PhD research | Connection and interconnection in multi-sensory nature-environment painting.
After 10 adventurous and fruitful years submitted my PhD exegesis in July and had my graduating exhibition at the ANU School of Art & Design Gallery in Canberra from August 24 - September 1, 2022.
If you missed the show I’ve uploaded install images below, and also created a gallery of the individual works.
I’ve also added a little detail on the content of my research. Feel free to get in touch if you would like to know more.
Painting has its own peculiar capacities to invite embodied connection to nature. Using practice-led research, evolving from Western landscape painting conventions, My PhD work has explored combinations of pictorial and formal language which create multi-sensory nature-based painting. In articulating human interactions with nature through painting, I have responded to a contemporary imperative to take pro-environmental action. Through material investigations in nature, the studio and the gallery, my research developed interactions of pictorial and formal painting language through painting as an expanded field, articulated through movement, and vertical and horizontal orientations. In disrupting landscape conventions which distance the audience from nature, and developing fresh configurations of sensory stimulating language, I created manifestations of painting that foster a culture of embodied consciousness and connection. My doctoral research has demonstrated how particular combinations of painterly language can articulate a complex range of inter-relations and shown how an artist’s embodied experience with nature-environments and with child rearing, can generate innovation within painting practice. The material outcomes and my exegetical writing highlight painting’s capacity to embody orientations to nature-environments, derived from cultural and societal attitudes, painterly traditions, material manifestations and personal bodily encounters. I propose that this awareness can be of value in contemporary art practice, to society and to our environment.