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An Experiment in Assembling: A Generative Painting Practice

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Exegesis(5.77 MB)

Date

2025

Authors

Whitaker, Joshua Hamish

Supervisor

Randerson, Janine
Lever, Ziggy

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Master of Visual Arts

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

In this project, I explore how notions of systems thinking, assemblage and abstraction can be both a methodology and method(s) within a painting practice. Systems thinking describes particular dynamics and functions between various creative outputs, such as paintings, drawings or structures, in relation to each other, to space, and to me. It gives conceptual structure as to why artist’s media are inherent systems as they mediate the input of creative intent to create different results. In the studio environment, systems thinking modifies the understanding of the elements present in the studio, and how they interact with each other and myself. For example, a projector grants the ability to reproduce images and video at various scales, which can become an outcome or processual tool, or the absorbency rates of differently primed surfaces changing paint application. Assemblage as a methodology posits that all matter in the described assemblage is interrelated and interconnected within dynamic relationships of varying degrees of agency and affect. A work created in colour pencil can change the way I work with a different medium by offering a new perspective on how my creative output can be mediated; this notion is extended to all elements of the studio environment as an assemblage. This methodology works in tandem with a positioning of abstraction as a process intrinsic to experience and communication, in which experience, as mediated by environment and through the self, becomes memory information, which in turn become creative actions. All these concepts work together to encourage emergence in the paintings, the creation of something new generated through the abstraction that occurs during the dialogue between me and between the works, a vital impetus of the paintings. Systems within the assemblage, abstraction and emergence are all positioned within an ecological framework which connects to grounded metaphors of gardening and propagation.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19895

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Masters Theses