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This study addresses modern and contemporary food art practices that incorporate edible materials into art. Such art emerged in the early 20th century when artists began using edible materials in work designed to be touched, tasted, or smelled by audiences. By constructing these experiential encounters, food art activates bodily responses of a perceiving subject. My project proposes a theoretical framework called the 'gastronomic body' to address and analyse the subjective, bodily involvement of food art audiences where their bodies become perceptual sites for interpretation and introspection. I argue that social and cultural environments inform and direct audience perceptions of gustatory art.In this thesis, I build on existing food art literature by investigating how bodily memory links to culturally formed habits, dining rituals, and customs activated by food art. The experience of eating food, and by extension food art, is multidimensional: past experience can influence or shape a subject's perception. Referencing key examples of food art, I trace a lineage of art that employs edible materials from the Futurist banquets of the early 20th century to neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 70s. Artists including Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha, and Daniel Spoerri used foodstuffs in various applications from object-based work to participatory, performance, and installation art. I also examine food-based artwork from the 1990s by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Janine Antoni and more recent examples, including 21st-century edible installations by Elizabeth Willing and Sonja Alhauser.This examination of food art shows how the imagined dimensions of sensory experience in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of the 'virtual body' link sensory perception and encultured experience. I uncover how sociocultural customs and norms shape bodily responses and sensory feelings from pleasure to displeasure through the lens of Silvan S. Tomkins's

Expanded Approaches to Ecological Sound Practice: Beyond The Schaferean Impasse is a critical intervention into the domain of ecological sound practice that seeks to create pathways forward for the field beyond the romanticism and essentialism that it inherited from its founder R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues at the World Soundscape Project. This intervention is enacted through a critical relistening and rereading of the canonical works of the field, which are recontextualised through a number of nested frameworks drawn from the environmental humanities, media theory, and geography. These discussions are situated alongside case studies of contemporary sound works that are seen to be demonstrative of potential pathways forward for the field. The project poses a rethinking of ecological sound practice as an ethico-aesthetic practice that sees the artist/audience as playing a co-poietic role in the construction of the soundscape through ongoing processes of mediation. Within the context of this revised model for ecological sound practice, emphasis is given to understanding the ecological crisis, and the acts of listening and recording, in socially differentiated and situated terms, rather than in the anti-modernist and romantic terms of Schafer and company.

Air is a politically incisive material in the climate emergency. Transcending national and political boundaries, air activates a power dynamic distributed asymmetrically between users (breathers/protesters), carbon contributors (polluters), and those of our elected rank (policymakers). This thesis proposes air as a new aesthetic of the climate crisis.This practice-led research (re)considers the creative potential of the material of air in contemporary art and performance through experimentation with its physical components and affective qualities. Air simultaneously and uniquely embodies lyrical imaginative thinking and physiological experience. The research draws from contemporary artists Latai Taumoepeau, Teresa Margolles, Katie Paterson and Olafur Eliasson, as well as the artist’s own extensive body of work. Developed alongside the dissertation are artworks, or AIR WORKS, that critically interrogate the embodied material reality of the climate crisis and the creative possibilities of feminist perspectives. Across four installation and performance works, the material of air narrates evolutionary pasts, maps the dimensions of the current climate crisis, and imagines possible ongoing climate futures.This dissertation connects air to material feminisms, exemplifying the co-constitutive nature of language and material (Alaimo and Hekman). Air’s invisibility demonstrates material feminisms as it facilitates normal physical, emotional and intellectual functioning as well as eliciting imagination. Critical feminist perspectives underscore the material investigation of air (Star, Dunn, Puig de la Bellacasa, Neimanis) and the climate crisis aesthetic (Yusoff and Gabrys, Wazana, Tompkins, Wynter). Storytelling as feminist practice (Haraway, King, Le Guin) assembles speculative pasts, presents, and futures, and imagines creative feminist alternatives.The AIR WORKS and this dissertation make important contributions to new knowledge by expanding an understanding of air as mate

My practice-based research project remakes historical obstetric and gestational developmental models using contemporary materials and feminist materialist methods. Extending standardised representations of the anatomical body, I (re)conceptualise somatic-environment entanglements to account for new epigenetic findings in the life sciences. Epigenetic inquiry understands bodies and environments as interdependent and permeable. Epigenetic mechanisms alter gene expression, triggering acquired characteristics. These are transmissible across several generations, and, when transferred by mothers, referred to as maternal-foetal programming. By employing critical material practices, and using historical medical modelling tropes, my artwork refigures maternal body-environment relations. I draw on the feminist and new materialist theories of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, Susan Hekman, and history and philosophy of science scholarship by Margaret Lock and Hannah Landecker. Each artwork represents the agential ‘mattering’, as Barad puts it, of bodies in response to issues of concern to epigenetics: low maternal socioeconomic capital, toxicant exposure, diet and obesity, stress and trauma. This thesis presents a body of practice and a dissertation that carefully consider epigenetic findings, questioning the epigenetic focus placed on the individual mother and mother-blaming cultural and visual iterations. The maternal body has been medically positioned as causal to offspring adversity across time. Despite an understanding of epigenetic heritability between body-environment relations, denigrating visual representations and discourse persist within clinical texts and across popular media. Even in the relatively new field of epigenetics, mothers are construed as responsible for inducing detrimental foetal changes, with an onus placed on mothers to manage and control aetiological environmental influences. My practice models a more expansive understanding of the way envir

In this Curatorial Practice-Based Research (CPBR) project, I argue that Biomedical Art calls for a very particular expansion of the idea of curatorial care, to encompass care for artists and their collaborators as human subjects, lively materials, audiences, archives and legacies. I undertake this through the experimental curating and reflective analysis of the large-scale touring exhibition The Patient: The Medical Subject in Contemporary Art.The thesis identifies an emerging field of practice in Biomedical Art, which focuses on the medical patient experience of biomedicine, and crosses scientific, therapeutic and social contexts. An exhibition engaging with living with illness,adapting to bodily change and contending with death, the artists included in The Patient undertake multiple roles; aspatients, subjects, objectified bodies, living biological material, researchers, collaborators, and themselves, carers. Idetail my creation of an interdisciplinary exhibition environment, where facets of the museum, the laboratory and theclinic coalesce to support these diverse perspectives, experiences and needs.My research project, which is undertaken primarily through a long-term engagement with, and commissioning ofcontemporary practitioners, is articulated as embodied and attentive curatorial methodology in which I mobilise ‘care’longitudinally, situationally, materially, conceptually, receptively and emotionally. Through reflective curatorial practiceI argue that these forms of care for artists, lively materials and exhibition visitors productively support the complexitiesand challenges of Biomedical Art represented in The Patient. I offer two main contributions to knowledge through this research: the articulation of Biomedical Art as an emerging contemporary practice; and a new way of understanding curatorial care as an imperative expansion from the caretaking of objects, to care for the living. I present curatorial care for Biomedical Art as intersecting with, and cont

Looking skyward, this research is grounded in the earthbound object. It places the material of Earth as a means for cosmic embodiment, exploration and transportation. Through my artistic practice I have explored cosmic-oriented philosophies of being and belonging including kinetic and prop-like woodwork sculpture, video art and immersive model-based installation. I propose that deep space and deep time are the ultimate symbol for an uncertain and precarious existence, so have looked to these perspectives in art making as a uniting force and framework for collective reflection. This research therefore re-situates the body and mind as no longer at odds with this great expanse, bringing human sentiment and cosmic forces into a comprehensible relationship. The first chapter introduces and contextualises my studio research as concerned with the cosmic condition, where the existential melodrama and anxiety that deep space provides has an emotional impact on self-awareness, provoking a search for a stable and material certainty within our sensory situation on Earth. The second examines the manipulating hand as a cosmic force: I discuss how grasping and arranging both natural and cultural material provides opportunity for self-reflection. As a relational tool, my sculptural cosmographies use the familiar and sense-able materials of Earth as a way of grasping the intangible scale of our universe. The third investigates my large-scale sculpture and immersive installation as sensory structures and monuments that re-situate prehistoric cosmic-oriented belief systems and the strategies of celestial architecture and Astroarchaeology in our age. I analyse the potential of performative sculpture and the installation as monument to transport and position the body as intimately connected to the energies and dynamics of the universe, entering the cosmos by inserting the viewer within a cosmic-centric system of thought. The fourth considers my video-based animated geologies as choreogr

This paper traces a visual and conceptual expedition, moving from a science-based anthropocentric perspective to a shared multi-species viewpoint inside nature. I use materiality and scale in sculpture and installation to entice the art viewer inside biological organisms. I argue that agency derives from multi-species interdependence and is therefore more than human.The relationality of humans inside nature is the focus of this study. Through my artworks, I investigate the interdependence of living organisms and this serves as an impetus to shift from the anthropocentric gaze to a consideration of the life worlds of non-humans. I provoke the imagination of belonging within a complex network of life forms by manipulating the corporeal associations of three-dimensional practice. The capability of sculpture to produce poetic metaphor brings into play many different interpretations, meanings and values: I use this polyvalent application to open an explorative space for the viewer. I attend to the requirements of content, audience and site by creating installations, public art and object-based sculpture.In support of my sculptural practice, I build on current posthumanist discourse about the Anthropocene to combine concepts from philosophy, science and art. I demonstrate these transdisciplinary links by interweaving specific theories from deep ecology, speculative realism and current ecological theories on connectivity. Comprised of five bodies of work, this research tracks a purposeful shift away from shift away from Anthropocentrism. These artworks generate space for mutually beneficial perspectives by enticing a practice of care into the positions on co-evolving organisms and the matter that is in constant co-becoming with us. In consequence, my research creates a decentralized and reconnected potential for the human outlook on and interaction within, the natural environment.

This practice-led research project creates and analyses five performance art interventions, The Breathing Space Projects, driven by an urgent coincidence of global, professional, personal and creative concerns and lived experiences relating to breath and the affective states of wonder and anxiety. Interdisciplinary debate by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Luce Irigaray, Jill Bennett, Sreenath Nair, Hossein Valamanesh, Jill Orr, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba establishes compelling arguments to address ways we frame and experience our lives. Crucially, calls by the WHO and Luce Irigaray for innovative attention to breathing crises and the impact of underlying drivers of globalisation on the sense of self and community reveal an affective gap in their approaches that may impede movement towards an Irigarayan “renaissance.” This project proposes a block exists between anxiety and wonder that constrains breath and creates suffering for both women and men. This project focuses on the breath’s transformative pause as a methodological frame, ‘a poetics of breath’, to articulate space and sensation. Through this air-conditioning it explores the capacity of interdisciplinary performance art to create an intervention, a meditative poetic ‘breathing space’ as an alternative respiratory system, to reground connection within and between self and other and facilitate a receptivity to the flux of living, the ‘in(de)finite’. It reveals a self passing through the breathing and affective experiences of awareness, vulnerability, resilience and connection, discovering along the way the contributions to living by the allegorical, the elegiac, the epic and the lyrical breath.The ability to observe as an artist enables significant reflexive shifts in each of my creative works. Works become increasingly immersive meditations of visual, corporeal and literal language eliciting a material sensescape across time using selected sites of historical existence. Each manifest

Since the turn of the century there has been a well-documented resurgence in live and performative practices in contemporary art. This has prompted extensive debate about how we ‘do’ the histories of live art. In response, an increasing number of artists are engaging with the historiography of performance as subject matter in their work. Through practices of re-enactment, re-staging live acts, reconstructing documentation, and reconfiguring archives, these artists open up the past to new readings and potential futures. In this thesis, these emerging areas of practice are examined to consider how such work can productively reconfigure the performance archive and engage with the politics that shape art history. Drawing on the work of performance studies scholars (Rebecca Schneider, Amelia Jones), theories of history (Walter Benjamin, R.G Collingwood) and theories of the performative (J.L Austin, Judith Butler), as well as feminist and queer perspectives of time and history (Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Freeman, Griselda Pollock), this thesis formulates a methodology for writing about performance. It considers the reactivation of historical performances by artists from the formative period of feminist art in the late 1960s and 1970s, including VALIE EXPORT, Jill Scott and Suzanne Lacy. In revisiting their work, contemporary artists such as Mel Brimfield, Barbara Cleveland and Eve Fowler engage with the role of gender, the archive, and the institution to rethink existing art historical narratives. Departing from traditional art historical approaches based on objective analysis, this thesis proposes a methodology that acknowledges the performative role the writer plays in re-enacting the traces of live works. Through this framework, the act of writing becomes a type of performance, aiming to make the process of re-enactment, and the kind of speculation that goes into the re-imagining of a live performance, evident on the page. Using this approach, this thesis proposes that

The Drawing of Bodies and Things documents practical and theoreticalinvestigations into the languages and processes of observational drawing. Thepractical investigations have utilised traditional drawing media and extended thedrawing process into three dimensions using motion capture technology and 3Dprinting. A series of participatory drawing exercises create collaborative worksthat question the inherent meaning—or lack thereof—in mark making, authorshipof work, and the value of the experience of creation over the value of the object. Thebody of work questions the heavily codified nature of western representationaldrawing and how fragile or constructed the standard methods of illusionisticrepresentation may be. The investigation focuses on the sensory experience ofobservational drawing, and the viewing of representational images and drawingsproduced through observational drawing processes. More specifically, TheDrawing of Bodies and Things details the relationship between drawing and thevisual, tactile, haptic, and proprioceptive senses, as well as the interactions andexchanges between these senses. The investigation addresses the readability andcodification of representative marks in traditional and contemporary drawingpractices, specifically observational and figurative drawing techniques.The written thesis addresses relevant theoretical, historical, and conceptualreadings of representational and observational drawing as described by DeannePetherbridge and John Berger; phenomenological concepts of self, perception,embodiment, and being as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and expandedupon by David Michael Levin; and recent neuroscientific understandings andneurophilosophical concepts of the transparent self-model and internal simulatedworld-model as described by Thomas Metzinger. These readings are presented indialogue with the practical body of work as well as analysis of other contemporaryartists addressing embodiment, observational drawing, and representation