Masters Theses
Permanent link for this collection
The Masters Theses collection contains digital copies of AUT University masters theses deposited with the Library since 2002 and made available open access. From 2007 onwards, all theses for masters degrees awarded are required to be deposited in Tuwhera Open Theses & Dissertations unless subject to an embargo.
For theses submitted prior to 2007, open access was not mandatory, so only those theses for which the author has given consent are available in Tuwhera Open Theses & Dissertations. Where consent for open access has not been provided, the thesis is usually recorded in the AUT Library catalogue where the full text, if available, may be accessed with an AUT password. Other people should request an Interlibrary Loan through their library.
Browse
Browsing Masters Theses by Supervisor "Amundsen, Fiona"
Now showing 1 - 20 of 31
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Item10 Bowen St.(Auckland University of Technology, 2008) Leitch, FranThis project is a site specific based exploration into the boundaries between the domestic home and the navigation of the anxious corporeal body which dwells in the space. These connections open up ways of mapping anxiety brought on through intrusive thoughts surrounding contamination (in relation to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). The corporal navigation of the domestic is fuelled by the thoughts and their control over the notions of fear and anxiety surrounding the transferring of contaminated material from the external temporal world (dust and organic matter) into the internal sterile environment through movement or fissures in the fabric of the dwelling. The project explores the notions of the domestic space being formed into a container for the intrusive thoughts through physical acts of decontaminating, containment, sealing and expelling the elements of dirt; the body and the home become a hybrid entity alluding to the extreme control which forms and takes over the domestic space.
- ItemA fatal cycle(Auckland University of Technology, 2008-02-06) Steer, LaurieThis art project focuses in a voyeuristic way on the fatality and futility of war. With its accompanying emotional responses; the aim is to reflect on these issues through a cyclical process of construction and destruction. The motivation for this research is to generate a personal and intimate understanding of the experience of war by exploring notions of helplessness and loss through art making processes. The research presumes war exists as a continuous fatal and futile cycle. Within this investigation fatality is defined as accepting the conditions of death, dying and disaster while also alluding to the philosophical concept of fate: futility is defined as pointless, hopeless or useless. Through methods of construction and destruction this project seeks to initiate alternate ways of emotionally processing, responding to, and understanding the experiences of war from a distance. This thesis is constituted as practice based artwork 80% accompanied by an exegesis 20%.
- ItemAnamnestic environments: the lost, found and retained(Auckland University of Technology, 2011) Stevens, AprilThis visual art project explores the idea of and possibilities of the evocation of childhood memories, experiences and narratives through drawing installation practice. Underpinned by cognitive neuroscientific, phenomenological and anthropological fields of enquiry, these ideas are investigated through installation environments where causal links are explored between drawings evocative of past domestic settings, activities and experiences in viewers’ memories and current experiences of the domestic in exhibition spaces.
- ItemCreative Projects Towards Nuclear Disarmament: Revisiting Oceanian Nuclear Weapons Testing Through Indigenous Hawaiian Epistemology(Auckland University of Technology, 2021) Kodama, KaoruNuclear weapons testing is one of the most defining aspects of the postwar history of Oceania. Conducted by US and French military in the Marshall Islands and French-occupied Polynesia, respectively, the repercussion of the tests shape today’s lived experiences, while contemporary militarisation continues to cause further environmental and social damage. This research focuses on a range of textual and visual projects from the wider Pacific: a socially oriented interview project, a memorial, a video art installation and a video poem. I explore how the responses of these works to Oceanian nuclear histories can function as a contribution towards ongoing efforts to disarm and demilitarise the region. Indigenous Hawaiian epistemology, as discussed by Hawaiian researcher Manulani Aluli-Meyer, guides the exploration of the selected creative works. For Aluli-Meyer, Hawaiian epistemology involves three distinctive ideas: conceiving of knowledge as an epistemological triangulation, the foundational pillars of Hawaiian knowledge and the intelligence of aloha. She positions the triangulation of knowledge as incorporating embodied, mental and spiritual ways of knowing, which also constitute the basis for holistic knowledge. For Aluli-Meyer knowledge that engages all three faculties of the body, mind and spirit is deemed holistic. Within my research, I am interested in how the triangulation of knowledge can function to challenge objective empiricism. This challenge, in turn, emphasises equally engaging all three facets of the body, mind and spirit when encountering the creative works selected for this thesis. The foundational pillars of Hawaiian knowledge value relational ways of knowing. My research is concerned with how the relationships that are formed through the selected creative works enable and contextualise knowledge, which establishes and cultivates viewers’ connections to locations and people involved in Oceanian nuclear testing. Such relational and contextual specificities function to undermine the dominant narratives of nuclear states that falsely universalise and appropriate lived experiences of the testing. Connection to land, particularly place, is a recurring theme in this research. Land holds and produces knowledge; irradiation and displacement from land thus signifies more than a disconnect from a physical homeland. The selected projects reclaim connections to land, which helps to reverse the various forms of erasure that nuclear weapons testing has inflicted on Oceanian communities. Both the triangulation of knowledge and the foundational pillars of Hawaiian knowledge are grounded in the intelligence of aloha. Aluli-Meyer positions aloha as the principle of compassion, empathy and care. Knowledge that is formed through aloha is an enduring kind of knowledge, which enables the continuation of past, current and future life. This research simultaneously explores how this Hawaiian epistemological framework leads to ways of knowing that are conducive to the ongoing work of nuclear disarmament. Ultimately, this thesis takes the position that the textual and visual projects examined serve as sources of knowledge that contribute towards the demilitarisation of Oceania by practising the principle of aloha.
- ItemDid They Have to Be Quiet? Radically Repositioning Trauma and Mothering Through a Wit(h)nessing Lens(Auckland University of Technology, 2023) de Jong, MarijkeThis practice-led master’s project explores intergenerational Holocaust trauma in relation to mothering. This investigation is situated within my personal matrilineal family story of mothering and being mothered with a history of Holocaust trauma. This project comes to fruition through photographic, filmic and sonic methods. The methodologies of this research prioritise an ethos of care by focusing on reparative relations which are underpinned by current somatic trauma scholarship. The ethical nature of my research focuses not only on the original trauma rupture of the Holocaust but the traces of trauma that reside in the maternal bodies of my lineage. The artworks of this project present a chorus of voices that traverse time, generations, cultures, and places anchored through a reassertion of the maternal gaze in the form of witnessing through a camera’s lens. This research explores how a camera, as a third party, can play the role of a witness and listener that can bring new awareness and knowledge of the impact of Holocaust trauma on mothering. The project aims to interrupt generational patterns of trauma between the mother-child dyad. I privilege trauma recovery and mothers’ welfare as a universal social need that can impact all aspects of wellbeing in societies.
- ItemThe Ecological Self — A Lens-based Inquiry(Auckland University of Technology, 2019) Monks, NicholasThis lens-based research project explores a deep personal connection with a familiar coastal site. I am interested in exploring the ways in which different lens-based media can facilitate a reciprocal exchange between the self and the land, a relationship. The overarching intention is to explore what might constitute an ecological-self emerging out of embodied lived experience. As such, this research project is underpinned by an ecological phenomenology that promotes embodied and affective sensitivity for the rhythms of the more-than-human world. The aim is to recognise the environment as a participatory agent in my practice, liberated from the colonising processes of rigid meaning that I might inadvertently be imposing upon the land.
- ItemFaito'o Fakatonga: The Visual Practice of Traditional Medicine Making and Healing Practices From Tonga to Aotearoa(Auckland University of Technology, 2016) Finau, Malia LesieliThis project is a moving image art project using the concept of Veitalatala (poetic documentary) (as defined by Talita Toluta’u (2014) that will explore faito’o (traditional medicine) and kau faito’o (native doctors), the practice of medicine making and healing practices from the Pacific to Aotearoa . This project will focus on telling stories of the Tongan matrilineal history of faito’o, the passing on of knowledge and how this is maintained today. I am a first generation New Zealand born Tongan living in Aotearoa. I will first explore the medicinal plants and their cultivation, how they are used and made into medicines in the country of origin, Tonga, then explore the new and different plants that are used by the kau faito’o in Aotearoa. This project focuses on traditional medicine making and healing practice from the Pacific to Aotearoa by exploring the hands of expert medicine makers and how processes of making are repeated, with bodily tacit knowledge. This research has developed into an interest in how practices are culturally maintained across generations in the Pacific. The time it takes to make medicine from plants and the patience of the maker are explored poetically through duration and extended footage. Narratives of making and of plant knowledge in particular are the focus of this project.
- ItemFlexible spaces for happy people (almost, almost)(Auckland University of Technology, 2013) Drayton, CharlotteThis project examines ways in which architectural tropes might operate within an installation practice. Looking specifically at suburban architecture and the idea of renovation and DIY within a suburban context, this project explores the particular associations, ideals and value systems that become embedded in architecture through the subjective question of taste. Furthermore, this project examines the role of both language and material properties within the practice as a means of both evoking subjective association in a viewer and probing further notions around ‘taste’ and ‘lifestyle'.
- ItemFrom the Same World: Re-making Self, With a Camera(Auckland University of Technology, 2020) Green, GillianThis project investigates personal lived experience and the construction of identity through exploring photo-filmic methods both analogue and digital. Being with particular photo-filmic processes and the natural phenomena that appear in front of the camera can ignite affective experiences through embodied knowing. Using a camera can both prompt and enable a disconnection from the noise of the world by providing a focus on the experience of the present. I am interested in the connection between the object, the camera, the film, the artist and the viewer, and the notions of temporality and chance that exist within these relationships. My approach to my practice is viewed through a lens that considers Laura U. Marks’ haptic visuality, Geoffrey Batchen’s tactility and the image and Pema Chödrön’s teachings on meditation. My project questions how photo-filmic processes, with their reliance on real-world material objects, can be used to explore the non-materiality of meditative engagement, memory, embodied experience and personal subjectivity. My exploration of these processes and practices have also helped me to articulate the very bodily experiences and their benefit that manifest through transformation and change within my art practice and my life. This exploration feels both important and deeply engaging because it is providing for me a means to be in the world and contribute to that world.
- ItemThe Handbook Project(Auckland University of Technology, 2021) de Roos, LindseyThe Handbook Project is an exploration of an “unhelpful guide” for navigating arts academia and art spaces as a person of colour through a tactile and social “art practice”. This project is an intuitive and reflective journey of deinstitutionalising my mind and my making (even though I still operate within the institution), through the lens of race. My research explores how retrospective (which developed into reparative) forms of making can work towards a decolonised sense of imagination. To aid this exploration, I utilise materials that I am very familiar with when it comes to academia, such as annotations, workshops, essay writing, paper and photographs. These sit alongside conventional methods of artmaking such as photography, sculpture, and print. I introduce notions of slowness and repetition to these materials in order to disrupt my habitual behaviours with them (in the context of academia). The project is situated in the following three main concepts of freedom: the freedom-of-knowledge, the freedom-of-space, and the freedom-of-language. These “freedoms” simultaneously function as pathways and pillars to navigating the concepts of race, and the potential explorations of racial equity in context to this project. To understand how these freedoms might manifest, I move between my experiences as a student, as a mentor, and as staff (of the University) to observe and critically engage with how my BIpeersOC and I can exist here safely.
- ItemIMG: seeing as feeling(Auckland University of Technology, 2013) Prisk, JoeIMG: seeing as feeling, explores painting for its capacity to act directly on our nervous system. With a focus on eluding attachments of text, narrative and generalizing concept, this project aims to facilitate an encounter in which the paintings are primarily experienced as images. In making these images, the roles of artist and spectator are interchanged in order to clear the accretion of signs that flood into the reading. Cleared of signification, the work opens up the potential for the spectator to encounter the images unmediated through their previous experience.
- ItemImmersion and emergence(Auckland University of Technology, 2013) Carter, CathyThis project explores the potential of the art encounter and how it can connect the viewer to interior feelings and imaginative associations to form a visceral, psychologically compelling experience. It experiments with a multi-sensory approach using photography, moving image and installation to investigate seeing as experience rather than solely observation. The investigation draws on work made from the artist’s immersive encounters with bodies of water. This research is theoretically framed via the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari in particular their notions of ‘becoming’, ‘smooth space’ and ‘affects’. Its central question asks if and how an imaginative transformation occurs as a result of an art encounter so as to lose the self – even for a moment – to open up new possibilities around a potential heightened awareness of the fluidity of life.
- ItemJunctures for knowing what you know: installation, site, process, material and object(Auckland University of Technology, 2013) Stockman, HarrietJunctures for knowing what you know: Installation, site, process, material and object is a reflexive studio based project that embraces human experiences of familiarity, anxiety, and awkwardness in an attempt to seduce the viewer/ participant to question assumed knowledge. Each installation, within the larger research project, looks to develop from a permission to ‘play’ as method of approach. Within such play, this project’s intention is to respond to previous works within the project and the relationship between the objects placed into a space, the history and use of that space and the architecture of site. Consideration will be given to my hand and its touch and its role as the unconscious assimilator through which the osmotic process of collecting and receiving information from a selected site and materials takes place. Accordingly, this research proposes that the hand contains the potential to translate and map the body’s movement back into a selected site and material establishing a reflexive rhythm of work. Materials are selected because they have a history that merges with both architecture and sculptural casting practice. This research aims to tease out moments prior to a collapse within each installation as a tantalizing encounter so that potentially the viewer/participants ‘knowing’ meshes with the experience of the encounter thereby triggering a sense of re-knowing.
- ItemLiving Alongside Mauao: A Photographic Honouring of the Whenua(Auckland University of Technology, 2023) Douglas, HeidiThis research project is an ongoing photographic representation of my deepening relationship with whenua2 as a first-generation immigrant. Identifying as tauiwi, or non-Indigenous to Aotearoa New Zealand, I acknowledge the decolonising process that must occur in my mindset to adapt to my adopted homeland. Using the lens as a witnessing device, I examine relationships between myself and the maunga, Mauao, near where I live in Te Moana-a-Toi (the Bay of Plenty). This friendship, of sorts, between myself and Mauao has lent a familiarity and given me immense comfort. Mauao was a stable, omnipresent hoa as I settled and raised a family in Aotearoa New Zealand. I search for and photographically capture the events I recognise as changes on the maunga. These changes either result from colonial interference and long-term damage or are brought about through acts of reparation. Through photographic reportage and written letters, I document the changing relationship I have with the country I have adopted as an immigrant. This project aims to honour Mauao for its friendship over the years by witnessing the process of repairing specific sites on the maunga. The letters and the photographic images represent significant beginnings towards taking care of and valuing the whenua of Aotearoa New Zealand. I privilege the value of healing the past while looking to care for the future and honour the relationship which has grown between me and the maunga; me and my adopted homeland.
- ItemLolotonga ‘Etau Tatali – While We Wait(Auckland University of Technology, 2022) Ngata, Delia AloisiaThis research project entails an embodied practice of unfolding my family koloa through print design, contemporary ngatu and garment making. As a daughter of Tongan women, I acknowledge my responsibility to koloa by utilising motifs and repetition in my designs. My research is centred on the methodology of fakafetongi which brings forward connections to my tohihokohoko . This project seeks to develop, protect, and preserve traditional Tongan textile-making processes by amalgamating traditional and new methods of making. I explore the preparation of what I will contribute to our family koloa, which is ultimately for my nieces to unravel when they are ready.
- ItemNonhuman Persons: a Photographic Love for Aotearoa’s Natural Environment(Auckland University of Technology, 2018) Athena, ChervelleNonhuman Persons: A Photographic Love for Aotearoa’s Natural Environment focuses on how photography and an intimate perception of spirituality can establish connections with the indigenous flora of Aotearoa. Through a photographic image’s ability to produce a sense of heightened self-awareness, this project explores how photography can be utilised to invoke a love and connection with the natural environment. This research takes the position that plants have a life force and questions how emotional and spiritual connections can be formed through photographs. This project asks how photographs can be used to establish a deeper reflective connection between humans and plants, thereby promoting a more caring and responsible relationship towards Aotearoa’s endangered whenua, especially when considering the looming extinction of kauri.
- ItemPerforming the loop(Auckland University of Technology, 2010) Myers, Ruth SusanSituated between sculptural and body art practices this project explores the phenomenological lived-body through the artist’s body in reflexive activity as both subject and object. A specific focus explores the lived body as not able to be got to; positioned within a loop of continual deferral and becoming in the chiasmic fold of flesh. To this end studio methods include the use of an ‘embodied’ lens, positioned physically and spatially within the momentum of my bodily activity. As such, private actions and sculptural endeavours are located as lacking resolve and deeply subjective. This project prioritises process rather than product and employs the lens to enable performative documents, performing the work as moments of encounter within a bodily incoherence. This thesis project is constituted as 80% practice-based work accompanied by a 20% exegesis.
- ItemPhotography and instability: rhythms of reflections and repetitions in space(Auckland University of Technology, 2010) Skipper, GemmaThis visual arts project constructs multiple series of individual, but intimately related, analogue photographs that describe public ‘natural’ environments, located amongst residential and light industrial areas. As such, this research is concerned with how a site can be depicted in an individual image and across a series. Specifically through the differing and deferring ways that that photographic medium is languaged and experienced as nature, culture, time, space, representing and presenting. Each of these concepts occurs endlessly and interchangeably and thereby activates a viewing encounter by the mediums instability. This research accordingly investigates a range of spatial relationships – the actual site, the spatial depth created across and within a series, as well as the spacing and distancing that occurs between and through images – amid multiple photographic series. These establish continually shifting experiences, with both the medium and represented sites. By means of these constructed spaces, formal rhythmic relationships of reflections, repetitions and reoccurrences provoke encounters with individual images, into active engagements, within and across spatial depths of series’. These interventions serve to guide, pause and block viewing experiences, thereby continuously reflecting photography itself in every formally negotiated encounter.
- ItemA Practice of Practise(Auckland University of Technology, 2016) Worrall-Bader, EloiseThis project, A Practice of Practise is just that a practice; in relation to my overarching ‘art practice’ of practise; a regular and repetitive attempt at making with clay. The research explores how practise-orientated making can facilitate a system of un hindered knowledge sharing. This is done through event based demonstrations and collaborative exchanges. This research employs two devised models of thinking; ‘The Horizontal Scale of Learning’ this scale attempts to position learners and teachers on a non-hierarchical plane of learning and the ‘Endless Circle of Processing’ that separates information and knowledge. While this project works in clay, this research can be applied to all forms of practise oriented making.
- ItemPulse, pulse, somersault(Auckland University of Technology, 2009) Gorodi, Suzie MeiThis project explores notions of seeing and knowing, underpinned by performative and phenomenological fields of enquiry that relate this exploration to the sensate experience of the viewer. A specific interest considers ideas of embodied vision with an aim at generating events that vacillate in the bodies of the audience. A primary focus is on the arena of encounter as a multi-sensory experiential event, and within this context this project proposes a temporal and spatial framework for exploration. Studio methods develop a cinematic-body of video work negotiating performative practice involving video projection and temporality. Pivotal goals are to explore the significance of the ‘chiasm’ between seeing and knowing, raising questions about how humans see, and how humans make how they see matter. Therefore, this thesis project progresses along experimental approaches to video installation, particularly in relation to the phenomena of encounter, the viewer, and film experience. The central motivation of this video practice is aimed at corporeal affect in the body/s of the audience. This thesis project is constituted as 80% practice-based work accompanied by a 20% exegesis.