Date of Award

2021

Degree Name

Master of Arts (Thesis)

Schools and Centres

Arts & Sciences

First Supervisor

Annette Seeman

Second Supervisor

Joan Wardrop

Abstract

In this practice-led creative research, being both artist and identical twin, I examine sameness and difference in the relationships between two people and between multiple objects/creative works. Through the inherent ability of printmaking processes to produce multiples and the attendant installation opportunities created by punctuated space, I unfold and re-tell a doubled and ambiguous understanding of being in the world. Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world (Dasein) underpins and situates my understanding of being in the world, thrown into a world as an individual, and my existence as a double: being in the world with others. I relate his thinking through Barbara Bolt’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Dasein to the artist’s making to seek new ways of understanding Dasein / being-there. The work I make is a metaphor for investigating how I understand the world around me. To do this, I discuss tacit methodology and draw together the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, which forms and informs a praxical knowledge, a knowledge that comes from doing and its reflective dimension. By investigating practices by both historical and contemporary artists who employ the diptych as a device to present works as an interconnected pair, I position my forms of the diptych to create relationships of closeness and separation, together | apart. The space in between two people or artworks—a gap—becomes instrumental in separating while simultaneously relating to and evoking continuation and connection. Imagery derived from and alluding to the body, in a gap between figuration and abstraction, is developed in an iterative, open-ended series of prints. Academic discussions about the nature of studio research are applied and interpreted through creative practice, imparting and enabling both an informed, personally situated perspective and an appraisal of the engagement of other artists, such as Roni Horn, Lesley Duxbury, and Paul Uhlmann, whose practices of ambiguity, in-between spaces and gaps are embedded in the wider field of visual arts practices. This research contributes to a broader field of discussion of understandings of being in the world, of spaces in-between and impermanence as related to unique printmaking practices.

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