Reliquaries

BACKGROUND This work contributes to the broad field of contemporary art, and specifically the idiom of painting. Reliquaries was included in a peer selected prize exhibition scoping diverse discourses around contemporary art. This work examines the idiom of painting as forming continuously through cyclic systems that shape and develop in response to other external (social/historical) systems, while investigating the sensory experiential implications of painting practice. This relates to David Joselit's (2009, Painting Beside Itself) and Isabelle Graw's (2012, The Value of Painting) ideas of instability, where images and representations are marked by re-formings and change. The research also generally investigates the implications promoted by new materialist theorists Isabelle Grosz (2008, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth) and Karen Barad (2003, Posthumanist Performativity) where materiality is seen to be essentially unstable. CONTRIBUTION The idiom of painting has along history of self-reflexivity, and therefore there are substantial precedents where questions are examined within, and through the medium. In devising Reliquaries the research within this work specifically examined ideas relating to the conflation of past and present and how time may be reframed as cyclic, represented this through the idiom and material characteristics of paint. This research is formed through painting in order to investigate the idiom within a dialect and through reflexivity. SIGNIFICANCE Reliquaries was presented for public exhibition within a Regional Gallery, which was visited by the general public and practitioners within the field, in turn fostering discourses around the nature of the idiom within our contemporaneity.