as

a strong shadow on the ground of a road in the old Chinese cemetery

at Bukit Brown in Singapore. The second layer shows the side of a

building at night in Chinatown. The geometrical nature of the building

is harshly contrasted against the textures of leaves and rocks on the

road, although the building’s definition as a modern urban site is

compromised by the ground surface. Awkward sounds further the

sensation of disruption.

78

Figure 29. Pavement, Liminal Interstices, animation sequence on DVD and digital

composition on cotton rag.

Layer 1: Shadow and ground, Bukit Brown old Chinese cemetery.

Layer 2: Building, Chinatown, Singapore.

Night Trees incorporates the dramatic sounds of deep bell chimes,

evoking an eerie presence. The postcard image used here is

abstracted in its fragmentation, again removing most of its originality,

while trees at night are swaying in a strong breeze. Taking the

pictures of the trees in a strong intermittent wind resulted in some of

the frames being clearly focussed and others being very blurred,

evoking spatial depth and mixing up the flatness of the planes.

Figure 30. Night Trees, Liminal Interstices, animation sequence on DVD and digital

composition on cotton rag. Layer 1: Night city trees, Brisbane.

Layer 2: Postcard from street stalls, Singapore.

79

Sky returns to the punchy rhythms of the first piece. Here a colonial

sketch (Bigot de la Touanne, 1824) merges with a sky-scape pictured

through the beams of a roof structure on the top floor of a Singapore

hotel. Two palm leaves tantalize the edges with their rhythmic

patterns, while the dramatic cloud shifts across the screen diminish

the visibility of the colonial scene.

Figure 31. Sky, Liminal Interstices, animation sequences on DVD and digital

composition on cotton rag.

Layer 1: Sky through roof girders, Regency House, Singapore.

Layer 2: Postcard, Antiques of the Orient Pte Ltd, Singapore. Lithograph by Deroy

after a sketch by Comte Edmond Bigot de la Touanne, circa 1824.

With images constructed out of the Goethe Institut residencies in

Singapore and Melbourne (2004-05), Liminal Interstices references

both city locations. The encounters with places and cultures are the

context for the methodology, which considers the nature of the

psyche as an implement of access across history, body, place and

culture. The methodology itself is multidimensional in nature. It

recognizes its terrain of shifting subjectivities and temporalities, as

well as itself as a rational, sensate and spiritual instrument of

80

investigation. The aesthetics and temporalities shift by way of

crossing media as well as navigating across aesthetic domains and

devices such as the material, the indexical, the temporal, the multi-

layered, the virtual, the cultural, the indigenous, the dance, the

fragment, the kitsch, the spiritual, the universal and the personal.

Figure 32. Instrument, Liminal Interstices, animation sequence on DVD and digital

composition on cotton rag.

Layer 1: Grasses, Native Gardens, Royal Park, Melbourne.

Layer 2: Postcard from street stalls, Singapore.

81

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

Flicker Series, 2003. List of Works

1. Sun

Inkjet print on cotton rag.

88 cm x 42 cm

2. Water 1

Inkjet print on cotton rag.

102 cm x 30 cm

3. Boy

Inkjet print on cotton rag.

87 cm x 32 cm 4. Leg

Inkjet print on cotton rag.

62 cm x 76 cm

5. Arm

Inkjet print on cotton rag.

58 cm x 77 cm

6. Boy with Bike

Inkjet print on cotton rag.

61 cm x 77 cm

7. “W” series # 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 &

11

Inkjet prints on cotton rag.

30 cm x 24 cm W2

90

8.

“N” series # 1, 2, 5, 7, 8 & 9

Inkjet prints on cotton rag.

40 cm x 30 cm N2

9.

“O” series #. 3, 4, 6 & 8

Inkjet prints on cotton rag.

40 cm x 30 cm O8

10.

“V” series, #. 1, 3, 4, 5 & 6

Inkjet prints on cotton rag.

18 cm x 14 cm V5

11.

“E” series, nos. 1, 4 and 7

Inkjet prints on cotton rag.

40 cm x 30 cm E1

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APPENDIX B

Beyond Capture Series, 2005. List of Works

Branches, 138 cm x 90 cm

Buttons 1, 88 cm x 86 cm

Buttons 2, 88 cm x 86 cm

Dresses, 97 cm x 64 cm

92

Ribbons, 88 cm x 72 cm

Hands 1, 78cm x 90cm

Hands 2, 78cm x 90cm

Hat, 83 cm x 64 cm

93

Ferns, 115 cm x 178 cm

Tree, 134 cm x 90 cm

Window, 95 cm x 90 cm

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APPENDIX C

Liminal Interstices series, 2005. List of Works This artconneXions project for the Goethe-Institut consists of 9 prints

and a DVD of 9 animation/sound sequences (12 min.). Each print is a

representation of each picture combination in the animation.

Nine archival inkjet prints on cotton rag.

All 81 x 56 cm. Printed by the artist, 2005.

Arms

Big Leaves

Instrument

Night Tree

Pavement

Rose in Hand

Ship and Sand

Sky

Tree Leaves

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APPENDIX D

Liminal Interstices series, 2005. Sound and Image Sources.

Sound Sources

Chimes: timber tramway bridge, bolts and nails, Mt. Erica, Victoria

St. Paul’s Cathedral bells and traffic, Melbourne

Breath and doors, Old Melbourne Gaol

Aeolian harp, Sandringham Beach, Melbourne

Container Ship, Port of Melbourne

Digging, Merri Creek, Melbourne

Sticks, Mt. Baw Baw, Victoria

Waves, Brighton Beach wall, Melbourne

Steps, Genoa River, Victoria

Currawongs, Corringle, Victoria

Pardalote, Deddick, Victoria

Late afternoon birds, Rodger River, Victoria

Whipbird and bellbirds, Cabbage Tree Creek, Victoria

Train, Dandenong, Victoria

Cane toads and chorus, Cooran, Queensland

Rain, Cooran, Queensland

Waves, Cape Schanck, Victoria

Hand drum

Picture Sources

Singapore Botanical Gardens

Bukit Brown Chinese Cemetery, Singapore

Chinatown building, Singapore

Singapore postcards

Chinese post-war advertising pamphlets

Beach at Digger’s Camp

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Regency House, Singapore

Melbourne Royal Park Native Gardens

Picture References

All Liminal Interstices references (except Sky, Sand and Tree

Leaves):

from street stall tourist pamphlets, Singapore.

Sky:

postcard, Antiques of the Orient Pte Ltd, Singapore

Lithograph by Deroy after a sketch by Comte Edmond Bigot de la

Touanne, circa 1824.

Sand:

online exhibition, Why Melbourne? From Dreamtime to the capital of

Victoria, City of Melbourne and the Royal Historical Society of

Victoria. Painting: “H.M.S. Lady Nelson” 1879, George F. Gregory,

LaTrobe Library Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Tree Leaves:

postcard, Antiques of the Orient Pte Ltd, Singapore

A China Trade painting of Singapore executed in the med 19th

century.