Holding space - courting potential: aesthetics and the non-objective (open) artwork

This practice-led research project investigates the relational characteristics of Non-Objective Art. Not reliant upon representation or subjective expression, a non-objective artwork uses a discernible language of embodied relationships to construct meaning. Each formal, material, symbolic and conceptual constitutive element of a non-objective artwork contributes to a network of relations that is articulated and experienced through an aesthetic encounter. This research specifically addresses the perceived impersonal rationalism associated with Non-Objective Art and the entrenched dualities that promote this misconception. My research proposes that a non-objective work of art can accommodate paradox through the embodiment of polarising opposites and in so doing create a complex, temporal, somatic and intellectual encounter. I have elaborated this proposition through a developing thesis of openness synthesised from the theoretical framework of an "open work" proposed by Umberto Eco in his 1962 book, Opera Aperta (The Open Work), the notion of "sympathy" and "changefulness" as advanced by Lars Spuybroek's Gothic ontology in his book, The Sympathy of Things (2011), the Taoist philosophy of "being, non-being and becoming" and the Japanese ma. My research presents openness as an embodied and philosophical notion, replacing reductive essences with expansive possibilities and exposing the contemporary non-objective (open) artwork to the contingent, complexity of the world. The research has been informed by, but not restricted to, the artworks and practices of Korean artist Lee Ufan, German artist Franz Erhard Walther and South American artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Their commonality being an ability to capture material, philosophical and experiential complexity through a critical and visually reductive syntax. Accordingly, my research sits as a series of intersections. Intersections of East and West, material and immaterial, rational and organic, mind and body. I have pursued this investigation through the creation and exhibition of non-objective artworks, situated between the real space of the object and the illusionary space of the two-dimensional surface. Expanding my practice to manifest material, immaterial and temporal openness I have aimed to amplify the agency and value of our aesthetic interactions and a way of knowing, beyond what can be verbally articulated, that is unique to Non-Objective Art.