Abstract

This PhD by practice comprises a body of work accompanied by written critical commentary. A six part collage composition produced over a period of three years is the core of this project, dimensions 4900 x 1524 mm. The research project interrogates creative studio practice with the specific intention of articulating the artistic thinking of collagegrids and to present this to a wider audience. Identified as mutually exclusive or conflicting discourses in the history of art, grids and collage exist in parallel, each having its own discourse, strategy and associations. This PhD project investigates the interplay between collage and grids in collagegrids practice, interrogating the through of thinking through art, where the insights lie in how they function together, in the how rather than the what of art practice. The project methodology is hybrid, employing Active Documentation of the PhD iteration of collagegrids to record the processes, theoretical, personal and practical involved in a ‘complexity of overlap’ of practice. It utilises contextual study with which to elucidate the mode of constructive composition at the crux of collagegrids and to situate the practice and its conceptual framework in the wider field of knowledge. The project, collagegrids: thinking it through argues for a materially anchored thinking process, a non-linear logic of association, where meaning lies in the links and connections made in resolving tensions that arise in the juxtaposition of difference. This argument is made by testing theories of cognition through the new domain of collagegrids. By correlating existing research methods the project forms a new paradigm for artistic research, which recognises both empirical and embodied philosophies, and uses a connective model in the presentation of the exegesis. Finally it articulates a fundamentally constructive way of world-making, introducing to the linguistically based theory of metaphor, a materially anchored cognitive processing of artwork, which is a new contribution to thinking and telling the cognition of creative practice.