In Loving Memory explores architecture in relation to death, through the concept of the eulogy. In Loving Memory seeks to capture the social and cultural needs of individual identity and to expel one’s individual identity from the crisis of a universal existence. The final outcome of this project is a design for a Mortuary, Chapel and Burial-ground at the Otuataua Stonefields in Mangere, Auckland.. (Honours 2009)

How to expand and utilize our ‘experiential’ or ‘lived’ experience is the main concern of this project. This urban project is an exploration of interiority as a space ‘within’ — between appearance and disappearance — between the finitude of constructed space and the infinitude of the cosmos — between the abstract contained time of the clock and the empty timelessness of the cosmos and dreams — between the open future and the closed past. The design is a spatial domain where the body ‘releases’ time by activating and being activated. (Honours 2009)

This is an architectural project building upon my personal experience of travel and explores the spatiality of the journey seeking to locate a sense of belonging through transient settings. The project proposes an aviation lookout located on the Manukau Harbour adjacent to the Auckland International Airport. (Honours 2009)

This project explores the city and our spatio-temporal experiences within it through the affects of screen-based technologies. This project appropriates the screen within the context of spatial art installation practice to explore how new media information technologies generate some ubiquitous virtual urban conditions. Of significance here is my attempt to intensify our experiences within this virtual condition — It is a mediating condition described here as the meeting point between our virtual and actual selves. Devices such as scale and repetition in relation to moving image mediums enable a play with omnipotent forces of the screen as it appears in our everyday urban lives. (Honours 2009)

This project attempts to translate my experience of the everyday street for the viewer; to reveal my experience of walking and looking through drawing. The everyday is an elusive and slippery subject that has been used for various and sometimes radical agendas by many writers and artists in the last two centuries. It is seen as having potential for finding the authenticity that is lacking in other spheres of human activity. However, there is an inherent contradiction for the artist engaged with the everyday in that, by definition, the mundane is barely noticed yet it can swiftly become extraordinary when examined closely. This project uses a toolbox of everyday tactics, processes and methods to explore and devise appropriate modes of representing the everyday street, while taking this contradiction into account. (2009)

This project explores notions of seeing and knowing, underpinned by performative and phenomenological fields of enquiry that relate this exploration to the sensate experience of the viewer. A specific interest considers ideas of embodied vision with an aim at generating events that vacillate in the bodies of the audience. A primary focus is on the arena of encounter as a multi-sensory experiential event, and within this context this project proposes a temporal and spatial framework for exploration.Studio methods develop a cinematic-body of video work negotiating performative practice involving video projection and temporality. Pivotal goals are to explore the significance of the ‘chiasm’ between seeing and knowing, raising questions about how humans see, and how humans make how they see matter. Therefore, this thesis project progresses along experimental approaches to video installation, particularly in relation to the phenomena of encounter, the viewer, and film experience. The central motivation of this video practice is aimed at corporeal affect in the body/s of the audience. (Honours 2009)

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This project explores the areas of human perception and story narrative in moving images. Engaged by the research question, “Can spectators become co-authors in the process of a story narrative?”, the research focuses on exploring the co-existence and contradiction between the values of spectators and an author in a process of a narrative by developing a new potential narrative approach with multiple perspectives.

Call and Response: Emotive interplay between graphic elements and the viewer

This thesis creatively reconsiders the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and offers a design of the ancient epic as a contemporary, illustrated text. The work is concerned with notions of heroism, and methods relating to construction of imagery. The manifestation of this investigation is the illustrated book Gilgamesh, the Hero of Mesopotamia, which comprises the principal site of research in the project. It consists of thirty-six drawings that explore cyclic composition as a form of narrative discourse.

This research project considers the influence of digital technology and its impact on creative thinking in graphic design. While the dissertation does not adopt a Luddite position, it offers by way of example, reflections on the usefulness of handcrafted approaches to both design thinking and realisation. Considering the potentials of typography as a contemplative space, I create a series of installations that actively engage with the haptic. Through this process, I am able to eventually transport into the digital domain certain resonances that are the result of material thinking.

This project Shatter, explores the potential of the photographic essay to express a fictionalized account of an autobiographical narrative. Specifically, the research is concerned with presenting a subjective, first-person account of an incident from the author’s childhood that highlights the themes of familial unrest, injustice and isolation. The research employs a methodological framework that combines heuristics and Schön’s conceptualization of reflection-on-action.

The Threat of Action: Emotional displacement and the momentum of narrative
This practice-based art project explores the territory of emotional states, in particular, disruptive states that threaten to displace a person from an expected emotional cadence. This type of displacement in turn has the potential to further envelop a person’s experience to the point where invention takes over the senses. Disruptive states share common ground with the sublime through this quality of transcendence, along with potential energy, which is the threat of euphoria or danger at the threshold of the sublime.
Through the processes of painting, this study attempts to open up avenues of narrative. The project focuses around the idea of potential in relation to narratives. Momentum is the continuous flow of events, which suggests movement or progression with potential for more. Still images interfere with the structure of narratives as they can only present a fragment, separated from context. In the space for the creation of context lies the potential that can lead viewers down an avenue of their own speculation and invention. Like the possibility for invention that would propel a narrative forward, the work particularly includes figurative narratives charged with a latent energy, which is the tension created by the threat of action. Meanwhile, a parallel is drawn between these actions referenced in the narratives and those involved through the construction of a painting.

Untitled Research Project
This project explores relationships between the scale model/miniature and modes of representation through the lens, in addition to various display systems such as plinths, shelving and the frame. In the investigation of these relationships the project attempts to explore concepts such as the simultaneity of narrative and a longing for transcendent experience, that are embedded in the very operation of the model/miniature. It is this longing that allows the viewer to be ‘in excess’ of some imagined or projected past ritual. That in the encountering of these models it is possible for the viewer to be more present to an ‘originary event’ or ritual than had they been in attendance, disavowing the impossibility of witnessing such an event. In this way the project proposes that through longing for a transcendent vision and a disavowal of an 'originary event', the model/miniature can not only be understood as a kind of performance/ritual document (recording mythic time and space) but as performance itself that takes place in the witnessing. That the scale model/miniature through the interactions of longing and disavowal, recitation and retelling can become both event and ‘more’ than the ‘event’ which it documents.

People I Know is a conceptual visual arts project which involves collecting and archiving information with the intention of extending the notion of portraiture and identity beyond the frame of the body. The collection is a body of collaged material that is a substitute for the body of the sitter, characterizing them. My practice methodology is a combination of collage and collection, which allows for a wide field of research and an interdisciplinary approach. These works could be considered case studies of people I know; in object, text, and sculpture; brought together in installation.

Through the sculptural object, this thesis, in|form: The per formative object, explores the relationships between body and object, viewer and artist, performance and the per formative. By exploring the performativity of an object (and questioning how an object performs in relation to the body), the documented performances activate an inter-relational act between artist and object (I perform the object, the object performs me simultaneously). The work that unfolds from this investigation considers the placement of the viewer’s body in relation to the artist’s. A dialogue is formed between the three bodies: object, artist and viewer, creating a sense of embodiment within the work through this relationship. in|form explores this embodiment through the role of video documentation. The performances are constructed to be viewed solely through the documentation, which creates a discussion between the ‘live’ moment and the documented event, and how the viewer then relates to this. The performances take place as solo acts, but are constructed with the viewer in mind. As the viewer watches the documented performance of the action between artist and object in space, the relational nature of the work creates a second performance which embodies the viewer. This sole action, recorded and then viewed, considers the relational value of the body, specifically engaging with the abstraction of bodily formlessness within the object to reveal a bodily nature. Using the object to trace the movement of the body creates a language that communicates to, and about, both viewer and artist: through the awareness of passing time, through the large scale projection of the documentation, through the bodily nature of the object, and through the performativity of the object’s responsive nature to the artist’s body as the pair navigate through space. in|form explores how the absence of the body (in a literal sense) considers the body as an object bound by time, at once physical yet transient. By tracing the motion of the body through object, the viewer experiences the body through sensibility. Ultimately, the function of the body negotiating as a time-bound object is imitated through the performativity of the object with artist, and the elusiveness of this action emphasized by its documentation.

Perceptions and Disjunctions in Urban Space
In this studio based visual arts project I am exploring through representational painting and compositing, conjunctions and disjunctions in space and time in the urban environment. My approach situates the stranger as the phenomenological self, the perceptual being, at the centre of the research who explores the spatio-psychology of the city in the light of contradictory philosophies that move between seeing the city as a place of social malaise to seeing it as a malleable space for each individual within it.