In search of space : Exploring the dynamic relation of person and place.
This research, based in practice, addresses the interplay between person and place, how it is understood, analysed, or indeed, constructed through art-making, addressing the importance of environment in everyday experience. Introducing artistic practices as an aspect of everyday praxis I examine how art-making and viewing disrupts the matrices of association bound with person, site, and sight, positing engagement with image-making and viewing as a dynamic field of inter- and intra-subjective potential. Acknowledging conscious and unconscious dimensions of encounter through quotidian exchange, I explore ideas of affect (after Massumi and Brennan, int. al.), proximity, and distance in art-making and art-viewing, and the relation of affect to memory and imagination. I develop a method where image making and viewing are integral to the conditions of possibility for extended looking, and draw attention to how the method exposes overlooked dimensions of spatial experience and personal agency (after Debord, Coverley, and psychogeographic practices), operates to externalise elements of the unconscious (after Freud, Lacan, Campbell, and other psychoanalytic practices), and explores domestic space as linked to self development and attunement (after Bachelard and Dolto, joining psychoanalytic and poetic perspectives).The thesis contains examples of practice-based activity, charting the use of the method discussed. It is accompanied by a collection of book works and short film works showing the use of the methodology in facilitating transitional space where the complexities of the person/place relation operates outside formal language (after Winnicott, Wright, and Dolto), concretising outcomes. Concluding, I consider how different perspectives explored throughout work together to expose the developmental potential of person and place and how this manifests through artistic production.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom).