Complex forms and fragmentary structures

Complex Forms and Fragmentary Structures explores the function and sites of operation of a sculptural and spatial project. The focus of this research is to develop a unified and differential framework that engages across scale, art historical traditions and artistic genres. Both the research and the practice are led by a methodology informed by contemporary and art historical research, addressing two key operational devices in Scale and Field. With specific attention to the work of women artists, the research examines the related histories of modernism across visual art, craft, design and architecture. It also explores historic and contemporary attempts to reorder and reprioritize form, genre and discipline within spatial and social practices. The exegesis explores this research within the operational categories of Material, Objects and Space. It utilizes the writing of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, and her philosophical notions of excess, territory and framing as explication for the genesis, production and operations of an artwork. It also incorporates Russian Constructivist theorist Boris Arvatov’s theory of socialist objects as co-workers to human practice as explication for the relationships between production, objects, society and context. Finally it utilizes French theorist Henri Lefebvre’s notion of programmatic space to create a field of operations for a sculptural and spatial practice. In utilizing specific approaches to scale and field the research draws from the intentions of the historical unified work of art by creating fragments or echoes of this concept. The aim of this research is not to replicate the unified work of art, but to utilize and adapt its most productive aspects: a non-hierarchical approach to material, form, genre and discipline; a synthesis (without dissolution) of distinct components with a field; an, at times, functional approach to scale and the condition of objects; and, the ability of these to project into, expand and program space. I argue this productive potential can be used to create the unitary yet modular and differential field of the artwork. It also enables artworks to hold more than one function or approach. It encourages the co-relation of, and productive tension between, the constituent components of the artwork. Of particular concern to this research are notions of adornment and décor, and their integration with concepts of, and approaches to sculpture, craft, design and display together with form, function, surface, space and interior. In presenting diverse approaches to scale and field the research creates an adaptive, modular framework that defines its own complex territory of operations whereby the image, along with the sculptural, architectural, ornamental and functional co-exist. This differential field operates where individual elements in the form of materials, through images, objects and relations between constituent components, remain distinct as identifiable markers to past historic moments, current conditions and possible future events.