Research Catalogue

My art practice and teaching philosophy is practice-based. I draw on personal experience, art historical and cultural tableaus to engage in critical discourse. Contemporary drawing and painting practice are the cognitive research methodologies that I employ to examine and extend my visual observations of contemporary culture. Migration, identity and belonging are felt experiences that I explore through my artistic research initiatives. My aim is to explore tacit experiences that cultivate visual narratives, which speak of the visual intent and creative output as opposed to documenting subject matter. My art practice employs ‘materiality’, mark making and the language embodied in the traditions of drawing and painting to produce works of art that position personal experience as legitimate artistic tenor. 

I completed my Doctor of Philosophy Fine Art degree, practice and theory in 2009 at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. My practice-based research, titled: Migration, Memory, Landscape: Re-contextualising personal experience through Contemporary Abstract Painting, examined a personal experience of migration within a contemporary global context. The focus of the studio research was to examine the materiality of drawing and painting to find a new methodology that expressed the phenomena of felt experience. As part of the process of discovery felt experience was re-contextualised through an interdisciplinary and philosophical lens, which utilised drawing, painting, documentary photography, poetry and a video installation as a methodological tool. This cross-disciplinary approach offered an alternate reading of the discordant relationships between the Scottish and Australian landscape as a locus of identity formation. Prior to my Doctor of Philosophy, Fine Art degree I completed my undergraduate studies in Fine Art, majoring in Painting and Sculpture and was awarded the faculty and University medal for my BA Fine Art Honours [l] degree submission.