Manifesting becoming: encountering relational entanglement through composite art installation

My research explores the relationality of matter, meaning, time and space using artistic practice-based methods. I bring together different cultural understandings of this relationality to explore how their synthesis might enable the formation of new, complex or hybridised interpretations and artwork forms. I engage with models from Western and Japanese philosophical and art histories, including posthumanist theorist Karan Barad’s notion of entanglement, the concepts and practices of the mono-ha art movement and Nishida Kitarō’s ideas of contradiction and nothingness. I bring my art practice into dialogue with these theoretical and philosophical knowledges, using art as a means to interpret, synthesise and practice them. Through this process, theory comes to inform the creation and evolution of my work and is simultaneously reified into complex physical form – forms that reveal various ways of knowing and being in the world. By engaging with and interpreting different cultural perspectives, my research aims to express multiple understandings of the material world and the phenomenological encounter of it. I pursue my investigation through Composite Art Installation, an art practice that introduces a variety of components and artwork forms into the installation situation. Importantly, this composite structure does not come together into homogenous unity; rather, it is experienced complexly and relationally through its parts. The encounter with the composite is a personal experience that produces a diversity of content, and changes over time. As such, my works do not exist in a static state of ‘being’ but in a dynamic state of ‘becoming.’ I create composites using particular components and artwork forms, including found objects, sculptural applications of photographic prints and spatial and temporal intervals. Across this project I explore how these forms can be combined and informed by a range of transcultural theories and art practices to expose the relationality of matter, meaning, time and space and enable the manifestation of the world’s becoming.