Excerpts: 2018 QUT Visual Arts Postgraduate showcase exhibition

Excerpts 2018 is the Visual Arts Postgraduate showcase exhibition. It features a selection of creative works, produced by candidates concluding their Masters and PhD research - Karike Ashworth, Naomi Blacklock, Christopher Handran, Chris Howlett, Annie Macindoe, Meaghan Shelton and Elizabeth Willing. Creative practice functions as research through a purposive investigation of theoretical and creative contexts and crucially, a rigorous questioning of practice itself. These artists also engage with the professional contexts of contemporary art and have exhibited nationally and internationally during their study. This year Excerpts is staged in the Visual Arts studios and the ethos of the open studio program at QUT is apparent in the transmedia approach of these artists, who work across and between media boundaries including - performance/ installation/ moving image/ photography and sculpture. The creative practice research undertaken by these candidates examines diverse contemporary discourses including popular culture and video gaming, food and hospitality, sport and science; as well as personal and cultural experiences in relation to grief, trauma, gender and sexuality.

Karike Ashworth’s doctoral research utilises contemporary art to understand, express and critique expectations of neoliberal feminine bravery. Ashworth’s performance and video works feature the ‘Brave Girl’ persona who embodies strength, beauty, health and sociability, yet is also disobedient and absurd, thus challenging tropes of socially acceptable femininity.

Naomi Blacklock’s performance works address the significance of disruptive feminist voices by conjuring rituals with aural screaming and objects such as candles, bells, salt, soil and mirrors. Blacklock’s doctoral research aims to reimagine intersectional identities in contemporary art through the figure of the ‘witch’ as Other and its reclamation by cultural minorities and LGBTQIA communities.

Christopher Handran’s interdisciplinary practice explores the mediation of experience by technologies, creating low budget spectacles that foreground material presence and the perceptual dimensions of spectatorship. Handran’s doctoral research considers the performative agency of apparatuses and technologies that both mediate and generate experience, drawing on historical and contemporary intersections of art and science. Chris Howlett’s works combine 3D game play with interactive game mods, video projections and sound in order to consider how simulated environments construct and reconfigure our ideas about the nature of identity. Howlett’s doctoral research investigates the political possibilities of digital creative forms and how these can act as sites for dissensus.

Annie Macindoe’s creative practice responds to the limitations of traditional forms of language in the representation of loss and grief and her Masters research reframes personal and public responses to these experiences. Macindoe’s multi-channel video installation works present fragmented narratives in order to evoke the elusive nature of trauma’s affectual phantoms.

Meaghan Shelton’s Masters research aims to challenge the historical marginalisation of art made by women and to reveal the nexus of craft and art. By exploring crochet’s formal qualities and narrative potential, Shelton posits that previously undervalued crafts provide a means of addressing the ineffable aspects of feminine experience.

Elizabeth Willling’s performative and participatory works explore food as art material by drawing on personal and cultural narratives and investigating contemporary food politics. Adopting the term ‘hosting’, Willing examines hospitality as a key method in her Masters research, which manifests in the form of conceptual meals, cocktail events, sculpture, design and installation.

We congratulate these artists and researchers on the significant outcomes of their postgraduate studies.

DR RACHAEL HAYNES & DR DANIEL MCKEWEN Excerpts 2018 Curators