sydney college of the arts master of fine arts 2019
TRANSCRIPT
Sydney College of the Arts
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The University of Sydney
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
2019
RESEARCH PAPER
TRANSLUCENT POTENTIALITIES:
FROM ART ACTIVISM TO PURE AESTHETICS
by
Bernadette Smith
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts
Statement
This volume is presented as a record of the work undertaken for the Master of Fine
Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my
own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.
I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and
that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been
acknowledged.
Bernadette Smith
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Abstract
Summary
Introduction …………………………………………….………………….…………page 1
Chapter One
Activist Interventions ..………………………………………………….………….. page 7
Chapter 2
The Performativity of Images……………………………………………………....page 24
Chapter 3
Light Objects…………………………………………………………………………page 33
Conclusion .………………………………………………………………………….page 49
Bibliography ...……………………………………………………………………….page 52
List of Illustrations
Figure 1 Bernadette Smith, Newtown Art Seat, 2015, Self Adhesive Vinyl
Photograph, Newtown, Sydney …………………………………………………………p.7
Figure 2 Bernadette Smith, The 100th Anti-CSG vigil, September 2, 2015,
photographic prop, outside AGL headquarters, Sydney…………….....…………….p.8
Figure 3 Bernadette Smith, Urban Waterways, 2016, photograph mounted on foam
core, guerilla art at Redfern Biennale during Art Month Sydney……....…………....p.9
Figure 4 Bernadette Smith and Mark Elliot-Ranken, Ancestral Voyagers, 2016,
mixed media installation, Sculpture at Sawmillers, McMahon’s Point, Sydney......p.11
Figure 5 Daniel Buren, Neuf Couleurs au Vent, 1984, wind flags, Montreal.....….p.12
Figure 6 Daniel Buren, covering a billboard in stripes,1969, Paris………….….....p.13
Figure 7 Josh Wodak, When I Was Buoyant, 2012, photographic series………...p.14
Figure 8 Bernadette Smith, Waterline, 2016, video and OHP installation detail,
Beams Festival, Sydney …………………………………..………………………….. p.15
Figure 9 Bernadette Smith, Climate Altar, 2016, mixed media installation detail,
Nocturnal Arts Festival, Wollongong……………………………………………….….p.16
Figure 10 Bernadette Smith, Climate Altar, 2016, mixed media installation and
performance, Nocturnal Arts Festival, Wollongong…………………………………..p.17
Figure 11 Bernadette Smith, Waterline, 2016, video installation detail, Beams
Festival, Sydney………………………………………………………………………….p.18
Figure 12 Bernadette Smith, Water 4 Life Highway Action at Tempe, June 28, 2016
photograph of protest, Sydney……........................…………………………………..p.19
Figure 13 Bernadette Smith, No Dakota Access Pipeline protest with Jaqueline Cain
from Moree, November 18, 2016, photograph, Sydney, CBD……………………...p.20
Figure 14 Pussy Riot, Punk Prayer, 2012, performance inside St Basil’s Russian
Orthodox Cathedral, Moscow…………………...…………………………………….. p.21
Figure 15 Bernadette Smith, Manna from Heaven, 2018, dye sublimated print on
polyester fabric, Sydney Park, Sydney……….…………..………………………….. p.24
Figure 16 Daniel Buren, Intersections 7, 2012, mixed media installation, Scolacium
Archaelogical Park, Italy…………………........................…………..………………. p.25
Figure 17 Daniel Buren, Suspended Painting,1972, canvas on cable, Italy...…... p.25
Figure 18 Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube,1963, plexiglas box, Germany……p.26
Figure 19 Bernadette Smith, Manna from Heaven and Liquid Sky, 2017, pigment
print photographs, at Sunstudio, Sydney.....................................................….......p.27
Figure 20 Bernadette Smith, Incoming Wave, 2018, digital photograph, Clovelly
Marine Reserve, Sydney…………………………………..……………….…….……. p.29
Figure 21 Bernadette Smith, Dew Drops, 2018, digital photograph on chromaluxe
aluminium, 50.8 cm diameter……………………………………………………...…...p.31
Figure 22 Bernadette Smith, Eden Gardens Unearthed, 2018, digital photographs on
self adhesive vinyl, dimensions variable, Sydney…..………………………………..p.32
Figure 23 Bernadette Smith, Blue Shift (detail) 2018, digital photograph…………p.33
Figure 24 Bernadette Smith, Last Rays, 2017, pigment print photograph….…….p.35
Figure 25 Bernadette Smith, Last Rays pants, Vice Chancellor's office, University of
Sydney, August 17, 2016……………………………………………………………….p.36
Figure 26 Bernadette Smith, Let SCA Stay, 2016, campaign poster, Sydney College
of the Arts noticeboard…….…………………………………………………………....p.37
Figure 27 Bernadette Smith, Vortex, 2017, pigment print photograph………….…p.38
Figure 28 Noguchi Rika, Hand and Rainbow, 2010, analogue photograph…..…..p.39
Figure 29 Bernadette Smith, Still, 2017, pigment print photograph…………….....p.40
Figure 30 Bernadette Smith, Fluidity 2, video installation, ElectroFringe17…….. p.41
Figure 31 Bernadette Smith, Blue Shift 1 and 2, 2018, pigment print photographs
mounted on alupanel, Verge Gallery………………..…………………………………p.43
Figure 32 Bernadette Smith, Diffractions in Glass with Equinox 1 and 2, 2018, mixed
photo-media, Verge Gallery………………………………………………………….…p.44
Figure 33 Bernadette Smith, Deluge (detail), 2018, mixed media installation,
Maitland Regional Art Gallery…………………………………………………….…….p.45
Figure 34 Bernadette Smith, Light Objects, 2018, photo-media installation, Perth
Centre of Photography………………………………………………………………..…p.46
Figure 35 Bernadette Smith, Curatorial Class Lab, 2018, art installation, Sydney
College of the Arts gallery.......................................................................................p.47
Figure 36 Bernadette Smith, Meridian, 2019, digital print on Chromaluxe aluminium
……………………………………………………………………………………………..p.48
Figure 37 Bernadette Smith, Meridian, (detail), 2018, pigment print photograph...p.49
Abstract
This project begins by researching how art can change individual and collective
behaviour regarding life support systems, using water conservation as a lens
through which to examine wider environmental concerns. Examining the role and
nature of art as an effective communicative tool has involved a journey from art
activism to pure aesthetics and back again to explore the performativity of images.
My hybridised practice first investigates how photography and video through
performative actions, installation and social media can be activated to engage
onlookers during environmental protests and beyond to support the movement for
water sustainability. Art strategies were developed to raise public awareness of
water by producing eye-catching visual aids such as water themed activist clothing
and situating meaningful art interventions both during public campaigns and
elsewhere. As well as engaging with socio-political art forms presented outside of
gallery contexts my practice approaches New Materialist concerns with the
primacy of matter in the age of the Anthropocene. Counteracting a dominant
anthropocentric view of the universe my art practice explores the viscerality of
matter to emphasise non-human agency. While photographing aquatic
environments I used an extreme macro lens to closely observe the way light
interacts within different states of water such as condensation and flowing water.
This contributed to my growing interest in the optical effects of light refractions.
Then news that my heritage campus would close caused a rupture generating new
awareness of my studio surroundings when I noticed for the first time how slanted
sunlight penetrated its textured glass window panes prompting further study of the
science behind light interacting with translucent materials. These discoveries on
my art journey have augmented an appreciation of the complexity of the non-
human world and generated more visually compelling ways to create and present
activist art for environmental sustainability.
Summary
The creative work produced for my Master Of Fine Arts examination exhibition at
Sydney College of the Arts in May 2019 consists of photomedia imagery of light and
water refractions presented as three-dimensional assemblages of moving image
projections and photographic objects creating a visceral encounter with the agency
of matter and the non-human world.
1
Introduction
Market driven economic growth and the green house effect of burning fossil fuels
risks omnicidal overheating of our atmosphere. Global warming has intensified
drought, floods, destructive storms, catastrophic fires and ongoing species extinction
while mismanagement of our resources has led to fresh water scarcity further
exacerbating climate crisis.1 My MFA project aims to challenge the dominance of
anthropocentric views responsible for commodification of the environment by
promoting respect for life support systems such as water. Non human agency can be
achieved by making water, so often taken for granted, more visible in our community
through public interventions to highlight the need for protection of this essential
resource. Towards this end I explore modes of political expression in art and
activism to develop compelling visual communication methods. Examining ways of
further enhancing viewer receptivity to the underlying message has led to formalist
art approaches to intensify its visual potency.
The research paper traces a journey from art activism to pure aesthetic encounters
and back, investigating the agency of images to more effectively promote water
sustainability. This evolving trajectory stems from my involvement with water quality
activism after witnessing destructive mining and water contamination near
Newcastle, NSW. My MFA project began by considering how art concerning water
ecology could influence individual and collective attitudes regarding life support
systems. Initially I photographed and utilised patterns of water, both riverine and
coastal, in urban art interventions and environmental protests. The objective was to
reveal how meaningful public art forms could become a powerful tool for social
change, reaching a much wider audience than traditional gallery contexts.
New aesthetic discoveries along the way and ruptures within my practice have
brought changing sensibilities, moving my art beyond medium specificity and a
singularity of focus towards a transdisciplinary engagement. The insights gained
from using photo-media performatively during public protests developed into a
broader concern for projecting moving images into three dimensional environments
1 “Climate Change 2014,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accessed March 8, 2020,
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/06/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf
2
and sculptural photography. My earlier use of water imagery to create
representational political art in the public sphere evolved into a sustained
photographic exploration of translucent light refractions that verged on abstraction.
During this creative journey my focus has progressed from using water imagery
purely as visual communication aids in the context of activism towards probing the
aesthetic dimension of light interacting with the material of water.
Interwoven throughout this thesis is my journey through the interstices between art
activism and pure aesthetics. By pure aesthetics I am referring to the formalist
concept of making and analyzing art purely for its visual aspects, such as colour,
form, line and composition, rather than for its representational or narrative value. My
detour into pure aesthetics did not eliminate my engagement with environmental
activism and eventually helped sharpen and intensify my images to create more
effective visual communication. This process also involved exploring the agency of
imagery by presenting and rematerializing my art in different forms and contexts.
My personal breakthroughs as an artist were built upon successive creative acts that
have driven me inexorably along this path rather than emanating from a fixed
position. In relating my own history of projects on this art journey I am attempting to
unpack my personal growth as an artist. As artists we do not rest on our laurels but
build, dismantle and rebuild constantly along the way. It is the restless energy
generated by this process of doing, redoing, failing and succeeding that keeps this
artist going. My growth as an artist prompted further critical enquiry, with my wide
range of work increasingly being informed by ideas rooted in New Materialism and
Performativity. Key theoretical underpinnings are discussed alongside relevant
artists to gain further insights into the context and ongoing development of my
practice.
Chapter One, Activist Interventions, explores practical ways of using photo-media to
raise public awareness of water conservation. Situated within a transgressive guerilla
art practice, I placed photographs depicting local waterways in strategic urban
contexts. This strategy was expanded into ephemeral public art installations using a
wind flag depicting macroscopic rainwater droplets. In marked contrast to ubiquitous
commercial advertising dominated by words, it was a subliminal way of raising the
3
profile of water in the public conscious. For insights into how artworks can change
public perceptions of place and function in a performative way I look at urban art
interventions by Daniel Buren.
In further iterations I projected moving images of water onto buildings to draw
attention to coal mining contamination of Sydney’s water catchment and potential
sea inundation from global warming. Political art interventions pioneered by artists
such as Krzysztof Wodiczko using street projections are considered in relation to my
work. Playful and engaging new ways of embodying protest were also tested by
designing and wearing clothing printed with water to raise public awareness of water
ecology. These actions were documented and uploaded into social media contexts
to reach a wider audience and assist the movement to publicise water sustainability.
Turning to the role of subversive carnivalesque street theatre and costume as a way
of speaking to power, I compare strategies of art groups such as the seminal Guerilla
Girls and Pussy Riot. Referring to French theorist Jacques Ranciere’s concept of the
‘distribution of the sensible’ or those uncounted in the social system, I propose
developing agency for the non-human.2 By non-human I mean biological,
hydrological and geological systems including the world of animals, plants, insects,
weather, ocean, river and all material things existing alongside the human species.
In response to the Anthropocene or human induced climate crisis I attempt to make
the powerless visible in the public sphere using water as a lens to emphasise
environmental awareness.
In Chapter Two, The Performativity of Images, I discuss ways of enhancing the
agency of the image especially when exhibited outside of protest settings where the
meaning is no longer buttressed by its context. To meet this challenge I examine the
idea of art performativity discussed by artist and cultural theorist Barbara Bolt and
engage with pure aesthetics in my studio practice. Bolt and others have used the
term performative to describe how images can be an active force in the world.
Through the oscillating visual drama of shapes, shadows and light; underlying truths
beneath the structure of representation can be highlighted and feelings intensified.
2 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics – The Distribution of the Sensible, (London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2004).
4
For example, Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808 depicting the violence of war,
provokes empathy by highlighting victims in warm chiaroscuro tones while the
soldiers are cloaked in sinister darkness.
These immanent qualities within the image draw upon formal design elements to
increase the potency of the image producing emotional affects upon the viewer.
Drawing parallels with J.L. Austin’s concept of performative speech, Bolt suggests
that art can also be performative in the way: “certain speech utterances or
productions don't just describe or report the world, but actually have a force whereby
they perform the action to which they refer.3 The performative utterance (as opposed
to the constative or descriptive utterance) does things in the world.”4
My study of aquatic environments to obtain water imagery for protest costumes and
video interventions grows into a fascination with the play of sunlight within different
states of water. To contextualize my studio work in a broader sense I examine artists
concerned with the materiality of water including early Hans Haacke systems-based
artworks such as Condensation Cube. This arc of exploration contributes to a
growing aesthetic concern with translucent light refractions and the agency of matter
highlighted by discourses in New Materialism which emphasise a less
anthropocentric view of the universe.
New Materialism, with leading theorists such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway,
Elizabeth Grosz and Jane Bennett, draws on environmental, cultural, sociological,
feminist and science studies among other approaches to reposition the centrality of
the human subject towards entities other than human beings. The non-human world
encompassing all living things even non-organic things are given greater prominence
and scholarly attention in response to human induced climate crisis. New
Materialism signals a return to matter as vital, non-human centred ontology
emphasizing the materiality of the world to counter Western notions of progress and
the hegemony of human will. These discourses question “the stability of an
3 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. The William James Lectures 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 4 Barbara Bolt, “After Motherwell, after Manet and after Goya: the performative power of imaging and the
intensely present” in Art as Parodic Practice, TEXT Special Issue 33: October (2015):4.
5
individuated, liberal subject, and they advocate a critical materialist attention to the
global, distributed influences of late capitalism and climate change.”5
In Chapter Three, Light Objects, light diffractions in glass are explored through
photomedia then rematerialized into objects and assemblages and placed in new
contexts to enhance performativity. I chart how my concern with the materiality of
water expands into the material world of my studio after discovering light waves
scattering within its textured glass window pane. To critically understand this optical
phenomenon I again turn to New Materialism touching on the writings of Jane
Bennett and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Karen Barad’s concept of
diffraction and entanglement outlined in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway is
also considered in relation to my growing engagement with New Materialist thinking.
Delving further into the optical science behind the phenomenon of translucent
refractions I consider Berenice Abbott’s photographs of light waves in water which
influenced the form of my next video installation set inside a gallery staircase.
More experimentation with forms and presentation followed, extending my light
refraction photographs into actual objects. Photographs were digitally printed on
square, oval and circles, then presented in conceptual art contexts to test their
agency outside of environmental protest settings. The work is situated within the
context of other art practices transforming photomedia beyond its function as purely
image, considering precursors such as Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and the
1970 Museum of Modern Art show Photography into Sculpture. Like so many artist
photographers in the new millennium I have moved away from medium specificity
into more hybrid art practices.6
The thesis conclusion reflects on my changing art practice summarising what has
been gained in the MFA and bringing together the many threads of exploration
generated from my art journey. My thesis began by considering how compelling
imagery of water used in the public sphere could raise awareness and motivate
social action to help mitigate climate change in a way that words alone could not.
5 Kameron Sanzo, “New Materialism(s),” Genealogy of the Posthuman, April 25, 2018,
https://criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms, accessed March 8, 2020.
6 Rebecca Morse, "Photography/Sculpture in Contemporary Art," American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 31-34.
6
This journey culminates in translucent light encounters rematerialised into
performative assemblages to emphasise non-human agency and sustainability.
7
Chapter One
ARTIST INTERVENTIONS
“The aim of critical public art … is an engagement in strategic challenges to the city structures and mediums that mediate our everyday perception of the world: an engagement through aesthetic-critical interruptions, infiltrations and appropriations that question the symbolic, psycho-political and economic operations of the city.” 7
Figure 1. Bernadette Smith, Newtown Art Seat, 2015, self adhesive vinyl photograph, Sydney
Scientists have warned us that humankind has brought our planet to the brink of
mass species extinction and irreversible climate change.8 This was brought home to
me on a personal level after discovering that for many years I had lived next to the
contaminated groundwater red zone of Fullerton Cove where I also witnessed the
wanton destruction of coastal heathland wrought by sand extraction in Stockton
Bight. This motivated me to become involved with environmental activism as a
documentary photographer and artist. My MFA journey from art activism to pure
aesthetics began by developing art to assist the environment movement.
While photographing street protests as an activist for Stop Coal Seam Gas Sydney, I
realized that environment groups, who mainly rely on written placards and banners
7 Krzysztof Wodiczko, “ Redefining Site Specificity, 1993”, in Situation ed. Claire Doherty (MIT Press: Cambridge
MA 2009), 124. 8 “Climate Change in Australia,” Australian Government Department of the Environment, accessed March 8,
2020. https://www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/en/climate-campus/global-climate-change/trends/
8
to disseminate their message, often fail to connect with passersby.9 To address this
need my MFA research first aimed to demonstrate how artists can assist movements
for environmental sustainability by developing effective visual aids and public art
interventions supporting water sustainability. Surveys of protest art such as
Disobedient Objects at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney which opened on
October 31, 2015 suggest that art and design produced by grassroots social
movements have played an important role in bringing about progressive change.10
Public art in urban streets can function on a more visceral level than art displayed
within an institutional context such as a gallery. This potential was earlier
demonstrated to me in 2015 while installing my panorama of rainwater on its journey
to the sea for Newtown Art Seat (fig.1) when a council worker commented: “It will be
good on hot summer days because people can look at this and feel cool.” It helped
me realise that a wider range of people can be reached directly when viewers
encounter unexpected art about ecology in public places instead of the normal
consumer advertising seen on our streets. Working in this way I believed could affect
viewers more deeply than simply exhibiting images in the traditional gallery context.
Figure 2. Bernadette Smith, The 100th Anti-CSG Vigil, September 2, 2015, photographic prop, AGL, Sydney
My first attempt at employing visual aids to raise public awareness of water was
when I used my photograph showing ripples on water enlarged into a 70 cm
9 see Bernadette Smith, City and Country United Against Coal and CSG (Blurb Books Australia, 2015) 10 Disobedient Objects, Power House Museum, accessed March 8, 2020 https://maas.museum/event/disobedient-objects/
9
diameter circle at an anti-coal seam gas mining protest on September 2, 2015
outside AGL headquarters in Sydney (fig.2). When viewed at a distance from across
the road this image was clearly recognizable as water whereas the written signs
were indecipherable, thus it had greater carrying power as a visual message than
text alone. Operating on an intuitive level, I believe that on the driest continent on
Earth it helped sow the seed of water sustainability. Using a circular shape for the
protest was intentional as I wanted it to stand out in contrast to the more angular
urban architecture. One of the major concerns about mining is the contamination it
causes in groundwater and run-off to waterways as well as its depletion of fresh
water supplies so my MFA concentrated on imaging water to display in the public
sphere.
Figure 3. Bernadette Smith, Urban Waterways, 2016, photograph mounted on foam core, Redfern, Sydney.
As part of my MFA project I intervened in various sites by placing circular
photographs I had taken of Sydney waterways around Sydney streets (fig.3). This
followed on from an earlier outdoor installation I had created for Art on the Greenway
on March 25, 2015. The photos showed the pattern of light and dark on the surface
of water caused by the disturbance of wind. Circles were used again because being
a more organic shape they acted as a foil against the hard edges of the city.
Appearing like portholes they were intended to cause a visual rupture confounding
viewers’ expectations as they pass by while implanting the idea of water in an almost
subliminal way. The strategic placing of photographs depicting local waterways at
the Redfern Biennale during Art Month Sydney in March 2016 and outside the Art
10
Gallery of NSW during the United Nations Climate Summit Rally on November 29,
2015 and elsewhere was situated within a transgressive guerilla art practice.11
These unauthorized site interventions were a form of nomadic art practice performed
as photographic actions in public space and perhaps even reclaiming the commons.
In part this was an attempt to win back community space for sustainability
consciousness in response to increasing commodification by commercial interests.
Sociologist Antonio Negri has observed that in a time of late stage Capitalist crisis
increasing social, environmental and economic precarity has led to more insistent
popular demands for a communal commons as demonstrated during the worldwide
Occupy movement of 2011. He elaborates on Hannah Arendt’s idea of freedom of
action in the public sphere:
“…we are not free unless we live a common experience, unless we win a
‘space-time’ in which freedom can not only be expressed but also established,
in which action can expand…”12
The concept of making water visible to the public and reclaiming the commons for
non-commercial space was further explored by creating and placing outdoor
assemblages. Macro photographs of water droplets were printed without text on to a
wind flag and used in temporal art installations in public parks and verges. This
added a kinetic element and was a curious sight because unlike normal wind flags
seen in public places there were no words or brand advertising only the visual
embodiment of water. In collaboration with artist Mark Elliot-Ranken it was installed
in various iterations for Sculpture at Sawmillers in September 2016, Art Crawl at the
University of Sydney in January 2017 and the Bayside Art Festival in April 2017.
For Sculpture at Sawmillers, Mark represented Greek gnomon poles used for
navigation by ancient seafarers, in combination with my wind flag to evoke the
elements of sea spray, rain and condensation encountered during early voyages (fig.
4). Although these different installations had varying nuances of meaning they all
conceptualise humankind’s relationship to water in some way. They also decenter
11 Art Month Sydney, March 2016. http://2016.artmonthsydney.com.au/experiences/redfern-biennale-2016/ 12 Antonio Negri “Living in a Time of Crisis.” in Global Activism – Art and Conflict in the 21st Century, ed. Peter
Weibel (Germany: ZKM, 2014), 100.
11
capitalism by creating a space for viewers to envisage a world view based on the
primacy of matter and life support systems rather than the dominant paradigm of
unsustainable extractivism.
Figure 4. Bernadette Smith and Mark Elliot-Ranken, Ancestral Voyagers, 2016, mixed media installation, Sculpture at Sawmillers, McMahon’s Point, Sydney
My use of wind flags also recalls the 1984 Neuf Couleurs au Vent (fig.5), Daniel
Buren’s permanent outdoor public art installation consisting of nine masts flying blue,
red, green, yellow, black and white striped banners in Montreal. They constantly
change with the wind direction adding a colourful stimulus which redefines the
viewers experience of this site. Buren’s signature stripes motif developed from
painting on bedsheets when he ran out of large canvas while working in the
Caribbean earlier in his career and was thought to evoke the anonymous striped
awnings prevalent on French shops during the sixties. He views the stripes as tools
for seeing and was one of the first artists to work directly with site rather than from a
studio. Various iterations of the stripe motif were used in his urban interventions and
later as gallery installations and public works to expand, augment or interfere with
the surrounding environment.
For me, his earliest stripe street interventions leading up to the 1968 Paris student
uprising were the most inspiring because of their raw, transgressive quality. Buren
12
began pasting up striped posters on to sections of advertising billboards after being
influenced by the Situationiste Internationale movement with its cultural critique of
capitalism. Situationism existed mainly in Europe from 1957 to 1972 attracting avant-
garde artists and left wing intellectuals such as Guy Debord who devised seminal
cultural theories and practices such as Détournement.13
Figure 5. Daniel Buren, Neuf Couleurs au Vent, 1984, wind flags, Montreal, Canada
Buren’s paste-ups culminated in a particularly provocative gesture when he pasted
stripes over an entire car advertisement (fig.6). At his 2018 public lecture at
Carriageworks in Sydney, Buren indicated that part of this work’s intent was to create
space for the eye to see without being bombarded by advertising messages. He said
the only place you could be free of commercials cluttering public space was in Cuba
which he found to be quite “relieving”.14 In my own urban interventions I aim to
reclaim public space for the visceral power of imagery to interact performatively
within place.
13 “Summary of the Situationist International,” The Art Story website, accessed March 3, 2020.
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/situationist-international/ 14 Daniel Buren, key note lecture at Carriageworks, Sydney on July 7, 2018.
13
Figure 6. Daniel Buren, covering a billboard in stripes, 1969, Paris.
Counteracting the logic of capitalism, art performativity can physically and
emotionally expand reality to facilitate an alternative consciousness rather than
merely represent the existing status quo. According to theorist Terry Smith, Bertholt
Brecht and Walter Benjamin have argued that: “revolutionary art must generate
visceral images, a visuality of real social relations, not however as a picture (the
mistake made of Socialist Realism), but as a set of effects on audiences and
viewers.”15 These authors reveal art’s performative potential to act on viewers in an
affective way by changing our perceived reality rather than relying on didactic
pictures to promote social change. Art thus plays a role in changing reality rather
than merely illustrating it or as artist Gabriel Orozco asserts, it is not so much what
people see in an artwork that is important but “how they confront reality again”
afterwards.16
In terms of affective imaging it is worth considering artist Josh Wodak’s photographic
series When I Was Buoyant (fig.7) where human subjects with raised arms were
projected with the sea level rises expected to inundate low lying Pacific islands when
global temperatures increase beyond two degrees. By projecting data visualisations
on the body Wodak has devised a visually compelling method to warn viewers of the
catastrophic consequences of climate instability in the looming Anthropocene epoch.
15 Terry Smith, ed. Impossible Presence – Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Sydney: Power Institute,
2001), 17. 16 Margaret Iversen. “Following Pieces.” quoting Orozco interview, Clinton Is Innocent (Paris: Musée d’Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1998) in Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins (New York: Routledge Press, 2006), 105.
14
Likewise, I intended communicating climate crisis visually but in a less diagrammatic
way by interacting with the corporeal presence of people. His series also rekindled a
previous interest I had in experimental analogue projections on bodies created prior
to my MFA during the 1980’s.17
Figure 7. Josh Wodak, When I Was Buoyant, 2012, photographic series, Sydney.
In my earlier Cibachrome series, hand-made slides were created using found
translucent materials, discarded 35 mm slides, 16 mm film and celluloid ink which
were then projected on to friends with an analogue slide projector and re-
photographed. This work explored not only the material qualities of translucent
materials but visualised emotions of loss caused by the destruction of my bushland
surrounds. Wodak’s series precipitated a return to light projection art, only this time
my subject would be water sustainability using night time digital data projections to
communicate facts and imagery onto buildings.
At Beams Arts Festival in September 2016 I overlaid water imagery on walls and
pavement using a data projector video and an analogue overhead projector (OHP)
creating a semi-immersive environment through which pedestrians passed. My video
Waterline was a moving meditation on fresh water with intermittent text relating to
Sydney’s drinking water supply being at risk from eight coalmines within its water
catchments.18 The projected video loop and OHP cast patterns of water were
intended to create a perception of morphing reality which would help viewers
visualize the concept of human induced climate change and threats to our water
supply. The silent video used animated stills of water in different states and was
17 Bernadette Smith artist website http://bernadettesmithartphoto.blogspot.com.au/ 18 Bernadette Smith, Waterline, video on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/182513822
15
originally made after learning that my former home in Fullerton Cove was located in
the red zone surrounding Williamtown air force base affected by PFAS chemical
contamination.19
Figure 8. Bernadette Smith, Waterline, 2016, video and OHP installation detail, Beams Festival, Sydney
There is an underlying sense of grieving related to ‘solastalgia’ in my animated water
imagery. The term ‘solastalgia’, coined by sociologist Glenn Albrecht, describes a
homesickness caused from living in an environment being rapidly destroyed by
unsustainable mining.20 In southern Stockton Bight where I had lived for many years
until 2006, I witnessed nearby forested crown lands relentlessly bulldozed beyond all
prior recognition leaving a moonscape in its wake. Although I tried along with other
concerned activists to mount legal challenges, we found the system was heavily
skewed in favour of mining which meant that high conservation value public land was
mined with little or no accountability and often without development consent.
19 “Background and Ongoing Management,” NSW Environmental Protection Authority website, accessed March
3, 2020: https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/working-together/community-engagement/community-news/raaf-williamtown-contamination/background-and-ongoing-management.
20 Glenn Albrecht, “The Age of Solastalgia,” The Conversation, August 7, 2012, https://theconversation.com/the-
age-of-solastalgia-8337.
16
This experience injected my work with strong emotional underpinnings which
although mainly operating at a subconscious level has contributed to its viscerality.
Since that time my art has been imbued with deeply personal experience of
environmental loss expressed in an oblique rather than literal way but there are other
artists such as Jenny Brown who work more directly with the theme of Solastalgia.
For her Solastalgia 2 art installation shown at Cementa Festival in Kandos, Brown
blended interviews with communities impacted by coal mining in the Hunter Valley
with relevant book readings to create scripted actions in an open field and video
projections in a train carriage.21 Her deconstructed documentary methodology has
affinities with my performance installation at Nocturnal Arts Festival.
Figure 9. Bernadette Smith, Climate Altar, 2016, mixed media installation detail, Nocturnal Arts Festival, Wollongong
Staged over several nights in Wollongong in 2016 I had created a funereal ‘climate
altar’ outside a church using plastic plant lanterns to symbolise the sacrifice of nature
(fig.9 & 10). On the church door above the ‘altar’ a micro data projector showed a
surreal video mash-up loop of rain, running tap water and maps of sea inundation
affecting Wollongong during extreme weather events. Additionally, an analogue
overhead projector raised above the stairs cast light patterns from a clear pyrex dish
containing oil and water over the pavement of the adjacent shopping mall. Standing
21 Jenny Brown, artist website http://jennybrownjenny.com/institutional/solastalgia-part-two/ accessed June 14,
2018
17
on the church steps and dressed in water printed clothing I was assisted by artist
Mark Elliot-Ranken to intermittently read out a 5 minute script consisting of early
colonial narratives and warnings from scientists and clergy about the impact of global
warming on Australia and the Pacific.22
Figure 10. Bernadette Smith, Climate Altar, 2016, mixed media installation and performance detail, Nocturnal Arts Festival, Wollongong.
My street projections can also be seen in the context of earlier public art
interventions pioneered by political artists like Krzysztof Wodiczko who projected
large scale slides and videos on building facades and monuments ranging from anti-
war statements to pro-refugee protests. In an iconic anti-Apartheid guerilla art protest
he projected an unauthorized Nazi swastika for two hours onto South Africa House,
London in 1985 before authorities shut it down. Such guerilla art tactics have also
been used throughout the last decade in Greenpeace projections against nuclear
power plants in Europe and against coal mining during the Vivid Festival in Sydney.
According to Wodiczko, public art is neither for decoration nor entertainment but
should interrupt and challenge the social systems and perceptions behind the city.
This concept of aesthetic-critical infiltrations of the city could help shift community
assumptions about water towards understanding it as a finite and essential resource
for all life.
When I lived near coastal hinterland being overrun by extractive industry in Fullerton
22 Bernadette Smith, installation video, Nocturnal Arts Festival https://youtu.be/YzhGb4hfzpo
18
Cove I remember every new development application would mention consultation
with “stakeholders” but the non-human world never counted as such.23
Environmental activists like myself were even branded as economic vandals by
miners if we tried to represent the rights of the non-human in court appeals. Yet
underground water contamination in our area only became a public issue of concern
when humans and their livestock began to be affected. This exemplifies Jacques
Ranciere’s argument that “…the social order has been founded upon distinctions of
who can speak in the public sphere and who cannot, of who is visible and who is
not.”24 He posits that the ‘distribution of the sensible’ or political status quo is
maintained through absences of discourse from the voiceless and that it is only by
making visible in the public sphere those who normally do not count that
emancipatory politics is possible.
Figure 11. Bernadette Smith, Waterline, 2016, video installation detail, Beams Festival, Sydney
Clearly water and the environment cannot stand up and speak for itself without art
activism to bring these issues to the surface of public consciousness before it is too
late. The non-human world threatened by human-induced climate crisis could benefit
23 I define non-human as biological, hydrological and geological systems including the world of animals, plants,
insects, weather, ocean, river and all material things existing alongside the human species. 24 Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts, “Jacques Rancière: Thinker of Dissensus” in Jaques Rancière : History,
Politics, Aesthetics. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 6.
19
from being thrust into the public sphere to make people more empathically aware of
the need for environmental sustainability. The challenge for me was to progressively
test more effective ways of achieving this using the streets as a platform for
experimentation.
During Beams Festival 2016 in Sydney, I realised that further performative potential
for water imagery could be generated. Here was direct physical interaction dissolving
the boundary between viewer and artwork as passersby strolled through my water
imagery allowing light and shadows to flow over their bodies (fig. 8,11). Observing
how viewers could effectively become part of the installation led me to develop ways
of displaying water on people that could also be seen by day. Going beyond my
previous use of visual aids and street interventions I designed clothing printed with
water utilised at anti-mining protests to raise the public profile of water.
Figure 12. Bernadette Smith, Water 4 Life Highway Action at Tempe, June 28, 2016, protest, Sydney
At the Water 4 Life Highway Action on June 28, 2016 (fig.12) organized by Lock the
Gate against coal and gas mining and the No Dakota Access Pipeline protest on
November 18, 2016 staged in solidarity with Native Americans (fig.13), I tested
20
performative actions such as wearing water costumes and dancing with props.
Drawing on the action performance advertising techniques used at busy
intersections during peak hour, when signs promoting pizza are waved at motorists, I
tried to enliven the Water 4 Life protest employing similar strategies. These
performative actions were then documented and further used in social media
extending my visual communication tactics. I also tried crowd funding sites to
produce subsidised water printed clothing for activists disseminated to the wider
public via social media and dedicated website.25 The novelty of wearing water
imagery made visible the vital qualities of water that had otherwise been left out of
the equation and ruptured the papered-over absences within economic discourse.
Figure 13. Bernadette Smith, No Dakota Access Pipeline protest with Jaqueline Cain from Moree, November 18,
2016, photograph, Sydney, CBD.
While it is beyond the scope of this MFA to provide statistical evidence of the political
agency of my water clothing there has been supportive feedback from other
protestors and positive social media commentary from within the environmental
movement. Even though my hypothesis is speculative I believe that wearing water
costumes at protests operates on three levels: firstly drawing public attention to the
issue visually by incongruously standing out from normal street wear, secondly by
25 Bernadette Smith, Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155093274372207
and Bernadette Smith crowdfunding blog page: http://activistvisualaids.blogspot.com.au/
21
defying accepted standards of dress and social expectations to challenge the status
quo and thirdly by embodying water sustainability to passersby at a glance. This is
supported by research into perceptual aspects of art or neuroaesthetics indicating an
aesthetic trajectory. To engage viewer interest an artwork has elements of
recognition or familiarity, then surprise or ambiguity followed by resolution or
synthesis of that ambiguity involving viewer collaboration and reward. Even abstract
art operates under this principle using perceptual pattern recognition of forms.26
Unlike the use of text-based placards alone, utilising water costumes at protests can
connect with viewers emotively as well as intellectually. This is not without
precedence as costumes used politically in the public sphere are part of a subversive
continuum within the rich history of political street theatre. In traditional Christian
cultures for example, Carnival held before Lent, allowed for outlandish street
costumes, the lampooning of authorities and raucous public behaviour to overturn
normative rules and public order if only for a short time.
Figure 14. Pussy Riot, Punk Prayer, 2012, performance inside St Basil’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Moscow
26 W.Tecumseh Fitch, Antje von Graevenitz and Eric Nicolas, “Bio-Aesthetics and the Aesthetic Trajectory: A
Dynamic Cognitive and Cultural Perspective,” in Neuroaesthetics eds.Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian (New York: Baywood Publishing Company, 2009), 59.
22
Arguably modern art activism has its historical precedence in revolutionary Agit Prop
after the October Revolution in 1917 when artists and performers including poet
Mayakovsky and film maker Dziga Vertov travelled by train across Russia
propagating radical ideas through art. The train had a small cinema to screen films
and a printing press to distribute pamphlets and posters as they passed through
villages.27 In the 1960’s French Situationists also took to the streets with posters,
performance and detournement strategies to support student uprisings at that time.
Detournement involved satirical actions that would negate capitalism such as altering
advertising billboards and changing the narration in movies. More recently the
Guerilla Girls, first active in 1985, were feminist activist artists from New York known
for deconstructing gender bias in the art world. They used gorilla mask costumes to
add humour and remain anonymous so as not to distract from the issues they
presented in protest actions, posters, billboards, performances and installations.
During Occupy Sydney in 2011, artist Jacquelene Drinkall also used street theatre
costumes to reverse public perceptions of gender and class in the lead up to a Gay
Marriage Equality rally. Her gender bender dresses crafted from men’s ties were
worn by Occupy protestors in the CBD for their Tour of Corporate Greed shaming
exploitative workplaces such as Woolworths.28 Likewise, Pussy Riot, active today in
Russia, use brightly coloured knitted masks in sensational stunts that satirise
authoritarian tendencies within the Russian state. They emerged out of the activist
art collective Voina with roots in activist art of the 1990’s when artists struggling to
exist in post-Perestroika Russia began to abandon the quest for success in the
institutionalized art world. Instead they choose to operate in society at large making
public art interventions.
Pussy Riot are best known for playing anti-patriarchal punk music at an Orthodox
church in Moscow in 2012 which led to criminal prosecutions (fig.14). Their guerilla
art actions have been called “cognitive terrorism” because the battle is being fought
using cultural shock tactics to rupture public perceptions of what is acceptable.29
Pussy Riot’s art activism creates an extreme cultural encounter that confronts any
27 Adelheid Heftberger, “‘Propaganda in Motion.” in Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and
Eastern Europe, 1 (2015). ISSN 2365-7758 http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2015.0001.2 28 Bernadette Smith, “Australian art responses to the GFC” Arena Magazine, Issue 132, (Fitzroy, 2014). 53-[55]
29 Tatiana Volkova, “The Chronicles of Russian Activist Art” in Global Activism – Art and Conflict in the 21st
Century ed. Peter Weibel. (ZKM Germany, 2014), 515-531.
23
supposed consensus between church, state and populace. This form of art is
performative not only because it incorporates theatrical elements but because it
presents a new reality that overturns unexamined societal assumptions of what is
normal. Ranciere has described the ability of such artists to challenge the distribution
of the sensible:
“…to make the invisible visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated.”30
This performative ability to change public perceptions of reality is what gives
activist art agency. In Chapter Two I examine how art performativity and
engaging with the uncounted non-human world has shaped my aesthetic journey
to enhance the agency of images.
30 Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus – On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2010), 141.
24
Chapter Two
THE PERFORMATIVITY OF IMAGES
“In contrast to prevailing understandings of art as a representational or a signifying practice… through creative practice, a dynamic material exchange can occur between objects, bodies and images. In the dynamic productivity of material practice, reality can get into images. Imaging, in turn, can produce real material effects in the world…This performative potential constitutes the power of imaging.” 31
Figure 15. Bernadette Smith, Manna from Heaven, 2018, dye sublimated print on polyester fabric, Sydney
At the start of my research project, I created water imagery that partly depended on
being presented in the context of protest for its meaning and effect. In Chapter Two I
venture beyond this context to explore how the agency of my images could be
enhanced to allow them to function effectively in their own right within different
contexts. It is not only dynamic techniques of composition that can increase the
inherent agency of an image but external factors acting outside its boundaries may
also come into play particularly in the case of public art interventions. Existing in
proximity to the image these factors operating within the surrounding environment
can create new relational interactions which shape viewer experience and impart
additional meanings.
31 Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation - The Performative Power of the Image (London: I.B.Tauris & Co
Ltd, 2004), 18.
25
Figure 16. Daniel Buren, Intersections 7, 2012, installation, Scolacium Archaelogical Park, Italy
This performative role of art can be seen in Daniel Buren’s playful intervention,
Intersections 7 at Scolacium Archaelogical Park in Calabria (fig.16) where his
alternating mirrored and striped arches refract the ancient landscape as well as force
viewers to stoop as they walk towards the end of the tunnel of arches which become
gradually lower in response to the incline. Buren later went on to create elaborate
glass architectural installations and public works but it is his earlier Arte Povera
oeuvre, including Suspended Painting (fig.17), that impressed me more in terms of
my ongoing art methodology because of the way it affects the viewer in such a direct
unmediated gesture interacting with the site.
Figure 17. Daniel Buren, Suspended Painting, 1972, canvas on cable, Turin, Italy.
26
My encounter with pure aesthetics began while photographing aquatic environments
and observing them in my printed clothing mentioned in Chapter One. During this
time, I discovered translucent qualities within the movement of water and the way
light travels over surfaces and through layers. This led me to research this
phenomenon more closely using a macro lens to photograph the play of refractive
sunlight within different states of water, such as condensation. At first, I felt unease
that basing my art research on documenting water refractions for reasons not directly
linked to supporting environmental protest could lead to something overly decorative
or superficial rather than a performative art that changes reality. For this reason, I
looked for examples of art that succeed in operating performatively for political
change without sacrificing formal aesthetic considerations.
Figure 18. Hans Haacke Condensation Cube,1963, plexiglas box, Germany
One artist whose early work demonstrated that art could express powerful ideas
about sustainability but still be aesthetically compelling is Hans Haacke. His practice
explored water ecology with systems-based artworks involving interactions between
man-made and living biological systems such as states of water, wind, weather and
atmospheric conditions both indoor and outdoor. Haacke’s Condensation Cube
(fig.18) created in 1968 physically captured the condensation cycle. It consisted of a
sealed transparent plastic cube which contained a small amount of water and
changed form according to how many visitors were in the gallery. As the temperature
outside warmed with the arrival of more people in the room breathing and shedding
27
heat, the pool of water at the bottom of the cube began to evaporate, then would rise
and fall as droplets of water trickling down the inside walls of the cube.32
Haacke creates an encounter which can change viewer perceptions of the outside
world when they leave the gallery. His art practice later progressed to social critique
installations such as State of the Union at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York in 2005
and Germania at the 1993 Venice Biennale which inversely parallels the direction of
my own art journey. My MFA journey had begun with art activism concerning water
sustainability but gradually evolved into pure aesthetics boosting viewer perception
of the message through formalism. After experimenting with water printed costumes
used in protest in Chapter One my next step was to use digital images from my
macro series depicting condensation and rain drops as straight paper photographs.
Figure 19. Bernadette Smith, Manna from Heaven and Liquid Sky (right), photographs at Sunstudio, Sydney
Although I had only seen photographic reproductions of Condensation Cube, I
noticed these water droplets acted as miniature prisms refracting light. Such
phenomena became a growing aesthetic concern for me as can be seen in Liquid
Sky from my series of macro photographs of dew drops (fig.19). This work
demonstrated that displaying the beauty inherent within water refractions is not
32 Haacke went on to produce other works about water and ecological systems including Rhinewater Purification
Plant a decontamination tank using natural filtration systems exhibited inside a gallery in 1972.
28
merely decorative but in fact necessary for the viewer to comprehend concepts of
sustainability. Working towards this aesthetic goal would heighten the agency of the
image so that ultimately the imagery would become more effective visually even
when used in other contexts and forms of presentation whether shown in street
protests or galleries.
Testing the agency of the image outside of protest settings I exhibited two from this
condensation series at the Sunstudios 2016 Emerging Photographers Prize
exhibition in Sydney and Melbourne. Barbara Bolt’s theory of performativity in art
was evident in the way I chose to photograph water droplets backlit against direct
sunlight to enhance the contrast between highlights and shadow as Goya did in The
Third of May 1808. This added to the drama and viscerality of the water seen
foregrounded against the sky and clouds in the distance, giving an emotional
emphasis to the non-human agency of water. The theme for this exhibition was Free
which I responded to by combining materialist concerns regarding the vitality of fresh
water with the political issue of universal water access referencing the pro-
privatisation claim that the belief that water is a human right was extreme.33 My artist
statement placed alongside the photos read:
“When I learned that a transnational corporation has proposed that access to water is not a public right and should be privatised I was inspired to show the opposite. Using macro photography I have tried to record the vital essence of water as being inherently free, having a complex life of its own, encapsulating freedom of form and movement. I hope my photographs promote the concept that water is a priceless gift from the heavens and should remain free for all creatures for all time.”
It became apparent that I was straddling an aesthetico-political divide by trying to
make art with a political message yet relying on words written beside the image
rather than letting the content and context of the image speak for itself. After some
reflection I realised that the natural trajectory of my art practice was imaging water in
and of itself instead of saddling the imagery with extraneous messages. I turned
towards the concept of New Materialism to inform my efforts to photograph water
33 Paul Muir, “The Human Rights and Wrongs of Nestlé and Water For All” in The National, November 28, 2013. https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-human-rights-and-wrongs-of-nestlé-and-water-for-all-1.303517 (accessed 8/3/20)
29
more as an encounter with the other. New Materialism focuses on the primacy and
agency of matter and the non-human world which allowed me to find a more equal
relationship as an artist co-existing and interacting with my subject matter. In this
way I was not trying to impose meaning or practice mastery of picture-making over
what I was photographing but rather trying to experience water at the sensory level
purely for its own sake.
This revelation was intensified less by an intellectual process than a bodily and
emotional sensation while I was treading water in Clovelly marine reserve in eastern
Sydney. When I wore goggles for the first time enabling me to see clearly
underwater I suddenly noticed a large school of tiny fish darting back and forth
between my legs then swirling at break neck speed around my ankles. Next, with
split second timing, they reformed into a dizzying vortex spiraling upwards towards
my chest as I struggled to swim away but as if in a dream I could barely move
against the current. Eventually they moved on just as I recognised that my
momentary fear had been caused not by physical danger but by an unfamiliar loss of
mobility and control over my surroundings. I realized that living away from the coast
for so long had alienated me from nature, making the non-human world feel strange.
Figure 20. Bernadette Smith, Incoming Wave, 2018, digital photograph, Clovelly Marine Reserve, Sydney.
Following this event, my art practice involved more active engagement with the non-
30
human world, perceiving interrelationships between nature and culture. New
Materialist thinking informed my growing conviction that allowing the vitality and
presence of water to speak for itself rather than imposing an ideological control
would ultimately give more agency to water. This meant letting go of planning and
pre-conceived notions of what water should look like to potentially create more
compelling water imagery. New Materialist artist and theorist, Jane Bennett,
suggests humans do not have dominion over everything else but rather are
interdependent arguing:
“A lot happens to the concept of agency … once humans themselves are assessed not as autonomous but as vital materialities.”34 Karen Barad known for her theory of Agential Realism or the entanglement of all
matter has further helped my understanding of New Materialism and the physics of
light. In particular Karen Barad writes about the interconnectedness of the visible and
invisible which relates to my own aesthetic discovery of hidden microscopic worlds
while photographing water droplets with a macro lens. It seemed the closer I got to
my subject the more was revealed. Moreover not only do humans share the same
environs as this changing microcosm but our bodies consist of over 60% water. As
Barad concurs:
“Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming.”35
Although we can observe differences between ourselves and other entities it is not a
static difference as all things exist in a state of change in relation to everything else.
Nature is not self-contained or existing outside of us as I discovered moments after I
stepped into the sea at Clovelly Marine Reserve. This conceptualization flowed
through to my art making shifting my former photographic practice of pre-visualising
subjects in front of my camera towards relinquishing control and acknowledging I am
part of what is being photographed.
My emerging understanding of New Materialism partly explains why I became
dissatisfied with the rectangular frame of view which seemed to create a barrier to
34 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter – A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 21. 35 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 185.
31
perception for the viewer which was antipathetic to the organic nature of water. With
input from my MFA supervisor at the time, Michael Goldberg, I began to experiment
with photographs printed on aluminium circles such as Dew Drops (Fig.21). The
circular shape appeared more dynamic yet sympathetic to the subject matter and the
supporting structure enhanced the material presence of the photograph creating
more of a sculptural object than would a paper photograph.
Figure 21. Bernadette Smith, Dew Drops, 2018 digital photograph on Chromaluxe aluminium, 50.8 cm diameter.
I was able to test this circular form in situ when I installed pavement decals for the
annual Eden Gardens Unearthed festival (fig.22) held over 6 months from
September 2018. By placing photographs of macro views of condensation and rain
drops around Eden Fountain I hoped to encourage public awareness of fresh water
ecology. These images documented water changing form through the evaporation
cycle, then these frozen moments in time were rematerialized next to a fountain with
a body of actual water.
My art statement exhibited nearby reminded viewers that we are connected at the
cellular level to fresh water as our bodies consist of over 60% water. This brought
into relief the vitality of the water cycle at viewers’ feet which could be identified on a
visceral as well as intellectual level. The placement of these decal water images in
the physical path of viewers created an almost haptic encounter which could
32
potentially make them rethink habitual ways of viewing water. It creates a
performative encounter that increases the agency of water by making more visible
what is so often taken for granted and may even stimulate other senses such as
proprioception or the body’s ability to sense where it is in relation to the environment.
Figure 22. Bernadette Smith, Eden Gardens Unearthed, 2018, self adhesive vinyl photographs, Sydney.
During my MFA I have transposed photographs from my condensation series to
clothing, wind flag, polyester fabric (fig.4), aluminium circles (fig.21) and pavement
decals (fig.22), exploring the agency of the image through new modes of
presentation. Each iteration has created a different performative and sculptural
dynamic by changing the scales, materials and contexts to transform and
rematerialize the original image. In Chapter Three I discuss new aesthetic
encounters and consequent developments in my art practice brought on by
unexpected events that ruptured habituated ways of seeing.
33
Chapter Three
LIGHT OBJECTS
Even if we aren’t on the scene, somewhere in Ohio, observing an object indifferently “theorizing” another object, we can know that objects are doing things with other objects and will continue to do so behind our backs.36
Figure 23. Bernadette Smith, Blue Shift (detail), 2017, digital photograph.
My MFA project began by using photomedia to embody new forms of environmental
protest to enhance visual communication about water issues. These photomedia
works were driven by the aesthetics of activism and later New Materialism,
then events outside my control introduced the phenomenon of light refractions in
glass to my art practice. This prompted further research and exploration of matter as
both substance in nature and the substance of images.
Shortly after it was announced that our campus would soon close, I experienced an
overwhelming sense of loss as I entered my art school studio and looked around
absorbedly and emotively as if for the first time.37 I had always taken its heritage
architecture for granted until this imminent loss prompted me to experience it more
36 Andrew Cole, “THOSE OBSCURE OBJECTS OF DESIRE: THE USES AND ABUSES OF OBJECT-
ORIENTED ONTOLOGY AND SPECULATIVE REALISM” Artforum (Summer 2015): 318. 37 Sydney College of the Arts campus occupied the former Kirkbride mental hospital built in 1885 at Balmain,
Sydney. The closure announcement was made in June 2016.
34
deeply. Normally by day, I would look through my open studio window to the
landscape in the distance surveying glimpses of trees and boats on the far shore in
an almost proprietorial view. Cultural theorists have referred to such expansive views
stretching to infinity in Georgian English landscape painting as representing a
patrician order, where the ascendant viewpoint occupies a hierarchized position of
power and privilege asserting ownership or agency over all that can be surveyed in
the subaltern scene below.38 This overarching gaze makes it difficult to perceive the
particular or the minuscule.
On this occasion however, upon returning later that day my window was shut and
feeling stunned, I had stared only at the window pane rather than the view outside.
My art studio had been a creative space and refuge for thinking, but now feeling
bereft, I faced the rupture of it all being taken away at the stroke of an administrative
pen. The closed window metaphorically represented the closure of my studio space,
intersecting with the glass and forcing me to relate in a more intense way with the
material skin of the building itself. What had been an ordered view through the open
window then graduated into an intricate light phenomena within the semi-opaque
window pane.
Perceiving more through the senses than the intellect I began to notice how slanted
sunlight penetrated the gently undulating glass. The fading sunlight was partially
obscured by nearby branches swaying in the wind, making the glass flicker between
light and shadow. Starry trails punctured the darkness in this zone of uncertainty as
light bounced around the translucent glass transforming itself in a process of
disintegration. I was entranced by the aurora-like visual drama happening before my
eyes as the sun dipped towards the horizon. I have since attempted to photograph
this enchanting phenomenon in a series, recording the dying light at the end of the
day as it scatters within the liminal space of my studio window pane. These light
refractions were only discovered because the shock of losing our campus had cast
my normal perceptions into disarray, making me emotionally receptive to my
surroundings.
According to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a rupture is needed to
38 Stephen Daniels “The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Georgian England” in The Iconography of
Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments edited by Denis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43-46.
35
break habitual ways of seeing the world in order to perceive a new awareness of
things. He discusses beingness or the possibility of identification as an engaged
subject with the non-human world. Seeing beyond the familiar to encounter a new
photographic vision therefore entails abandoning ego and normal hierarchies of
attention to become deeply involved with the non-human world. Merleau-Ponty’s
writing elucidates that it is not from an overdetermined position of mastery as an
‘acosmic subject’ that one gains a heightened consciousness of the world but rather
by allowing an openness to things as an engaged subject. In his book
Phenomenology of Perception he suggests:
“If the qualities (of objects) radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and … a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but sympathises with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law.” 39
Figure 24. Bernadette Smith, Last Rays, 2017, pigment print photograph, 55 x 85 cm, Sydney.
These ideas support the critique of anthropocentrism inherent within New
Materialism in relation to my imaging of water discussed in Chapter Two.
Equally, this new development of my art practice exploring glass refractions is
informed by phenomenology or the study of consciousness and experience as
well as Object Oriented Ontology coined by Graham Harman to emphasise the
39 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge Press, 1962), 248.
36
agency of objects.40 My shock discovery of this aurora-like play of light within
this miniature non-human world happening almost daily regardless of whether
humans are there to witness it, metaphorically illustrates the way the planet
will continue on even without humans if the Anthropocene era causes mass
species extinction.
Figure 25. Bernadette Smith, Last Rays pants, Vice Chancellor's office, University of Sydney, August 17, 2016
The uncertain landscape of 2017 compelled a return to the idea of using my work for
politicized action during several student protests against the planned closure of
Sydney College of Arts campus. To embody the spirit of SCA captured in my window
series I tried digitally printing photos such as Last Rays (fig.24) onto clothing and
wearing them at these student protests (fig.25).41 I also had them printed on posters
(fig.26), business cards and even car magnets alongside messages supporting the
continuation of our college. Although they were reasonably effective in attracting
attention to publicise the issue I was inexorably drawn to exploring the power of the
imagery for its own sake rather than hitching my art to the wagon of a political cause.
As my practice moved closer to pure aesthetics my research became directed
towards the science, aesthetics, philosophy and relevant art practice involving
translucent refractions. To photograph the myriad points of light within the antique
40 Graham Harman suggests objects are mutually autonomous rejecting the idea of privileging humans over
other entities. Object Oriented Ontology – A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican Books, 2018). 41 Bernadette Smith artist blog: http://bernadettesmithartportfolio.blogspot.com/2016/08/saving-sca.html
37
textured glass of my studio window, I used a macro lens to record minuscule detail.
When there was no macro lens available, I improvised by using extension tubes on a
standard lens which meant there was only a limited depth of field in focus. This
added unexpected optical phenomena such as aspheric and chromatic aberration in
addition to the light wave refractions and diffractions from late afternoon winter
sunlight entering the glass.
Figure 26. Bernadette Smith, Let SCA Stay, 2016, campaign poster, Sydney College of the Arts noticeboard.
At such close range, lenses can produce defocused images of small bright points
known as bokeh particularly when the camera is placed at an angle to the picture
plane. If sunlight passes from air to glass of varying refractive index (thickness) then
dispersion makes wavelength components of white light bend or refract at different
angles separating into colours. When light encounters obstacles while travelling
through a small opening this also interferes with its wave phase causing it to diffract
into bands of dark and light crests and troughs (fig.23). The passage of light through
rippled window glass also creates interference which can cause dispersal into
different patterns such as sun stars (fig.24).
Other optical phenomena seen in my photographs can be due to either dispersion of
different wavelengths of the light called chromatic aberration or refraction related to
the shape of the lens (as in bokeh or aspheric aberration). Chromatic aberration
(fig.27), is caused by the lens failing to focus all colours in the visible spectrum to the
same convergence point. Lens manufacturer Canon explains:
38
“As color aberration is caused by a different refractive index for each wavelength (color) of the light, it manifests itself mostly as color bleeding…and color displacement…”42
Figure 27. Bernadette Smith, Vortex, 2017, pigment print photograph 55 x 85 cm, Sydney.
For theorists Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, the concept of diffraction serves less
as an equation of physics and more as a metaphor for life itself. Light can move as
both a particle and a wave and as Donna Haraway observes:
“Well when light passes through slits, the light rays that pass through are broken up. And if you have a screen at one end to register what happens, what you get is a record of the passage of the light rays onto the screen. This "record" shows the history of their passage through the slits. So what you get is not a reflection; it's the record of a passage.”43
This passage of light through diffraction grating where obstacles transform the
quality of light has been compared to a process or life path that affects all beings.
This passage mirrors my own obstacles as an artist. I have a specific learning
disability that makes it difficult for me to cross the digital divide from analog
photography. Consequently, I felt a need to translate my digital photomedia works
into concrete art forms that embody materiality and the physical.
42 Canon Science Lab, Canon Global website, accessed August 21, 2018
https://global.canon/en/imaging/dlo/factor/index02.html
43 Donna Jeanne Haraway, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna
Haraway (New York: Routledge, 2000) 103.
39
Figure 28. Noguchi Rika, Hand and Rainbow, 2010, photograph.
Diffraction is also closely related to the theme of the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018
called Superposition: Equilibrium and Engagement.44 This featured Small Miracles
the series of analogue photographs by Noguchi Rika. Her closely observed film-
based photography records the phenomenon of light in ordinary moments as a
series of simple optical experiments. Rika works across media producing photo silk
screen prints as well as traditional paper photographs. Hand and Rainbow (fig.28)
from this series shows the colored light of a glass prism piercing the shadow of a
hand against a scratched background. In Crane Fly and Light, the fragile body of an
insect backlit against a window screen record the way sunlight is captured and
transformed through various filters like glass and insect wings. Her photographs
seem modest at first glance but they demonstrate prolonged, experiential study.
Through such thoughtful attention to the non-human world these images instill
mindfulness and contemplation.
There are analogies to the way my macro photographs of light diffractions engender
an almost meditative state as viewers become absorbed in this non-human
microcosm. In Still my photograph of an insect against textured glass (fig.29) for
example, the window pane has become a transformative screen through which to
view nature. This is related to the way a mandala performs as a visual tool for
Buddhist meditation, inducing a sense of being in the present moment. Merleau
Ponty expressed this another way when he observed:
44 Artistic Director Mami Kataoka in her essay from the 21st Biennale of Sydney catalogue encourages us to:
“…consider how all things in this world interact with complementarity, in a state of equilibrium and engagement.” (2018), 11. https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/archive/21st-biennale-of-sydney/read-21st-biennale-sydney-catalogue/. Accessed March 8, 2020.
40
“Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.”45
Figure 29. Bernadette Smith, Still, 2017, pigment print photograph, 55 x 85 cm.
How I stumbled across light refractions within glass was uniquely personal and yet
my art practice is still part of a continuum extending back to early avant-garde
photographers from the 1930’s such as Lazlo Moholy Nagy and Man Ray. Rather
than only using light in traditional ways to render say a landscape or portrait, instead
the physicality of light and shadow itself was the subject of portrayal. They were
among the first artists to experiment with camera-less photography and the new
medium of cinema. Man Ray has been credited with inventing the photogram (or
rayogram) in which objects of various densities are placed on light sensitive
photographic paper, an exposure made under the film enlarger light and the shadow
then processed.
Berenice Abbott, another forerunner exploring the phenomenon of light began as a
portrait photographer in Paris but after returning to America became involved with
the science behind light perception. In her 1939 manifesto she described
photography as a “conservator of human and spiritual energies and ideas”.46 She
saw her role as translating science to the general public and set out to photograph
45 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge Press, 1962) 46 Julia Van Haaften, “Berenice Abbott:Science,” in Documenting Science, ed. Ron Kurtz (Göttingen: Steidl,
2012), 9.
41
under laboratory conditions the phenomenon of light travelling within water and other
physics principles. She described her earliest wave photographs made using a wave
tank in her book Documenting Science:
“My idea was to do a Rayogram in motion. Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray had done pictures by putting objects on sensitized paper but I wanted to do the same thing in motion, I put a sensitized paper in…the bottom of the developing tray…just raw paper, flashed the light and [after development] there was a beautiful wave.”47
As well as documenting scientific principles without the use of intermediary lenses,
her photographs have an abstract beauty revealing the direct, physical trace of their
creation in stark contrast to the immateriality of digital photomedia. Seeing her
vintage black and white photographs decades later, the materiality of light and water
recorded in flawless resolution still seem potent. Abbott’s recordings of caustics or
concentrations of light rays caused by wave variations or topography influenced my
stairwell installation at Electrofringe17 Festival of Art and Technology.48
Figure 30. Bernadette Smith, Fluidity 2, 2017, video installation, ElectroFringe17 Festival.
Electrofringe17 on November 4, 2017 was an opportunity to test the agency of
images in an art context. Here a wordless version of my animated water stills video
was projected through an arrangement of antique glassware of various refractive
indices through which visitors passed (fig. 30). Different densities within the
47 Julia Van Haaften, “Berenice Abbott:Science,” 9. 48 Bernadette Smith, Electrofringe17 video installation Vimeo link https://vimeo.com/244991299
42
translucent material created concentrations of light or caustics penetrating outwards
beyond the projection frame. These curved white lines spread like tentacles into
darkened corners of the room and helped integrate the exhibition space as a
wholistic sensory experience rather than just using one wall as a cinema screen.
This installation spurred a renewed search for more ways to present images that
intervene in sites performatively to produce a physical encounter with the viewer. A
performative artwork does not merely represent reality but creates its own spatial
context and situation affecting viewers experientially.
Changes in digital printing technology initially driven by the advertising industry allow
new forms and structures for presenting photomedia opening up opportunities to
expand my studio practice across media. Such developments have propelled
photomedia artists away from the medium specificity of traditional photographic
paper and chemical processing towards cross media art forms. In recent times
though there has also been a counter impetus of artists returning to the tactile
qualities of analogue photography and rediscovering outmoded chemical processes.
Slippages can occur between the concerns of contemporary photomedia artists
working with digital media in hybrid ways and those working with analogue
photography such as an overlapping concern for materiality and notions of
objecthood. These concerns mirror a growing emphasis across disciplines such as
the humanities and social sciences in objects, physicality and the non-human. As
curator Rebecca Morse concludes:
“As the tactile qualities of analog photography have been subsumed in the digital arena, artists have found ways of addressing and accentuating the objecthood of the photograph.”49
An early precursor to this trend was the Museum of Modern Arts’ Photography into
Object travelling group show in 1970 where analogue photography was combined
with sculptural techniques. This included embedding photographs in vacuum formed
plastic, photo-sensitised sewn linen shapes and photo-silkscreened images on
perspex, wood and glass cubes. Although the exhibition failed to make much impact
at the time it has lately been subject to reappraisal. A contemporary version of the
show was restaged in Los Angeles in 2011 creating widespread interest. Its success
helped generate related exhibitions such as Phot(o)bjects in Vancouver, Lit from the
49 Rebecca Morse, “The Evolving Photographic Object,” in The Photographic Object 1970, ed. Mary Statzer,
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 113.
43
Top: Sculpture Through Photography at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary
Photography and The Photographic Object at The Photographer’s Gallery, London
held in 2009.
Wolfgang Tillmans from the London show is well known for his Paper Drop and
Lighter series which call attention to the materiality of photographs. He has exposed
light sensitive colour photographic paper without a lens to create curling physical
objects such as Green 1, a crumpled unique photograph with sculptural qualities
exhibited in a perspex box. In my own photography I had tried to enhance the
agency and vitality of objects through formal compositional devices within the image
itself but for the next stage of my art journey I also wanted to engage with the actual
materiality and structural presentation of the photograph as an object.
Figure 31. Bernadette Smith, Blue Shift 1 and 2, 2018, photographs on alupanel, at Verge Gallery, Sydney.
In the last year of my MFA I had the opportunity with several exhibitions to further
explore the context in which my photo objects are placed and their physical
relationships. These exhibitions have provided a platform for experimentation to
explore images as objects without the contextual reference to environmental
activism. In this succession of shows I experimented with modes of assembly and
scaffolding of the photomedia image to draw attention to its material presence and
emphasise a sense of agency for the non-human. Firstly, I transposed Blue Shift
from my glass refraction series (fig.23) to square, oval, rectangle and circular shapes
44
on aluminium, alupanel, fabric, clothing and cushions trying out various
configurations in my studio. A selection of these photo objects were then arranged
into sculptural assemblages as in Verge Gallery window for the Curatorial Lab group
show, In Translation (fig.31) which opened August 18, 2018. In this manifestation,
the negative space around the objects was just as important visually as the
exploration of light and matter captured within the photograph and the materiality
embodied within the actual photo objects.
Figure 32. Bernadette Smith, Diffractions in Glass with Equinox 1 and 2, 2018, photo-media, Verge Gallery.
Inside Verge gallery, I explored provisional arrangements between objects to elicit
aesthetic possibilities involving spatial relationships, shape, proximity and nuances of
meaning. A monitor showing work-in-progress video of my animated window
diffraction photos was placed near the entrance next to Equinox, my dye sublimated
photographic print on a 102 cm diameter aluminium circle exhibited with a 10 cm
acrylic block print of the same photograph (fig.32).50 On the facing wall were pinned
two A1 sized paper photographs of window diffractions (fig.37). In keeping with the
exhibition theme, my presentation showed the immaterial digital photographic
medium translated into a range of physical forms as paper photographs, sculptural
objects and a moving image screen work. Each rematerialization into different media
had its own presence and relationship to objecthood, matter, time and space.
50 Bernadette Smith, Diffractions in Glass, video loop, youtube link https://youtu.be/g-aSCyt9OWU
45
In an earlier iteration for the Harbour Sculpture Prize in 2017, a photo-sculptural
assemblage incorporating a plinth wrapped with a self-adhesive vinyl photograph of
my ocean wave taken at Clovelly (fig.20) was used collaboratively with artist Mark
Elliot-Ranken to create Pilgrims Progress. We placed his model of an ancient boat
on top of my upright plinth to symbolise the way sailors had ventured out to the edge
of the known world overcoming fears that the world was flat. Fittingly shown at
Hunters Hill Sailing Club, the imagery was intended to provoke an optical illusion of a
column of sea water rising up from the ground then abruptly ending at the edge.
Figure 33. Bernadette Smith, Deluge (detail), 2018, mixed media installation, Maitland Regional Art Gallery.
The same ocean wave photograph was also printed on a fabric backdrop and
combined with this plinth and found object hourglass in a later installation for
Concerning Peace a group show at Maitland Regional Art Gallery held August 25 to
November 25, 2018 (fig.33). Entitled Deluge it served as a metaphor for climate
crisis and threats to global peace which invited the viewer to contemplate the need
for water sustainability. The thematic underpinning of the work drew upon World
Bank forecasts that unstable water variability patterns bringing floods, droughts and
rising sea levels can provoke forced migration and ignite civil conflict.
The work had a participatory dimension as viewers could turn the hourglass for the
countdown to the Anthropocene even though there was no sign to indicate whether
this was allowed. Staff had previously asked me whether I wanted this hourglass
46
attached to the plinth with museum gel but I had decided to let fate play its hand.
This decision generated a surprising amount of interest and interactivity among
viewers according to staff. Despite only being a five minute timer, during the
reception I noticed the glass had often been surreptitiously turned over so it hardly
ever timed out. Viewers were given agency to restart the Anthropocene clock if only
as a metaphor but it involved the risk that they would be breaking taboos about
touching official artworks in museums.
Figure 34. Bernadette Smith, Light Objects, 2018, photo-media Installation, Perth Centre of Photography.
In June 2018 I was part of a three person show at Perth Centre of Photography
called Light Objects - Photography in the Expanded Field which aimed to extend the
photographic medium beyond the flatness of the frame into three dimensions. In my
installation (fig.34) I wanted to emphasise the photograph as a material as well as
visual medium. My ocean wave photograph on fabric used as a backdrop in Deluge
was hung all the way to the floor in a corner next to photographs of water and glass
refractions on aluminium circles. Nearby a floor cushion printed with another ocean
wave was placed inside a large open suitcase on the floor. This incongruous
arrangement first suggested itself when I was unpacking the cushion from my
suitcase in the gallery after arriving from the airport.
The idea behind the installation was loosely based around the concept that nature
and the elements cannot be controlled solely for the benefit of one species. The
suitcase conjured the effect of a wave just about to burst out of its trunk evoking a
47
sense of wild seas refusing to be tamed or constrained by humankind. The
installation was put together somewhat intuitively by working through ideas and
testing the placement of visual elements to create a cohesive whole working with the
sketches, materials and elements I had brought with me from Sydney.
Figure 35. Bernadette Smith, Curatorial Lab, art installation, 2018, Sydney College of the Arts gallery.
For the Curatorial Lab exhibition at Sydney College of the Arts gallery in October
2018, I again used the ocean wave floor cushion in a suitcase but this time
theatrically spot-lit and placed in the centre of a darkened room with circular video
projections of moving sea and fresh water on either side (fig.35). On an adjoining
wall a length of dye sublimated fabric showing my macro photograph of
condensation was draped over two poles leaning against a wall invoking a protest
banner acknowledging my activist beginnings. An advantage of this softly draped
fabric “banner” against the wall is that it formed a more curvilinear edge rather than if
viewed as a taut, rectilinear shape with a harsh boundary that I am trying to avoid.
Overall the art installation successfully balanced the photo-media object
assemblages of the floor cushion and banner with the immaterial nature of the
ethereal digital moving image projections hovering above.
The installation opened up different interpretations for the audience. Viewers felt the
wave cushion suitcase concerned climate refugees and that the circle projections of
48
water gave them the impression of being inside a vessel looking through portholes to
the sea. Others were reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise by the cushion
suitcase which was not my original reference or intention but perhaps unsurprising
given his rhizomatic influence in the artworld and the number of contemporary artists
using suitcases as their creative medium.51 The response indicates my use of a
ready-made suitcase in the installation fits within this artworld trope giving the work
added resonance and contemporary art relevance.
What I discovered through feedback and observation from these Curatorial Lab
shows in particular was that using the circle format meant the image functioned as
more than just a picture to be looked at by the viewer standing apart from it. Rather
the image became something you delve into like a macro world that is entered with a
much greater perceptual sense of depth and immersion than is possible within a
square frame. A square or rectangular frame seems to create a harsher boundary
that separates the surrounding environment and viewer from the work yet the circle
allows one to almost become part of it or situate oneself within it. Of course this is
speculative but something I wanted to further explore in my examination show for
example in Meridian (fig.36).
Figure 36. Bernadette Smith, Meridian, 2019, digital print on Chromaluxe aluminium, 102 cm diameter.
51 Mendelsohn, Meredith. “9 Artists Who Turned Suitcases into Works of Art” in artsy.net article (Nov 18, 2016).
49
Conclusion
“Within any given framework, artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible, and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning.” 52
Figure 37. Bernadette Smith, Meridian, 2018, (detail) pigment print photograph, 55 x 85 cm.
Prior to my MFA I witnessed first hand how water conservation activists often failed
to communicate their message well because their banners and placards were hardly
noticeable. This motivated me to develop better visual communication strategies for
water sustainability using potent images of water acting performatively in the public
sphere rather than as static representations. The MFA journey has led me from
making art for environmental protest through to pure aesthetic encounters with water
and glass refractions then finally back again to presenting my art in the context of
ecological issues. Rather than always being situated within a charged, protest setting
where the meaning of environmental sustainability is clearly contextualized, my art
52 Jacques Ranciere Dissensus – On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum International Publishing group 2010),
141
50
installations were also tested in gallery settings allowing the agency and matter of
images to also assert itself within a purely aesthetic dimension.
To enhance the agency of the image there were experiments in form and
presentation transposing photographs into sculptural assemblages and video
projections, with each new iteration of the image enriching its power and
performativity. Digital photographs of water have been printed on fabric, clothing,
wind flags, shaped objects and animated to video to test art performativity or ways of
augmenting reality through art. Delving into pure aesthetics, performativity and New
Materialism I discovered how images can work intrinsically and extrinsically to
communicate meaning, gaining insights from the methodologies of other artists such
as Daniel Buren.
While exploring urban art interventions in my MFA I found new ways of creating
performative actions that were provocative, impossible to overlook and in the face of
passing traffic using water costumes worn at environmental protests. I learned that
embodying water in protests facilitates the agency of water allowing it to intervene in
communal spaces and the public conscious as a visible actor. Costumes and visual
communication aids were also developed into online marketing of water inspired
clothing and utilitarian objects to tap into web-based mass markets which has further
potential to be pursued in the future.53
For this MFA project I tried to wordlessly communicate to viewers a visceral
appreciation of the need for climate sustainability and non-human agency. This
entailed experiments in spatial relationships, visual and meaning-making processes,
moving my art practice away from conventional framed rectangular photographs
representing the status quo. By rematerialising the immaterial digital photographic
image into physical objects embodying matter and a sense of objecthood, the image
acquires real presence as a performative encounter, changing viewers experience of
reality and accentuating the non-human world. I learned that the power of images to
53 Bernadette Smith, online water clothing, hosted by Red Bubble and Vida websites:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/smithrankenart/shop
https://shopvida.com/collections/bernadette-smith
51
engage viewers can be intensified through formalist aesthetics, the scientific study of
neuroaesthetics, and varying the context, content and material substance of images.
For example during a class critique of my installation at Sydney College of the Arts
gallery (for Curatorial Lab 2018) nearly everyone interpreted the wave cushion
suitcase as signifying the pressing issue of climate refugees. This potent metaphor
may indicate fulfillment of my MFA goal of wordlessly communicating concepts
related to water sustainability through visual means alone. The class also felt that the
circle projections of water gave viewers the impression of being inside a vessel
looking out of portholes to the sea which again was a gratifyingly visceral allusion
which came out of the work.
The presentation methods for this show flowed from my original strategy of moving
photography away from frames on gallery walls testing the performativity of the
image through rematerialisation into objects. My imagery was again presented as
three-dimensional assemblages of moving image projections and photographic
objects placed in an aesthetic rather than an environmental activist context.
Interestingly, despite the formalist style and context or perhaps even because of it,
viewers were still able to connect this installation with an activist message of rising
sea levels. This suggested that the use of formalist aesthetics emphasising purely
visual elements could more effectively communicate a subliminal activist message
than a didactic approach – at least to a sophisticated art audience.
During my transformative art journey I have been propelled towards pure aesthetics
by ever-deeper investigations of the interaction of light with translucent matter. The
ethereal otherness of translucent light phenomena has potentialities yet to be fully
explored and I see this line of aesthetic inquiry in my art practice continuing after my
MFA both in video and photographic forms. Exploring the materiality of such
interactions through digital photography and then re-materialising the resulting
images into actual objects acting in space has enhanced the agency of matter both
conceptually and as an actual presence in my art. This has helped reconcile my
exploration of matter as both substance in nature and the substance of images. It
has been a generative process as much about the journey as the destination.
52
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http://au.blurb.com/books/6151132-city-and-country-united-against-coal-and-csg
55
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At the opening of In translations exhibition from USYD Verge Gallery website
https://verge-gallery.net/2018/08/18/in-translation/ - jp-carousel-240019
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have-to-be-naked-to-get-into-the-met-museum-p78793