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The body of paintings presented in this PhD serve as an embodied mode of research developed through experimental practices, and through theoretical research. The research is focused on painting due to the medium's familiarity as well as its status as the dominant discipline of the post 2000 generation of Romanian artists. The theoretical research scrutinises this crucial phase in Romanian cultural history, in which the post-communist landscape intersects and overlaps with postmodernist theory. The research pays particular attention to figurative symbols, their collective and personal implications, and meanings, and how such symbols have been appropriated and re-employed by Romanian artists since the 1990s. The focus on symbols informs the development of an experimental painting practice capable of testing the validity of a method based on appropriation. The project initially analyses Romanian artists active in 1980, with a focus on charting the prevailing symbolic landscape and discourses. This helps assess how effectively that cultural situation from the 1980s created a robust launch platform for the adoption of Western conceptual frameworks following the fall of the Berlin wall. This is initially done by observing the inherent symbolism employed by the Romanian authoritative regime pre-1989 and how artists of the period devised strategies of creating hidden meanings, and sometimes even hidden practices. The regime employed a series of strategies, from using idealised images of the 'new man', done in concordance with the general communist project, to reinterpreting and romanticising old Romanian myths and symbols. This assessment is then informed by a series of loosely structured interviews with prominent Romanian historians and curators. This practice-led research focuses on five Romanian male artists from the post 2000 generation. My interest in these artists is primarily motivated by their use of figurative symbols. Here, figurative symbols are used to differentiate between signs that have their interpretative meaning inherent to them and compositions with inherent meanings such as installation art, or even photography - both mediums present in the period after 2000. The selection is also based on a set of interviews with prominent Romanian art historians and curators. In the diverse and complex Romanian art scene their work forms a distinct trend, a major inspiration for my practice. The research then expands on the initial understanding of Romanian postcommunist art by following the emergence of internationally renowned Romanian artists post 2000, a fulcrum date in Romanian economic and cultural development. This contextual review is concurrently tested and modified in a studio situation, using a methodology that involves speculation, appropriation and reinterpretation, each method designed to mimic certain experimental practices of the postcommunism generation of Romanian artists, to reflect and expand upon their inquiry. The inquiry through painting on the post 2000s Romanian art scene, paired with an extensive historical literature review and targeted interviews, constitutes the contribution to new knowledge of the project.

This research explores how an emulative and practice-based approach can develop a closer understanding of the mysticism of Teresa of Avila. Drawing upon her mystical practice of recogimiento and the inherent visuality of her texts, this thesis seeks to map the psychological form and function of her soul and its relationship with language, word, and image. To do it so presents an innovative methodology for reading her texts which asks: what new vision of Teresa's mysticism can be developed by approaching her texts in an emulative parallel to the way in which she approached the Divine through Scripture? Drawing upon the centrality of imitatio and meditative visualisation within Teresa's practice of recogimiento, this parallel emulation focuses upon her textual imagery as an interface for "entering-into" and exploring the mystical topography of her soul and is performed through my artistic practice. This practice weaves together feminist philosophy, visual culture, religion, language, and psychoanalysis into an interdisciplinary lens through which to approach Teresa's texts through drawing, performance, dialogue, painting, and sculpture. This novel "practice-to-practice" approach draws together key aspects of Teresa's practice and the creative and interdisciplinary perspectives of my practice to navigate the mystical landscape that lies beyond the threshold of her texts. From this embodied position the thesis traces the function of language within her mysticism - both for Teresa the writer, and Teresa the reader -, and looks to map the functional structure of her soul through notions of word, image, and vision. The resulting map reveals a pattern of word and image that characterises both her practice of recogimiento and the nature of the soul itself. In doing so this project demonstrates how Fine Art practice can function as a methodology for interdisciplinary research.

Accent, that is differences heard in pronunciations, specifically the speech sound that identifies Chineseness is the departure point for this research into the construction of the identity of transnational Chinese. This question also frames pronounce, Meddling English, Oh Canada! and the six volumes of a project The Phrase Book of Migrant Sounds. The genesis of The Phrase Books of Migrant Sounds lies in phrase books written in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for migrants to North America. Of great interest is not only the fact that English phrases were translated into languages spoken in the southern parts of China (for example Toisanese and Cantonese) but that English words and phrases were transcribed using their corresponding pronunciations. These phrase books helped them articulate words of a language they had not heard before, the unfamiliar sounds made familiar, the alien brought closer to home. The research employs knowledge from an array of disciplines-cultural studies, sociolinguistics and anthropology to name a few-as well as archived sound recordings of late-19th century and contemporary transnational Chinese to map a sound history of transnational Chinese. It considers the experiences of those who call multiple places 'home' to challenge the singularity of transnational Chinese identity and to suggest that, rather than being monolithic, transnational Chinese identity is pluricentric and multiphonic. The thesis affords a link between one's sense of identities, however changing though they are, with political, cultural and social experiences. My practice-based research Sounding Chinese: Tracing the Voice of Early 20th to 21st Century Transnational Chinese looks at how transnationals-those who call more than one place home and who modify the way they speak accordingly- conceptualize themselves.

This thesis is a practice-based investigation into the use of voice as a tool for drawing. I explore a series of vocalisation acts through a range of technologies and environments to ask: how can voice be used as a tool for drawing? This research question is underpinned by a hypothesis that by investigating voice as a drawing tool the ambiguity inherent in drawing can be problematised further through the instability and potential of voice in its contingent non-graphic traces. As a result, this thesis contributes to knowledge in the expanded field of contemporary fine art drawing. This thesis refers to artists and researchers in this field including but not limited to Deborah Harty, Robert Luzar, Mary-Clare Foá, Kendal Heyes, Carali McCall, Sophie Tottie, Joe Graham, James Elkins, Marina Kassianidou, and Catherine de Zegher. As a practice-based investigation, this research utilises a hybrid methodology of action research (Kemmis, McTaggart, 2008), reflection-in-action (Schön, 2007), and the integration of theory and practice as action (Cazeaux, 2006, 2017) wherein practice outcomes are reflected on, both in the act of making and through the process of theoretical research. This cyclical process has involved theoretical and practical research being treated as operating in reciprocity and has resulted in practice outcomes that function in serial development with each outcome being the consequence of a change being introduced to the cycle that then feeds further research. In this way practice outcomes, rather than being solutions to research questions, have operated to problematise speculative research questions in their development (Drummond, Themessl-Huber, 2007). This research makes an original contribution to knowledge in the expanded field of drawing in contemporary art by proposing that voice can be used as a tool for drawing. Through this research I explore the capacities of materials and recording and playback technologies to both carry voice as vibration and to mark it in their mediation. By doing so this thesis questions the centring of human authorship in the creation of drawings (Petherbridge, 2010). I argue that the movement of voice is mediated by the materials and technologies through which it vibrates and transduces. These non-graphic traces are pluralised and contingent, and while being effects of the human body in the act of voicing and listening, cannot be reduced to the body alone.

Building on Freud's ideas on Nachträglichkeit (Afterwardsness), I ask how and why a work of art may become a site of emotional/psychological investment. The Freudian concept Nachträglichkeit describes how an experience that is either incomprehensible or traumatic is nonetheless retained unconsciously, then revivified at a later time in a different context. For André Green, this concept is fundamental to psychoanalysis, as it shatters the conventional temporal model while at the same time providing a basis for psychic causality, specific to psychoanalysis. This may be understood more broadly as the French conception, Après-coup, wherein the German term suggests a conception of time that involves a double movement: from the past to the present and from the present to the past, simultaneously. I employ this latter biphasic concept as a way to think about how the spectator engages with a work of art, which is outside conventional ideas of the direction of time in terms of past/present/future. I emphasise the simultaneity of a backward and forward movement through a practice-based response to three artworks, mapping the diachronic and synchronic associations (or echoes) through a framework of transdisciplinary methods, which provide the basis for case studies. These case studies represent a model of practice designed to provide a structure for speculation on meaning and dynamics in relation to psychic causality in artistic practice. The work of art gains its efficacy in/through representing unresolved affect categories, in a Nachträglich action. This finds correspondence with recent debates in psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience. My findings show that the act of identification with a work of art can be read as a formation of the unconscious in relation to biographical material.

How can painting be used to reengage with the art-historical female-nude subject through its feminist deconstruction - and what does this mean in relation to contemporary art? There is still a tendency among scholars to privilege formal analysis of an artwork at the expense of discussing (gendered) identity or, conversely, to focus exclusively on identity politics so that it overwhelms any discussion of form. This practice-based research thesis holds the two approaches in tension by examining the act of painting - itself a mode of generative research - while also investigating feminist art practice and criticism on painting and the body. Some practitioners working in contemporary figurative painting reengage with the art historical subject of the female nude. A number of them are given attention for the way they subvert and overthrow conventional narratives and histories. Reviewing these closely reveals a consistent avoidance among painting practitioners of a certain type of image or pose too firmly situated within historical convention. My practice-based research which is situated in the field of feminism and contemporary painting therefore seeks to discuss the possible reclamation of a space for representing what could be described as an 'indeterminate' and 'beautiful' female nude in reaction to strands of feminist art practice and criticism that have problematised the representation of a formalised ideal body. My thesis considers whether this subversion reaches the heart of the issue given our knowledge of the persistence of such historical paradigms. From a practitioner's point of view, specifically with regard to my own practice, this thesis operates as a 'post-rationalisation' of creative practice, for which feminist scholarship led by figures such as Griselda Pollock and Hilary Robinson has been pivotal. This research contributes to the thinking around how the implications of second-wave feminism have affected the terms of contemporary painting, adding to debates around the deployment of the female body within it. I address such issues from a feminist perspective, having selected a constellation of case studies of women's contemporary painting practices, testing my own practice against an articulation of their feminist strategies. Methodology involves the construction of a critical concept, for which I have coined the term the 'discarded body', which emerges from my practice and is concerned with issues of painting, gesture and the body. My critical framework builds on the notion of 'indeterminacy', which is employed by David Joselit to refer to the slippage of painting signs in Jutta Koether's practice, a notion I juxtapose with Suhail Malik's theorisation of indeterminacy in relation to contemporary art. By testing and evaluating the concept of the discarded body and its limitations, I unravel complex issues about identity politics and current perspectives on contemporary art. In so doing, I seek to pave the way for new ways of thinking about contemporary painting and about how modernism can incorporate more radical perspectives.

The thesis suggests a profound move in the paradigm of curating. From understanding 'a curator' as a fixed professional identity of a person - to recognising 'a curator' as an implicated, entangled, pluralistic and non- hierarchical process, which lasts for the duration of a singular curatorial project and redefines the terms of authorship, acknowledgement and power of its participants from within and each time anew. With regard to the researcher's first-hand experience of curating professionally for over 10 years, 'a curator' is depicted as an emergence cohered through encounter, while curating is moved away from Neo-Liberal ethos, administrative, managerial and branding exercises, performed by a self-isolated subject. Within this new paradigm, by focusing on 'curatorial ethics', the researcher explores how the personal drives and meanings, brought by an individual to the curatorial process intervene with the collective standards, expectations and definitions of authorship and power, imposed on a curator by institutions and other parties they choose to collaborate with. Accordingly, the aim is to identify and map a hybrid professional-curatorial ethic that emerges due to this intervention - using the researcher's own practice as a case study. The key outcome of this research is a method for formulating an ethic (in a suggested form of a manifesto) which is applicable to a wide range of curatorial practitioners who work beyond exhibition-making. It was developed by adapting the framework of "The Reflective Practitioner" (by Donald Schon, 1983) to the condition of a contemporary art curator via practice-based autoethnographic methodology and curation of three original art projects.

This thesis is a comparative study of research undertaken by practitioners in art and design as part of a research degree (PhD, Doctor of Philosophy) in the UK, and was driven by the lack of clarity in regard to how artists make contributions to knowledge. The Coldstream Report (1960) is taken as a starting point because it put the art school on a path to the university and created a gap between art practice and its history and theory; a gap that serves as the context and inheritance of research in the arts. Where the discourse of research in the arts can be understood as addressing the problem of knowledge through theory, artists instead engage in a working through of this problem via practice, and therefore completed PhD theses exist as a critically under-used resource. However, it was crucial that this thesis aim at redressing artists lack of ownership in research in the arts on fair terms, rather than develop a model that resolves the problem of knowledge, because any top-down demarcation would only serve to delimit the potential of artistic practice. The sample employed by this thesis consists of all thirty-two PhD theses produced by artists at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 1998-2013/14 and was supplemented by six 'narrative research' interviews. A basis for comparison was developed through engagement with the sample and used to structure a three-stage 'discursive method,' which was ultimately facilitated by consideration of 'values.' Due to 'values' providing a lens by which the problem of knowledge in the art and design PhD can be understood, an expanded discussion of the sample is proffered in terms of artistic identity, investigative activity and the character of evidence, and what is apparent epistemologically and ontologically. Consequently, a series of concurrent findings are put forward as a contribution to knowledge: the status of knowledge in research in the arts, evidence of deliberations of value by artists, and the identification of a play of forces in research. The findings of this thesis draw attention to how values are negotiated by artists as part of the art and design PhD, and crucially, claims that is a moving towards rather than a reaction to, the problem of knowledge, that grants artists ownership of research in the arts.

This practice-based enquiry questions the narrative positioning of the home within Western films created between 1920 and the early 1960s. It seeks to juxtapose the reality of the home in the construction of the US West with its subsequent mediated representation through film and popular cultural narratives. The interdisciplinary practice engages these concerns using archive material, film stills and the researcher's own photographic images in the medium of the quilt, breaking the traditional frame and opening up tactile avenues for visual storytelling. The quilt reflects pre-industrial methods of construction. The use of expanded photography - the construction of a mutual relationship between photography and other art or craft practices in order to shift cultural perceptions of the discipline - removes film from its linear narrative and highlights the tropes and conventions of domestic space in the Western film and the historical landscape. Focusing on narratives that reflect the period of US expansion and settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thesis argues that the frontier home was fundamental not only to the historical mapping and settlement of the US West, but also to the re-enactment of that settlement within the Western film. Importantly, the research leads to the development of a discourse that highlights how the re-presentation of the home in Western film engages ideological imperatives at the time of the film's production, such that these films draw upon mythological and technological constraints that reflect current and prevalent attitudes and prejudices. Reflecting upon the home as a gendered space, the work engages with codes relating to the cinematic role of women within such films to identify and reveal stylistic tropes and filmic conventions used within the interior mise-en-scène, where female characters are placed in roles that typically act as a support for the male protagonist. This body of work therefore seeks to question the populist perception and importance of the home in the 'Wild West'. The accompanying written thesis presents practice and theory as distinct but interwoven concerns, which are manifest as parallel discourses: one written in the first person, and one written in the third person. The reader is left to negotiate these personal and academic voices, both of which reflect a critical understanding of the importance of the domestic space in Western films.

Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757-59) attempts to establish a theory of the passions. The ambitious central idea of this treatise is that emotional reactions to objects, landscapes, and ideas, which can be categorised as either sublime or beautiful, can be explained by a rational examination of passion, ethics, and morality. My research reconsiders the Enquiry from the perspective of an artist using an autoethnographic approach to ask the question, to what extent can Burke's aesthetic philosophy be used as an applied methodology in the production of paintings, and drawings, which reflect on contemporary spaces, places, and landscapes? The thesis explores Burke's contributions to the discourse of the sublime in the eighteenth-century and how contemporary authors have reflected on the Enquiry's meaning. It shows how the Enquiry can be said to reflect a utilitarian aesthetic philosophy which is open-ended enough to offer multiple ways of seeing and thinking. Central to my practice-based research is the argument that various, and differing, aspects of Burke's conception of the sublime and beautiful are potentially useful in the process of understanding, and presenting, artistic visions of British spaces. This argument is explored in three chapters which consider very different territories defined as the horizontal, vertical, and transcendental sublime using Burke's thoughts about extensions of space. In this research the horizontal sublime is reimagined as the British coastline or border, the vertical sublime is reinterpreted as a mineshaft, and the transcendental sublime becomes an ancient British chapel. In these spaces differing relationships to nature are explored through the prism of the Burkean Sublime, as are contemporary events which give these spaces context in the twenty-first century. The thesis argues that Burke's flawed attempt to impose strict laws and very narrow limits on the recalcitrant material of the passions is more than a confusion of eighteenth-century speculations. My research demonstrates how the Enquiry can be used to stimulate the imagination, and how Burke's aesthetic speculations can turn painting, and drawing, into an exciting conceptual adventure with links to an eighteenth-century principled code of ethics and aesthetics.

In the 1940s, the very first comics about the lives and works of well-known visual artists appeared in US-American educational youth magazines, representing the birth of the comics genre of the artist's biography and inaugurating its first publishing boom. The start of the twenty-first century signalled the genre's second publishing boom. As part of a third, overlapping boom, graphic novels about canonical painters have become important tools in art museums' exhibitions, outreach, and education programmes, informing their public relations and marketing campaigns, promoting their collections, and (supposedly) attracting new and younger audiences. Little attention has been given to these three publishing booms, and no one has investigated the stakeholders and their agendas, including the political, economic, and artistic processes involved in producing such graphic novels. This thesis fills the gap by examining the booms' connection to art-historical traditions regarding the artist's biography and monograph, and considering how these comics function for different stakeholders, particularly in the context of European art museums, which co-commissioned, co-funded, co-edited and co-published them. The analysis of six graphic novels about the artists Paul Klee, Jacques-Louis David, Salvador Dalí, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt von Rijn and Jan van Scorel defines the publications' status between serious artists' biographies, comic books, history books and merchandise products. The PhD employs semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, extensive archival research, along with close reading, and textual and visual analysis. It combines several interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches from different fields, most importantly art history and comic studies, but reaching out to theories of museology (in particular curatorial and educational programmes as well as the role of the museum shops and its products), (trans)national identity-making, branding, marketing and public relations, and culturaleconomic policies (connecting to notions of soft power and cultural capital).

Few women artists from the Muslim world(s) who live and work in the diaspora can talk about the way they represent themselves and their artistic self-image without confronting the pre-existing ideas of their predominantly Western audiences. Neither are these women able to escape the historical and political narratives that surround them. My artistic practice is no exception to this - it is assumed, received, perceived and measured within a contemporary Western visual context. This thesis investigates the historical and political contexts of women artists of the Muslim diaspora and argues that Orientalism, Colonialism and Islamophobia negatively impact our image, self-representation and artistic voice within contemporary arts and culture. The events following 9/11 both hindered and problematised this self-representation, pushing some women to self-Orientalise and self-Other, whereas others were pushed into silence. Highlighting this transition - from being imagined through the Orientalist and colonialist canon to using selfnarration - as significant for women artists of the Muslim diaspora, this thesis focuses on the potential to self-represent by claiming our own voice and image. The nature and formation of this problem are examined in this thesis through analyses of key texts by historians and critics, exhibition histories, artists' works, individual interviews and my own experience of 30 years as an artist, curator and educator in creative and cultural settings. This investigation locates and defines this phenomenon (a problematic palimpsest) as the 'Islamo-Orientalised Female Other' (IOFO) by creating a critical framework that captures the complexity of this issue. Thus, the following central questions arise: Can the IOFO artist speak? If so, how? This thesis then discusses the possibilities of voice through artistic practice by proposing 'Anotherness' as a strategy, through my own practice, to move forward.

The central concern of this practice-based research project is how to create resistance from a feminist perspective by exploring and developing strategies in performance art. This resistance is aimed at the current economic and political conditions of post-Fordist production, in which an increased precarity of the workforce is accompanied by a shrinking autonomous political sphere and regressive gender politics, led by 'sexual decoys' (Eisenstein, 2007). In my practice, I perform and record political speeches which I circulate online; I also hold live talks and presentations where I introduce utopian performance improving technologies that replace the physical female body with a digital one. In both performance formats, live or online, the role of the performing female body is central to my investigation. According to J.K. GibsonGraham post-Fordism is characterised by an unquestioned narrative of accumulation which 'takes priority over other social processes, becoming an imperative of the social totality rather than simply an activity of firms' (2006, p.158). My research investigates how to disrupt this narrative through performance, resulting in a resistance towards it. Gibson-Graham also claim that theories of post-Fordism 'tend to highlight ways in which the economy and polity reflect and re-enforce each other rather than the ways they contradict and undermine each other' (p.159). Hence my practice as a performer investigates how to make these contradictions visible as a form of feminist critique and resistance. Central to my investigation is the exploration of over-identification which is based on the inherent contradiction that in order to create critique one becomes the subject of critique. In over-identification the performer overtly affirms the position of the subject of critique instead of articulating an open direct critique. Through my practice I explore how to deploy and transform this strategy effectively from a feminist perspective, to create an agonistic space as the location for resistance and disrupt rather than harmonise contradictions within post-Fordism. I combine this strategy with opacity where instead of an overt affirmation of positions, it transforms into an oscillation between contradicting positions.

This thesis is an investigation into the field of architecture and urban design, focusing on the codes and practices of contemporary public space. Underscoring a dependent correlation between research and existing urban sites, the investigation is situated on Granary Square, arguably the most successful privately owned public space made in London in recent years, located at the heart of the King's Cross Estate. Within architecture and urban design fields, high regard for specific urban regeneration projects with POPS at their heart normally overlooks their inherently divisive social impact, and strengthens the often legitimised belief that analysing, questioning and re-aligning such impact falls outside the realm of these professions. The investigation addresses some of the reasons behind such overlooking, and articulates research-practice that critically approaches some of the effects contemporary public spaces have on the unfolding of urban life, including on dominant aesthetic narratives often communicated through pseudo-public environments. The thesis sets out to test the agency of spatial practices in contemporary public space post-occupancy, by critically inspecting active maintenance practices specific to the King's Cross Estate, in connection to those characteristic of architecture and spatial practices more broadly. Research has been driven by routinely asking: how can performance practice be used as an agent to question and realign the codes and practices of contemporary public space? Motivated by this question, research-practice evolves through reading and writing, as well as through designing, negotiating and delivering performance interventions involving medium to long-term engagement with specific local groups. A feedback loop between these research methods critically informs the investigation, and shapes critical connections between architectural and urban design and performance practice tailored to contemporary public space. The contribution to knowledge derives from exploring how use and everyday practices are conditioned by specific maintenance strategies, including regulatory codes, ideologies and aesthetic regimes of public space.

A cultural evaluation of the Isle of Wight has not been addressed in relation to mainland Britain. Strategically and economically significant, it was often disregarded; however, its unique situation offers a microcosm of social and cultural development, which so far appears to have received little attention. From an island subjected to the will of outsiders, to a cultivated venue, which attracted and fostered cultural tourism, the purpose of this regional study is to trace the evolution of this vulnerable part of England and identify influential factors, which contributed towards its cultural constructions. The hypothesis considers that the construction and consumption of the island was, throughout its history, driven by external forces. This theme is developed by relating cultural and social notions to island circumstances and identifying variables which contribute towards its unique situation. An interdisciplinary approach utilizes mainland Britain as a historical matrix to illustrate cultural development; emphasizing determining circumstances, geographic, social, economic and aesthetic, to establish how the island was used, abused and ignored. Research is island focussed, though with corresponding allusion to metropolitan influence and middle-class cultural aspirations, which contributed to the island becoming a popular tourist destination. By taking a broad historical overview it is apparent that due to location, the island was always an integral part of the British Isles, more significant than other outlying islands due to its relative proximity to the capital, the short distance to the mainland and its strategic importance both militarily and territorially. The progression of a connected narrative allows for an identification of features such as changing attitudes to the countryside and the sea which indicate an increasing consciousness, realized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in cultural tourism, landscape art and relocation. This narrative structure is critical to establish the context for the primary focus of investigation, the period 1770- 1900 enabling an evaluation of the impact of visitors as consumers, landscape artists as interpreters, and the intertwining of these concepts to give an account of the evolution of cultural tourism on the Isle of Wight. This is central for an appreciation of the ideas, tastes, and affinities expressed aesthetically in prints and paintings, physically in mansions and marine villas and conceptually in cultural conventions such as the notions of travel. It is a significant area for research, since the dynamics of cultural forces are universally relevant for an appreciation of social, historical and economic influences in the cultural domain. On a local level the cultural constructions examined within this study are areas which can be appraised to determine and develop constructive tourism and respond to future cultural needs.

Historically, non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) was a hallmark symptom for diagnoses of hysteria and Borderline Personality Disorder. My practice-based research critically assesses how NSSI can be utilised as a voice for a history of trauma. From the 1970s to the present, bodily fluids were used in art to convey messages about feminism, masculinity, physical illness and racism. My research focuses on how specific feelings and states of mind can lead to the utilisation of NSSI to cope with unbearable emotions, which is seldom investigated in contemporary art practices. My methodology primarily utilises Schema theory to critically assess how dehumanising narratives can become familial legacies that can be acted out on a person's body. My investigation into NSSI is divided into three chapters that concentrate on NSSI as a symptom of a learned state of mind, bodily fluids as evidence of perceived character, and risky bodily endurance performance as a means of connection. As case studies about violence on the body, I critically assess American Civil War photography (1861-1865) of corpses and written accounts of the Battle of the Wilderness (1864). One of my practical methodologies utilises bodily fluids as an experimental material to investigate fragmentation and evidence of trauma. My practical methodologies involve photographic experimentation with collodion and platinum processes combined with my bodily fluids and endurance performances. Chris Burden, John Duncan, Marina Abramović and Ron Athey are utilised as case studies about bodily endurance performance. My goal is to potentially generate empathy for trauma through abstract visual and audio evidence of endurance and coping strategies. I utilise the potential of empathy as a method to express original, experiential information about living with NSSI as a maladaptive coping behaviour. The final results of my methodologies emphasise how dehumanising interpersonal interactions can become embodied messages about self-worth.

This practice-based research has been driven by the question, 'how do you make a hallucinatory artwork?' It uses ritual magic as both a method and allegory through which to explore performative methodologies in drawing. It suggests drawing as a Body of Pure Intensity - an always imminent body, capable of operating as actant and agent in the production of idiosyncratic forms of knowledge and subjectivity. My methodologies defend drawing as a special form of embodied analysis, reflexivity and hauntological dialogue, through its mimicry / imitative notation on and alongside the drawings of Antonin Artaud. I am asking, what can a drawing do when done as an act of magic, when magic is seen not as symbolic, allegorical, or metaphysical, but as a literalising act - with phenomenal and plastic e/affects? At the centre of this research is a series of drawings, made sequentially in a notebook, using techniques of self-induced altered states of consciousness to manifest the drawings. This series is in response to Artaud's posthumously published notebooks, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic (2004). This project walks alongside Artaud's drawings, conspiring with them in their respective collections and archives, mimicking their gestures and intensities as though rehearsing a jailbreak. This project, in five parts, presents small, discrete drawings as potential staging spaces for magical acts, calling upon a ghost cast of insurgent surrealists (including Unica Zürn and Austin Osman Spare), reanimating their intensities through acts of hyper-empathic mimicry that seek to reembody, and thus find supra-sensory dialogue with, their radical theses for drawing. Accompanying sections focus respectively on heuristic and diagrammatic journals, archival quests and performative assertions for drawing. Bodies of Pure Intensity presents an urgent reappraisal of drawing and magic as adaptive practices and methodologies within contemporary art research. This project situates its methods in relation to contemporary drawing practices that explore magical motifs and entranced states, such as Matt Mullican, Suzanne Treister, and indigenous Shipibo-Conibo artist Sara Flores. Wider implications of these findings present novel methodologies for drawing as a resistant act, producing new knowledge from within otherwise inaccessible and incorrigible perceptual experience.

This practice-based research proposes an artistic methodology for approaching sites of urban redevelopment, within which computer-generated architectural visualisations are central. I define these images as propositions, a term that has emerged through a developing material understanding of digital architectural images of profit-driven building projects: they do not just visualise future urban space, but also play an active role in its production. This concept is established by turning the lens of my camera towards the image, enabling the printed material to become digital once again. Through my artistic process the computer-generated architectural proposition is pulled back and forth between pixel and material, a process that, as this thesis determines, mimics the feedback loop between image and built space that is generated by digital architectural images of commercial urban development projects. My artistic methodology both emerges and is tested through a series of material investigations that contribute to the artworks that I have produced as part of this PhD submission. The aim of this practice-based research is to provide a toolkit of methods for approaching sites of urban change to further understand how they are networked both digitally and materially. This toolkit contains a combination of methods that mimic the interplay between image and material in these sites, of which photography, collage and mimicry are identified as key. I employ these methods in seven artworks produced between 2016 - 2019 through which a process emerges that determines how the built environment and the computer-generated architectural proposition are part of a chiastic structure in which the screen is a key component. I bring these methods together in World Capital: an installation that demonstrates how the artistic methodology that evolves through my research can be applied in practice. The written component of this PhD articulates my working processes, analysing my art works through a close examination of their development and drawing upon key ideas and concepts including site-specificity, placemaking, indexicality, the reverse gaze, and re-enactment. This analysis is both supported and intercepted by an accompanying narrative that recalls my encounters with the materials that this research investigates and transcriptions of two conversations that took place during this PhD. The findings of this research contribute new knowledge to an emerging discourse into the relationship between digital architectural images of commercial urban redevelopment projects and the built environment through the interrelated fields of artistic practice, architectural representation and visual culture.

This practice led research demonstrates the synthesis of clinical and creative practice through the concept of space-time, by addressing the idea of transferable skills and language across science and art. Clinical practice is focussed on the work of a highly specialist respiratory therapist. Creative practice includes a hybrid of land and textile art situated in the littoral, using the body as a transformative medium, writing and drawing. The work is underpinned primarily through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Bergson and Henri Lefebvre and interrogation of the Japanese aesthetic of ma The study explores two dualisms, time and space and mind and body, appraising research that challenges the separation of each binary. Space-time, evaluated through the Japanese aesthetic of ma, is considered alongside Bakhtin's concepts of unfinalisability and chronotope. Bergson's key writings on space and time (durée) and Lefebvre's The Production of Space and Rhythmanalysis are reviewed and linked to chronotope, unfinalisability and space-time. 'Drawing Water' references work on location where the interaction of the body with the sea and the littoral served as a metaphor for clinical practice. The chapter on mind and body addresses advances in the cognitive sciences, encompassing neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of the mind. Connections are made between the concept of space-time and the human body through 'Drawing Breath', representing both clinical and creative activity. Links between the two areas are developed further by identifying and examining the significance of a common terminology. A wide range of drawing methods and theories is examined and related to both clinical and creative practice. The portfolio comprises work on paper including text images, photography, videography and cloth; 'Drawing Thread'. The key lines of enquiry for the research are space, time, space-time, rhythm, the body, embodiment, emplacement, enaction and experience. Medical terminology is used throughout.

This fine art practice-led research investigates how the female sexed body might elicit sexual difference as an integral subjective perspective through modes of representation, modalities of experience and materiality. This research project seeks to explore, through a visual arts practice, how a woman's embodied consciousness can be in conflict with dominant ideologies of femininity, particularly in the context of a patriarchal society in which male embodiment is privileged over that of women. It explores how working through the processes of making in my sculptural installation practice provides the possibility for a radical new phenomenological body to emerge. Utilising the framework of a female subject position, i.e. a corporeal framework in which a physical body acts and experiences within a specific sociocultural context, I develop a unified and cohesive model of mind and body in order to conceive of female sexed subjects as having specific relationalities and different strategies or alternative desires to that of the universal, neutral, male body. In the course of my research, I determine the sensory qualities, expressive characteristics and affective dynamics present in the processes and materials of my arts practice, that serve to provoke specificities of female sexed subjects. A combination of feminist phenomenology, new materialism and a practice of vulnerability provide a methodology whose objective is the subversion of the patriarchal mode of embodiment. A new wave of feminist phenomenology suggests we experience embodiment as already gendered (McWeeny 2011). This becomes productive of a selfawareness in relation to the social and cultural contexts in which I live as a female sexed body and a woman, and it is through the mode of making that I question sexually specific materiality, experience and representation. Vulnerability, as a practice, involves the occupation of a position that instrumentalises ambiguity, instability, and uncertainty - and through doing so provides a way of exploring the boundaries of the body and self as being in a perpetual state of becoming. Vulnerability is the antithesis of a patriarchal position of power and control, a hierarchical system that constrains people's lived experiences. (Brown 2012). My work seeks to build on that of feminist practitioners who have re-imagined the sexed body as a dynamic, fluid and relational concept. I argue that it is the sociocultural situation of women in sexist, contemporary society, rather than consequences of a particular anatomy, that is critical to the ways in which female lived embodiment is engendered. My research aims to re-conceive the spatial and temporal dynamics of the relation between the visible and the tangible and, through my use of materiality, potentially shift paradigmatic ideas of what a body is. I propose that a phenomenological female body is generated at an intersection where material performs a transition between states of being and, in so doing, accelerates and generates instability and further possibilities of becoming. I claim the specificity of the ontological relation of becoming, in which a maternal genealogy is crucial, as a female phenomenological identity. Through my practice, I assert that this identity is an existential site, one which reverberates both a responsibility (Lorde 2007) and a responseability (Barad 2012).

This thesis investigates how implementing game-based techniques delivered through digital resources can impact collaborative learning between arts students in higher education. Research into games-based learning has paid little attention to its use in the Creative Arts: STEM subjects or vocational training are often the main areas in which games-based techniques and serious games are implemented. There is compelling evidence collected from the fields of collaborative learning theories, educational technology and games research to suggest that games-based learning could be used to enhance collaboration between arts students. The phrase games-based learning within this thesis refers to the creation of an activity that utilises game mechanics to engage students, encompassing learning content and an activity that has a learning outcome. This study examines the characterization of game mechanics, identifying which mechanics could benefit specific skills required to meet learning outcomes for enhancing and facilitating collaboration in the arts. Leadership, decision-making, communication, and creating a feeling of positive interdependence are traditional skills commonly regarded as needed for successful collaboration. This paper rests on the foundational notion that in the Creative Arts, skills such as improvisation, visualization and conceptualization are core. This thesis presents a conceptual framework for the application of game mechanics to digital resources in the Creative Arts. This framework has been developed within a Design-Based Research methodology to provide coherence for further empirical inquiry and has informed the creation of an experimental prototype resource. Rather than whether achievement of learning outcomes has been met, many games-based learning initiatives take student and staff satisfaction with a resource as measure of success. This thesis acknowledges the difficulties in measuring impact on learning outcomes and to help navigate this terrain it provides methods and tools that may be used to address relevant concerns. The contribution to knowledge from this research is a conceptual framework - a ‘roadmap’ for those looking to apply game mechanics in Arts-based subject areas; empirical evidence supporting the specific impact of games mechanics on learning outcomes and the use of Personal Meaning Maps as a research tool which support the analysis of collaborative working.