Mrs Gallagher, Acts of disobedience: performance and installation in rural New Zealand
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This art project examines aspects of New Zealand rural culture through the experience of a fictional performer, Mrs Gallagher. She questions the instrumental approach of agribusiness production, both as it enframes her domestic/farm helper role and the farming of animals. She uses the practices of everyday life, domestic crafts and appropriated materials of agribusiness to draw attention to the traditional ideological boundaries between the human/animal and assigned gender roles.Employing the tactics of 'making do', Mrs Gallagher uses inventive play to produce new forms that cross the domestic/agribusiness boundary. It is her aim that her acts of intervention and these hybrid forms will promote a more mindful use of technology and greater recognition of the continuity and difference that exists between humans and nature.All objects will be presented in site-orientated installation. Evidence of Mrs Gallagher's intervening acts is witnessed and documented using time-based media by a collaborative performer, the cultural theorist K. Joules Faraday.This thesis is constituted as 80% practice based work and 20% written exegesis.