The Sculptural Encounter As an Embodied Cognitive Experience

Making Connections: The Sculptural Encounter as an Embodied Cognitive Experience

A project submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Fleur Elizabeth Summers Master of Arts (Fine Art) RMIT University Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) Hons RMIT University Bachelor of Science University of Queensland

School of Art College of Design and Social Context RMIT University

December 2019

i Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the project is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. I acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Fleur Summers 20 December 2019

Acknowledgment of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

Acknowledgements

Dr Kristen Sharp (Senior Supervisor)

Professor David Thomas (Associate Supervisor)

Dr Jenny Robinson and Associate Professor Keely Macarow (Interim Supervisors)

Special thanks to:

My partner Stephen Dixon and our children Oskar, Lillah and Stella Summers Dixon for supporting, enduring and celebrating the PhD process.

My family and friends – especially my mum, Margaret Summers.

RMIT Sculpture Studio staff and the School of Art.

Dr Kristen Sharp for her unflagging support and encouragement.

Professor David Thomas for his insights into art practice.

Workshop participants: Angela Clarke, Stephen Dixon, Sione Francis, Duncan Freedman and Jaki Gemmel.

Thank you to the galleries that have exhibited my research:

Blindside Bunjil Place Counihan Gallery Future Estate (Alderman, Brunswick) Kings Artist-Run RMIT Design Hub RMIT Gallery The Substation West Space

Special thanks to:

VicTrack for funding my public artwork Making Sense for the Jewell Station Sculpture Commission, which was awarded in early 2017 and completed in 2019. Making Sense was inspired by the work Merge in Chapter Four of the dissertation.

RMIT ETHICS HREC/CHEAN APPROVAL: 0000018710

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Table of Contents Page

Declaration ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv List of Figures v

SUMMARY 1

INTRODUCTION 2

Chapter ONE SCOPE AND BACKGROUND 12 Sculpture and the Encounter 12 Sculpture and Embodiment 16 Sculpture and Cognition 19

Chapter TWO EXPANDING THE FIELD 22 Part 1: Mirrors, Doubling and Bodily Boundaries 22 Part 2: Modelling Sensation and Play 33 Part 3: Transpositions 40 Conclusion 50

Chapter THREE THINKING MACHINES 52 Part 1: Supreme Red Rods 53 Part 2: Dissociative Dialogues and Daydreaming 62 Part 3: Studio Thinking Machines 67 Conclusion 76

Chapter FOUR DARK ADAPTATION 78 Part 1: Making Sculpture in the Dark 79 Part 2: Dark Adaption 89 Part 3: Feeling the Way 94 Conclusion 100

CONCLUSION 101

BIBLIOGRAPHY 104

SELECTED VISUAL DOCUMENTATION 117

APPENDIX 1 167 ETHICS APPROVAL

List of Figures Page

Fig. 1: Richard Serra, Running Arcs (for John Cage), 1992, steel, dimensions variable 14

Fig. 2: Physical therapist, Jeremy McVay, demonstrating mirror therapy, 2011 22

Fig. 3: V.S. Ramachandran’s mirror box, line drawing, 2006 22

Fig. 4: Robert Morris, Untitled, 1965 (reconstructed 1971), mirror, glass and wood, 23 each cube: 914 x 914 x 914 mm

Fig. 5: Ron Mueck, A Girl, 2006, mixed media, 110 x 501 x 134.5 cm 24

Fig. 6: Fleur Summers, Hand and mirror experiment, 2013 26

Fig. 7: Fleur Summers, Experimental photographic series of hands and mirrors, 2013 27

Fig. 8: Alexa Wright, After Image LN2, 1997, digitally manipulated C-type photograph, 28 56 x 75 cm

Fig. 9: Olafur Eliasson, Seeing Yourself Seeing, 2001, glass, mirror, wood 31

Fig. 10: Jeppe Hein, Semicircular Space, 2016, stainless steel, dimensions variable 32

Fig. 11: Fleur Summers, Studio models, 2013, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard, paper, table 33 tennis bat and ball

Fig. 12: Fleur Summers, Testing studio models, 2013, balsa wood, cardboard 34

Fig. 13: Fleur Summers, Visual research for library furniture and polling booths 35

Fig. 14: Fleur Summers, Model for Sensory Field, 2013 36

Fig. 15: Still from Jacques Tati’s film Playtime, 1967 36

Fig. 16: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, plywood, mirrored acrylic, steel, artificial turf, table 37 tennis bats and balls, plasticine

Fig. 17: Fleur Summers Playtime, 2014, table tennis library carrel, mirrored table divider and 38 mirrored box with plasticine, plywood, mirror acrylic, steel, artificial turf, table tennis bats and balls, plasticine, dimensions variable

Fig. 18: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Detail of mirrored table divider 38

Fig. 19: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Close up of lower legs and mirrored table divider 38

Fig. 20: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Body with mirrored table divider 39

Fig. 21: Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece, 1968–1971 39

Fig. 22: George Maciunas, Fluxus Ping Pong, 1976 42

Fig. 23: Gabriel Orozco, Ping Pong Pond, 1998/2015, Museum of Contemporary Art, 44 Tokyo (Photo credit: Oskar Summers Dixon)

Fig. 24: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, in the 45 West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo credit: Christo Crocker)

Fig. 25: Fleur Summers, Series of photographs from Transpositions – A Proposition for the 47 21st Century Library, 2014, in the West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo credit: Stephen Dixon)

Fig. 26: Bruce Lee in the mirror room in the film Enter the Dragon, 1973, directed by Robert 48 Clouse

Fig. 27: Yayio Kusama, Studio Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 49 2011, installation, Tate Modern

Fig. 28: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 49 2014/2016, in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 29: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 50 2014/2016, in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 30: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915, oil on canvas, 54 80 cm x 62 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Fig. 31: Fleur Summers, video stills from Supreme Red Rods, 2014 55

Fig. 32: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods, 2014, Blindside, wood, video monitor, 56 dimensions variable

Fig. 33: Montessori Red Rods, Montessori Academy, 2017 57

Fig. 34: Olafur Eliasson, The Cubic Structural Evolution Project, 2004, white Lego, table, 58 dimensions variable

Fig. 35: Fleur Summers, series of configurations of Supreme Red Rods, 2014, Blindside, 59 wood, video monitor, dimensions variable

Fig. 36: Olafur Eliasson, The Cubic Structural Evolution Project, 2004, white Lego, table, 60 dimensions variable

Fig. 37: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, cloth, pedals, polystyrene 65

Fig. 38: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues (close up), 2014, cloth, pedals, polystyrene 66

Fig. 39: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014 (opening night) 67

Fig. 40: Fleur Summers, treadmill in the studio, 2016 69

Fig. 41: John Kilduff from Let’s Paint TV, 2019 70

Fig. 42: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, clipboard with handwritten text 72

Fig. 43: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 1) 72

Fig. 44: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 2) 73

Fig. 45: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 3) 74

Fig. 46: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 4) 74

Fig. 47: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 5) 75

Fig. 48: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, video still 76

Fig. 49: The Tactual Museum of Athens, 2019 (Photo credit: Michael Turtle) 80

Fig. 50: Fleur Summers, Studio at night, 2019 82

Fig. 51: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, wax form ready for casting 83

Fig. 52: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of wax showing fingerprints (left) 84

Fig. 53: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of bronze showing fingerprints (right) 84

Fig. 54: Peter Corlett, 2004, Father John Brosnan, bronze 85

Fig. 55: Fleur Summers, Merge, close up, 2017, bronze 85

Fig. 56: Fleur Summers, A selection of works from Merge, 2017, bronze 86

Fig. 57: Fleur Summers, Holding works from Merge, 2017, bronze 87

Fig. 58: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, clay modelling 88

Fig. 59: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, close up of bronze showing impressions of 88 fingers

Fig. 60: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, bronze, stainless steel, installed at Jewell 89 Station, Brunswick, Melbourne

Fig. 61: Fleur Summers, model of Passage, 2019, scale 1:20 90

Fig. 62: Fleur Summers, model of doorway of Passage, 2019, scale 1:20 90

Fig. 63: Scott Miles, Nothing Under the Sun, 2016, West Space, plywood, wood 91

Fig. 64: Fleur Summers, Passage, 2019, plywood and pine 92

Fig. 65: Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor, 1969, wallboard and wood bracing, 93 2.4 x 6.1 x 0.5 m, Guggenheim Museum

Fig. 66: Lisa Roet, Chimpanzee Hands, 2007, bronze, 110 cm high 95

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Fig. 67: Dorothea Tanning, Canape en temps de pluie (Rainy Day Canape), 1970, 96 tweed, upholstered wood sofa, wool, ping pong balls, cardboard 32 x 68 x 43 in

Fig. 68: Fleur Summers, Phantom, 2019, felt, stuffing 97

Fig. 69: Fleur Summers, studio model of Phantom and Passage, 2019, felt, MDF, paint 98

Fig. 70: Youth Imploring, 17th century, clay 99

Fig. 71: Sharon Price-James, Sensory Homunculus, resin 99

Fig. 72: Fleur Summers, Experimental photographic series of hands and mirrors, 2013 117

Fig. 73: Fleur Summers, Series of models for Playtime and Transpositions, 2013, balsa wood, 118 mirrored cardboard

Fig. 74: Fleur Summers, Testing studio models, 2013, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard 119

Fig. 75: Fleur Summers, Model for Sensory Field, 2013, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard, 119 paper, cloth, plasticine

Fig. 76: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Substation Contemporary Art Prize, installation view 120

Fig. 77: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Substation Contemporary Art Prize, installation view 121 (reverse view)

Fig. 78: Fleur Summers, studio test installation of Playtime, 2014 121

Fig. 79: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (table tennis carrel) from Playtime, 2014, 122 workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fig. 80: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 1) from Playtime, 2014, 123 workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fig. 81: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 2) from Playtime, 2014, 124 workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fig. 82: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 3) from Playtime, 2014, 125 workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fig. 83: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 4) from Playtime, 2014, 126 workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fig. 84: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (plasticine and mirrored box) from Playtime 127 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fig. 85: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014/2015, 700s Festival, RMIT University Library 128

Fig. 86: Fleur Summers, model for Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 129 2014, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard

Fig. 87: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, in 129

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West Space Reading Room, Melbourne

Fig. 88: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, 130 close up, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo cred: Christo Crocker)

Fig. 89: Fleur Summers, Photographic series from Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st 131 Century Library, 2014, workshop, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014

Fig. 90: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (composite figures) from Transpositions – A 132 Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014

Fig. 91: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (reflecting on the process) from Transpositions 133 – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014

Fig. 92: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, 134 Opening night 1 in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 93: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, 134 Opening night 2 in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 94: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, 135 installation view in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 95: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library and 135 Playtime, 2014/2016, installation view in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016

Fig. 96: Fleur Summers, Model making 1 for Supreme Red Rods, 2014 136

Fig. 97: Fleur Summers, Model making 2 for Supreme Red Rods, 2014 136

Fig. 98: Fleur Summers, video stills from Supreme Red Rods, 2014 137

Fig. 99: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods, 2014, installation view 1, Blindside 137

Fig. 100: Fleur Summers, Photographic series from Supreme Red Rods, 2014, installation 138 view, Blindside

Fig. 101: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (details) from Supreme Red Rods, 2014, 139 installation view, Blindside

Fig. 102: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (audience participation) from Supreme 140 Red Rods, 2014, installation view, Blindside

Fig. 103: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods and Rectangles, 2019, RMIT Gallery 141

Fig. 104: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods and Rectangles, 2019, RMIT Gallery 141

Fig. 105: Fleur Summers, Studio models for Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, fabric, wire, balsa 142 wood, filling

Fig. 106: Fleur Summers, Photographic study for Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, fabric, wire, 142 balsa wood, filling

Fig. 107: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling 142

Fig. 108: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling 143

Fig. 109: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014 (opening night), Kings Artist-Run, fabric, 143 pedals, filling

Fig. 110: Fleur Summers, pedalling Dissociative Dialogues, 2014 (opening night), Kings 144 Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling

Fig. 111: Fleur Summers, pedalling Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, Kings Artist-Run, fabric, 144 pedals, filling

Fig. 112: Fleur Summers, Walking on the treadmill for Walking the Studio, 2016 145

Fig. 113: Fleur Summers, Notes and clipboard for Walking the Studio, 2016 145

Fig. 114: Fleur Summers, Treadmill for painting for Walking the Studio, 2016 145

Fig. 115: Fleur Summers, Experimenting with painting for Walking the Studio, 2016 145

Fig. 116: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 1 for Walking the Studio, 2016 146

Fig. 117: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 2 for Walking the Studio, 2016 146

Fig. 118: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 3 for Walking the Studio, 2016 147

Fig. 119: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 4 for Walking the Studio, 2016 147

Fig. 120: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 5 for Walking the Studio, 2016 148

Fig. 121: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 6 for Walking the Studio, 2016 148

Fig. 122: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 7 for Walking the Studio, 2016 149

Fig. 123: Fleur Summers, video still for Walking the Studio, 2016 149

Fig. 124: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of wax showing fingerprints 150

Fig. 125: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of bronze showing fingerprints 150

Fig. 126: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Wax form ready to be prepared for casting 150

Fig. 127: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Wax forms ready for casting 150

Fig. 128: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of wax form ready for casting 151

Fig. 129: Fleur Summers, A selection of works from Merge, 2017, bronze 152

Fig. 130: Fleur Summers, Fine lines from Merge, 2017, bronze 153

Fig. 131: Fleur Summers, Fine lines and fingerprints from Merge, 2017, bronze 153

Fig. 132: Fleur Summers, Holding works from Merge, 2017, bronze 154

Fig. 133: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, clay modelling 155

Fig. 134: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, close up of bronze 155

Fig. 135: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, bronze, stainless steel, installed at Jewell 155 Station, Brunswick, Melbourne

Fig. 136: Fleur Summers, model of Passage, 2019, scale 1:20 156

Fig. 137: Fleur Summers, model of doorway of Passage, 2019, scale 1:20 156

Fig. 138: Fleur Summers, Entrance to Passage, 2019, plywood and pine 156

Fig. 139: Fleur Summers, Models and tests for Phantom, 2019, felt, stuffing 157

Fig. 140: Fleur Summers, studio model of Phantom and Passage, 2019, felt, MDF, paint 157

Fig. 141: Fleur Summers, Phantom, 2019, felt, stuffing 158

Fig. 142: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2020, bronze, felt, plywood, steel, dimensions variable. 159

Fig. 143: Fleur Summers, detail from Merge, 2020, bronze, felt. 160

Fig. 144: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2020, bronze, felt. 160

Fig. 145: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2020, bronze, felt, plywood, steel, dimensions variable. 160

Fig. 146: Fleur Summers, Passage, 2020, plywood. 161

Fig. 147: Fleur Summers, Phantom II, 2020, felt, straw 161

Fig. 148: Fleur Summers, Phantom II, 2020, felt, straw. 162

Fig. 149: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Passage, 2020 162

Fig. 150: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Passage, 2020 163

Fig. 151: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Passage, 2020. 163

Fig. 152: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II, 2020. 164

Fig. 153: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II, 2020. 164

Fig. 154: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Merge, 2020 165

Fig. 155: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Merge and Passage, 2020 165

Fig. 156: Fleur Summers, installation shot – Dark Adaptation (with the lights on), 2020 166

Fig. 157: Fleur Summers, installation shot – Dark Adaptation (with the lights off), 2020 166

Making Connections: The Sculptural Encounter as an Embodied Cognitive Experience

SUMMARY

This practice-led research project investigates the sculptural encounter as an embodied experience in which perception is active and involves sensory motor activity and cognition. The research is mediated through the moving body and employs strategies that use composite objects and altered situations related to play and physical activity, as well as environments with reduced illumination and restrictive architecture. It draws upon research in embodied and enactive perception and cognition, alongside an exploration of phenomenologically active sculptural and spatial practice since the 1960s.

The artworks created as part of this project are experiential and involve a range of sculptural practices, from traditional bronze casting to architectural interventions and performative participatory practices. The focus is on creating sculptural works developed from objects and concepts related to perception and cognition, which are informed by their connections to contemporary art practice. The research begins with an exploration of the neurocognitive effects of mirrors and kinaesthetic play, and ends with a more intimate, embodied focus on touch and proprioception related to empathy and affect. The sculptural encounter is located in both the intersubjective and social space of the gallery, and the more intimate space of the studio. The encounters include both the experience of the participants and the creation by the artist.

This research makes connections between art practice and theories of cognition and perception. It identifies how embodiment, kinaesthetic thinking, perceptual isolation and sensorimotor empathy underpin encounter. The artworks demonstrate how cognition is embodied and enacted by the audience and artist, and how cognition can be embedded into and potentially extend into sculptural work. By bringing together brain, body and environment through art practice, the research highlights how both the artist and audience can encounter sculpture with an expanded sensory awareness.

INTRODUCTION

This research seeks to orientate the experience of sculpture for both audience and artist as a multisensory encounter that is experienced and enacted by the moving body. This encounter is therefore embodied as it involves the entire body (including the brain) and associated sensory processes. This approach necessarily includes vision but also accounts for other sensations as part of a complex sensory experience rather than singling out particular senses. As Francis Halsall writes in his essay, One Sense is Never Enough (2004), ‘any mode of analysis which limits itself to one sense alone will be a flawed account of experience’ (p. 106). Halsall points out that, depending how the experience is framed, individual senses can alter the experience of other senses to create an ‘interconnected interaction’ (2004, p. 106). This research therefore argues for a sensory approach that focuses on coupling subjective bodily responses, feelings and thoughts through a phenomenological approach that includes the whole body. These bodily responses are important in the embodied encounter, as is the surrounding environment. As Francisco Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991, p. 172–173) outline in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, ‘cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities’ (Varela et al., 1991, p.172–173). Not only does this model integrate the brain, body and environment in cognition, but it includes the moving body. As Alva Noe writes at the beginning Action in Perception: ‘Perception is not something that happens to us or, in us. It is something we do’ (Noe, 2004 p. 1).

There is no doubt that vision is an essential factor in these encounters. However, as architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa contends in The Eyes of the Skin (1996), Western culture has historically been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, which causes an imbalance in our sensory systems. This focus on seeing is deeply embedded in the way contemporary thinking and writing about art has developed, and how visual communication now dominates through text, images and screen-based culture (McQuire, 2016; Papastergiadis et al., 2016). This has contributed to the disengagement of the sensorial body and resulted in the critique of vision-centred modes of thinking. This uncoupling is not a recent development and can be traced back to very early Western philosophical thinking (Jay, 1993). However, as David Levin argues in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993) this ocularcentricity is not benign and is responsible for the aggression and ‘psychosocial pathology of everyday seeing’ as described by philosopher Michel Foucault and others (Levin, 1993, p. 205). In response to these conditions, and alongside a more recent turn against a cultural or semiotic focus in the critique of art, there has been a renewed interest in the relationship of the body to materials. This can be seen in the writings of New Materialism (Barrett & Bolt, 2013), craft practices (Sennett, 2008, and the embodied sensory experiences of experimental art practices (Potts, 2000; Sheets-Johnstone, 2009; von Hantelmann, 2014). All of these concepts are relevant to sculptural practice, but the experiential and sensory turn are of particular interest in this research.

The sculptural encounter is at the centre of this research. The encounter, as defined in this dissertation, is a complex event that involves multisensory experience, bodily movement, and

cognitive processes. The encounter is of particular interest due to the inherent spatialisation of sculptural form, which is both problematised and enhanced by temporal and material experiences. In the introduction to her seminal book, The Passages of Modern Sculpture (1977), art critic Rosalind Krauss states that sculpture is a medium ‘peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing’ (1977, p. 5). Krauss sees this tension as defining and empowering sculpture, thus endowing it with ‘enormous expressive power’ (Krauss, 1977, p. 5). This complexity offers much to the encounter of sculpture, alongside its capacity for wide variations in size, form and media, as well as being part of our material world.

As a practice-led project, this research does not seek to systematically categorise or describe the sculptural encounter. Instead, it aims to produce sculptural works that create unique multisensory experiences and encounters through interaction with, and in response to, the audience and researcher. In doing so, this research connects sculpture to the wider project of understanding how the body is centrally involved in perception and cognition. The artworks demonstrate how cognition is embodied and enacted by the audience and artist, and how cognition can be embedded into and extend into sculptural work by creating multimodal sensory connections. The research was initiated through my interest in the mirror box, which is used clinically to treat the pain caused by phantom limbs, and its similarity to sculptural objects, particularly those from Minimalism onwards. My past study and work in medical science, led me to develop a project that begins with an interest in cognition, bodily sensations, and sculptural process and resolves with an embodied response to practice.

It is worth noting that this study was undertaken part time and has unfolded over six years in conjunction with academic teaching and professional practice. As a result, the research outcomes have been organised into three distinct chapters in the dissertation. While these chapters stand alone as discrete projects, they also reflect a continuity of thinking and making maintained over an extended period of time. They document the chronological development of my ideas and their manifestation as artworks as part of an ongoing, dynamic, and intuitive process. This involved intense periods of making and exhibiting alternating with periods of conceptual development and reflection. In the final process of contextualising the research in this dissertation, I have tried to document emergent thinking in each chapter so that the research can be seen as an unfolding process. The first body of work Expanding the Field refers to Rosalind Krauss’ essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979), and implicitly compares the idea of sculpture expanding as a discipline, to the interdisciplinary nature of the research and the spatially expanding capacity of mirrors used in the works. The second body of work, Thinking Machines, focuses on the influence of bodily movement involved in understanding, participating with and creating sculptural work. The final body of work, Dark Adaptation, resolves the research questions through a series of works which most clearly articulate an embodied approach to sculpture through touch in environments with reduced opticality. These works are brought together in the dissertation to trace the trajectory of the research as it developed.

This project is situated in a field of practice that includes contemporary works, such as Carsten Holler’s Pinocchio Effect (1999) and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room (2006), which translate embodiment and cognitive concepts directly into artworks. The research builds on the work of Robert Morris, who produced works in the 1960s as part of the movement now known as Minimalism. Morris’s works and his writings in Notes on Sculpture (1966) and Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making (1970) articulated new relationships to the kinaesthetic and were informed by phenomenology (Morris, 1995). Minimalist sculptors became interested in phenomenology as defined by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) when his work was translated into English in the 1960s. Phenomenology generally refers to the study of human consciousness through first-person experience and was first described by German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) (Gallagher, 2012). There is no single definition of phenomenology as it is more of a style of thought or method and it has been critiqued and adapted over time by other philosophers including Martin Heidegger (1889 -1976), Jean Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906 -1995). Merleau-Ponty was most strongly influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, and focused his work on theorising the body as the primary site for experiencing and understanding the world by forming a ‘system’ (Merleau-Ponty,1945 /2002). As minimalist artists became interested in focusing on the spatial and temporal unfolding of their work through the experience of the audience, Merleau-Ponty offered sculpture a theoretical account to foreground the interaction of the body in space. The engagement of sculptors such as Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Eva Hesse with Merleau- Ponty in particular, has given his approach to phenomenology a strong part to play in the history of sculpture as a discipline in the twentieth century (Potts 2000).

Phenomenology continues to make a contribution to a wide range of disciplines but has more recently become important in connecting the arts and sciences. Since the early 1990s when the failure to consider embodiment in artificial intelligence became apparent, the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau Ponty has informed critical theory and the cognitive sciences in general, and has a strong role in theories about embodied cognition and enactivism (Newen et al., 2018). This practice-led research project has been informed by this knowledge and this has resulted in the production of artworks that not only create connections between art practice and cognitive science, but also generate experimental, composite objects and altered situations in which sculptural forms and the moving human body can co-create complex sensations in space and time. Many of the artworks involve everyday activities, such as playing table tennis, riding a bike or walking. These activities are complicated by altered perceptual situations involving mirrors, hybrid objects or reduced lighting. There is a focus on touch in the encounter for both the artist and audience. Subsequent knowledge and questions raised by these objects, practices and subjective sensory experiences generate and inform the artworks.

Research into cognition plays an important part in this research project by providing theories and sometimes physical objects or activities that act as starting points for many of the works. Cognition is defined in the broadest sense as the ‘mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and

understanding through thought, experience and the senses’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2015), although, there is still much debate on whether it is possible or necessary to define cognition precisely (Allen, 2017). Cognitive science is multidisciplinary: it involves the study of the mind and mental phenomena. It includes psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, linguistics and anthropology. As such, it can be framed in different ways (Bartel, 2014).

Questions surrounding human consciousness continue to have currency in cognitive science, and this has given me a rich and complex ground to work from. I began this research with an interest in neuroscience and how an understanding of cognition is played out in the body with a particular focus on the phenomenon of the phantom limb. While the understanding of phantom limb pain is largely based on neurocognitive research into the neural structures and processes involved in cognition, treatment of the condition is centred around how embodiment is experienced through feelings of bodily control and ownership, bodily integrity, and affective feelings in the absent limb or the prosthetic (De Vignemont, 2011). This treatment involves a mirrored box, which helps to reconstitute bodily continuity through the experience of embodiment. This importantly illustrates the significance of the lived experience and how external objects, environmental conditions and kinaesthetic movement are related to, and potentially extend, cognition.

Subsequently, as my project progressed and I employed ideas of embodiment and enactivism, my research developed a more post-cognitivist framework as outlined by Simon Penny in Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (2017). Post-cognitivism, which is an extension of the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and others in reconnecting the body and mind, critiques the cognitivist paradigm of the 1960s, which sites cognition in the human brain and nervous system and as bounded by the body. Simon Penny proposes, through his work making interactive art using robotics and sensor-based systems, that ‘cognition is embodied; integrated with non-neural bodily tissues; or extends into artefacts, the designed environment, social systems and cultural networks’ (Penny, 2017, p. xxviii). I argue through my research that cognition can extend into sculptural objects and practices. The production of artworks and the experience of artists has the potential to add to philosophical accounts of experience (Montero in Newen et al., 2018). While there are studies about the embodiment of dance and music performance (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011; Warburton, 2011; Block & Kissell, 2001), there are few studies that consider contemporary sculptural practice in relation to embodiment.

Despite the seemingly serious nature of the topic, some of the works are playful or even humorous. I have used this as a strategy to encourage interaction and enhance the encounter. Play and humour as strategies have a strong lineage in the history of art. They can be seen as part of many art movements, particularly in Dada, Fluxus, Pop Art and contemporary practices. Studies show that, as a cognitive event, perceiving something as humorous or playful enhances creativity and inventiveness, and reduces stress (Wycoff & Pryor, 2003). Play in contemporary art is a highly complex activity that involves varying degrees of uncertainty, contingency and indeterminacy. It

employs and disrupts systems and authority, and generates meaning and knowledge through its performative and embodied nature (Zimna, 2014). Some of the artworks produced in this research involve particular sports, such as table tennis or riding an altered bicycle. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott regarded organised sport as ‘playing’ for adults and as a way in which individuals could make sense of inner experiences and external reality through cultural activity (Winnicott, 1971). Most importantly, for this research, play focuses primarily on the actual experience rather than the outcome (Brown & Vaughan, 2009), giving the audience an opportunity to experience the work in a process- based and expanded way.

This research also develops an understanding of affective and empathic responses through the sculptural encounter. This occurs through a more nuanced interaction later in the project, in which the audience is invited to enter into an intimate engagement with the works through touch. Touch breaks down boundaries and creates extended fields of interactions through empathy, which involves the act of ‘projecting oneself into another body or environment’ (Ganczarek et al., 2018, p. 141). In this research, the focus is on the concept of sensorimotor empathy, as described by philosopher Anthony Chemero in his paper Sensorimotor empathy (2016). It is employed in the final chapter of this dissertation, Dark Adaptation, to understand the encounter as enacted and extended through touch and movement in the experience of large and small sculptural works. The audience is encouraged to touch, enter into and feel the works to develop an empathic and material engagement so that the ‘lived body expands, and temporarily includes aspects of the non-bodily environment, whether they are tools or other humans’ (Chemero, 2016, p. 145). This engagement brings together a range of meanings through the sculptural encounter making connections between audience, object and environment, as well as contemporary art practice, and embodied, enactive and extended concepts of cognition.

Research Aims and Objectives

The aim of this research is to create a series of artworks that explore the sculptural encounter as a way to experience embodiment, and to create new knowledge through an interdisciplinary project. The artworks aim to create multisensory experiences in sculpture through processes that connect materials, audience and artist with concepts in sculptural practice and cognitive science This dissertation locates the practice-led research in relation to art practice, art theory, philosophy, and cognitive science.

This research arose from an interest in the physical similarities between sculptural objects and therapeutic devices used in occupational therapy and physiotherapy, and how these objects can influence our experiences of our bodies and consciousness. The research focuses on the presence of sculpture as physical objects that go beyond visual experience. This can sometimes be subtle and resonates with the ideas of artist Phyllida Barlow who once stated that sculpture was best viewed in the dark and that ‘it’s only when the sculpture’s image has disappeared into the blackness that the

chill of its presence can be felt’ (Lack, 2009, para. 1). This notion of something that can be felt but not seen is mirrored in the experience of the phantom limb. Together these ideas speak of complex bodily sensations and conceptually rich approaches to the encounter of sculpture. Both present alternative paradigms for understanding perception. As a result, the research begins with an interrogation of the mirror box and ends with an exploration of touch in reduced illumination. The research also brings my previous work and interest in medical science into conversation with art as an experiment that attempts to create an interdisciplinary practice-based research project.

The objectives for this research project are:

• understanding the encounter of sculpture as a multisensory experience involving the brain, body and the surrounding environment; • exploring and developing methodologies and strategies for the production of sculpture which can produce complex sensations; and • developing a context for these works within relevant research disciplines.

The focus in this research is on developing a series of works that promote multisensory experiences in the studio and for participants in the gallery. This was achieved by applying knowledge from a range of fields including philosophy, contemporary art and cognitive science to sculptural practice. This involved developing methodologies for including the moving body as a necessary part of audience engagement. Throughout the research, and in each of the three bodies of works developed, the characteristics of the sculptural encounter were explored through studio practice and exhibition. This involved participatory practices, altered and hybrid objects and activities. Sporting activities and games were employed in the early stages to encourage spontaneous movement by participants. Play and humour were also investigated as strategies for audience engagement, as well as touch and proprioception.

The work begins with the creation of artworks designed for a group of participants to encounter and ends in more solitary and focused encounters for both the researcher artist and participant. This research is situated in both the social space of the gallery and the intimate space of the studio. As the ideas developed and changed, these spaces were used in different ways. Initially, works were constructed in the studio and then tested and studied in the gallery. As the work proceeded, the studio also began to become an important site as the work became more self-reflexive and relied on the experiences of myself as both investigator and participant. In the final work, movement was mediated by light, space and architecture.

Research Questions

The research was driven by the following questions:

• How can current understandings of the encounter of contemporary sculpture and spatial practice be explored in relation to embodied perception and cognition?

• How can objects, practices and technologies employed in understanding embodied perception and cognition be extended in the production of sculptural and spatial artworks?

• How does the production of artworks engaged with cognitive science contribute to and engage with contemporary art as an interdisciplinary practice?

Methodology

My research project is structured around an adaptive methodology to accommodate evolving ideas and modes of making. This way of working is conceptually based and is generally not restricted to any particular material or technique. The materials used have been chosen at each stage of the research depending on the ideas under development. The range of artworks reflect the depth and range of investigations undertaken to address the research questions. This allows the research methodology to involve cycles of making, testing and reflection, as developed through the three main bodies of works. These cycles are generative and, through the development and observation of each artwork, I have developed new ideas and works that continually advance the research project and respond to the research questions. The research, therefore, takes place through continual action and intentional reflection on that action. This type of dynamic and intuitive process involving emergent and experimental methodologies is common in the visual arts and has been described as ‘performative research’ (Haseman, 2006; Barrett & Bolt, 2014).

My methodology also involves unpredictability as part of the generative process. Sometimes my process is logical and intentional but there is also room for contingency as the research project unfolds. This has allowed me to interrogate my creative process and the direction of the research project. I also acknowledge that the project is driven by my own personal interest and experiences and my understanding of audience responses to the work. My previous work and study in the natural sciences has led me to create interdisciplinary projects that are informed by and question science through process, but are defined by and situated in creative sculptural practice.

An important part of my methodology involves visual research and model making, which is at the core of my generative material process. Not only does the model allow me to visualise different options for works at scale, but I also use models to develop and conceptualise works through several stages before I fabricate in full scale. This is an embodied way of working and implicates the hand as well as

the rest of the body in the cognitive process. I use several processes to develop ideas and often develop a range of options. An early model may be approximate in scale, while a later model will be constructed in more exact measurements as a tool in the translation to full scale. When working with materials such as plywood, acrylic mirror or other material that comes in sheets, I work with sheet size to get the most out of the material, and to conserve and reduce the number of cuts. Scaling down a work before making it public also allows me to develop a more intimate understanding of the potential sculpture before it is realised in full scale. These are important processes in sculptural practice as the cost and feasibility needs to be considered.

As part of my methodological approach, I have also drawn on research from cognitive studies, often using key ideas as starting points in my artworks. These ideas come from various areas of knowledge including neural plasticity, kinaesthetic thinking, sensory reduction, perceptual isolation and sensorimotor empathy. These responses are manifested as artworks in generative and intuitive ways which are then contextualised by the dissertation. I have adapted methods and/or materials related to allied fields, such as physiotherapy and occupational therapy. I have read scientific papers and then used relevant ideas as feeders for my work. Over the period of the research project, I developed a deeper understanding of embodiment and have been informed by a number of new texts as research into embodiment, cognition and art has developed, especially in relation to ideas of the post-cognitive. Importantly, the artworks produced resist reductionism or didactic representation of these concepts, developing and extending beyond these concepts and structures into innovative, interactive and participatory objects and practices.

This research is contextualised in relation to contemporary art practice through the dissertation. I have actually directly experienced most of the examples referred to myself, as opposed to reading about works or experiencing them through reproduction. While this could be seen as a limitation to the scope of the research, given the focus on sensory experience it was important to engage with the works discussed in a direct and embodied manner wherever possible.

Outcomes

The outcome of this research is a series of sculptural artworks that activate the body through play, touch and guided interaction. There are three main bodies of work within the project, which are described in the chapters Expanding the Field, Thinking Machines and Dark Adaptation. Each chapter has a series of related works, which range from studio-based experiments to large gallery-based installations. While the focus is predominately on sculptural work, I have also produced photography and video-based works. A range of materials were employed including acrylic mirror, plywood, steel, textiles, readymade objects, video, text and silicon bronze.

CHAPTER OVERVIEWS

This dissertation is divided into four main chapters, beginning with an introduction to the scope and background of the research. This is followed by discussions of each of the three bodies of artworks that make up the research. These works are presented in the order in which they were conceived and developed and, in most cases, subsequently exhibited.

Chapter One: Scope and Background

Chapter One considers the theoretical and conceptual background of the research project, and introduces the interdisciplinary nature of the approach I have undertaken. It brings together sculpture, the encounter, and embodiment, alongside ideas surrounding cognition. The sculptural encounter is introduced in relation to ideas concerning the expanded nature of sculpture, as described by art critic Rosalind Krauss, and how the heterogeneous nature of sculpture might be experienced and perceived. Alva Noe’s analysis of Richard Serra’s large sheet metal sculptural works is used to introduce the concepts of enactivism. The temporal nature of the encounter is considered in reference to Henri Bergson’s concepts about the experience of time. Embodiment is discussed in relation to mind-body dualism and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of phenomenology, particularly how this connects to the Minimalism project in art in the 1960s. Ideas of post-cognitivism are discussed, together with the notion of performativity in art.

Chapter Two: Expanding the Field

Chapter Two introduces the first body of work, which explores the phantom limb, and responds to the clinical mirror box as a sculptural object in connection to embodiment. This chapter discusses a series of works that incorporate mirrors, play and physical interaction, and integrate physical structures from table tennis and libraries. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach is considered and the work of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is investigated. I discuss my experimentation with mirrors and two of my works, Playtime (2014), and Transpositions (2014). I contextualise these works in connection to the practice of a number of artists including Alexa Wright, Joan Jonas, Jeppe Hein and Gabriel Orozco.

Chapter Three: Thinking Machines

Chapter Three focuses on kinaesthetic movement in relation to concepts of enactive perception. The chapter begins with a discussion of the work Supreme Red Rods (2014), which focuses on play and uses Montessori educational principles and materials to create a participatory work. The second work, Dissociative Dialogues (2014), explores daydreaming through the repetitive physical activity involved in pedalling a bicycle. The final work, Walking the Studio (2016), involves walking on a treadmill in the studio and is contextualised in relation to the work of Bruce Nauman and John Kilduff alongside the

writing of Rebecca Solnit and the practice of walking. This chapter is important in the development of the research as it documents a change of direction away from material outcomes in the gallery that involve audience participation, to more intimate and reflective activity in the studio.

Chapter Four: Dark Adaptation

Chapter Four discusses the final body of works and revisits the concept of the phantom limb. The work begins in the studio in the dark and focuses on touch and empathy. These works extend and embed cognition in studio activity and create environments using reduced light and restrictive architecture. The first work, Merge (2018), is informed by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder and Herbert Read on touch and is influenced by the work of artists Phyllida Barlow and Martin Creed. The second work, Passage (2019), creates a liminal space that allows the audience to move between light and dark spaces, contextualised through work by artists Scott Miles and Bruce Nauman. The final work, Phantom (2019), is a large figurative soft sculpture that attempts to reconstitute the body and is understood through Max Kozloff’s writings on soft sculpture and Elizabeth Grosz’s ideas of the prosthetic. These works extend and embed cognition in activity in the studio and the gallery and create expanded fields of thought and rich affective states

Conclusion

The final chapter concludes the research and summarises how the project outcomes relate to the research questions.

CHAPTER ONE: Scope and Background

This chapter considers the theoretical and conceptual background of the research project and introduces the interdisciplinary nature of the approach undertaken. It brings together sculpture, the encounter and embodiment with ideas surrounding cognition. It also informs the work in the following three chapters.

SCULPTURE AND THE ENCOUNTER

This practice-based research project explores the encounter of sculpture through the production of artworks in relation to neurocognitive and embodied experience. The project does not attempt to present a comprehensive analysis of the sculptural encounter. Instead, it explores a series of experiences and artworks that probe the encounter through the experience of art and the human body. It focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of this encounter by drawing upon theories surrounding perception and cognition that relate to the artworks produced. In order to integrate ideas surrounding neural plasticity, kinaesthetic cognition and embodied experiences, this project considers the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and explores the work of Minimalist artists such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra, light and space artists such as James Turrell, as well as other practitioners, such as Bruce Nauman, Alexa Wright, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Holler and Gabriel Orozco.

For the purposes of this study, this dissertation will primarily consider sculptural practice since the 1960s. Definitions of sculpture can be as simple as a ‘form in space’ and or as critically motivated as Ad Reinhart’s comment that sculpture is ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’ (Lippard, as cited in Potts, 2000, p. 1). However, since the 1960s sculpture, has become a varied and multifarious project with numerous ways in which three-dimensional work can be conceived of, made and presented, as well as how it can be experienced or encountered. Works often have a relationship to the human body in terms of scale, ranging from small and intimate, to large and public, and monumental. Sculptures may be described as objects, scatter pieces, floor works, installation or earthworks, among other definitions. Works may be kinetic and involve time and movement. Sculpture may be relational, participatory or performative. Materially sculpture can be durable and permanent, rigid or plastic, or it can be fragile and ephemeral.

In her 1977 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, critic Rosalind Krauss used the phrase ‘infinitely malleable’ to describe the changing conditions of sculpture since the 1960s. Krauss was not only referring to the expansion of the physical conditions of sculptural materials and their potential elasticity, but also to the collapse of the historical and seemingly immutable logic of the sculptural monument (Krauss, 1977). Krauss contended, at the time, that it was more useful to define the boundaries of sculpture as being what it is not – that is not architecture or landscape. As a result of these changes and others into the twenty-first century, contemporary sculpture has become a slippery category that is messy and spills out of spaces, defies conventions and at times comes perilously

close to not being art or even existing as a material object. It blurs boundaries when it exists as objects, spatial arrangements or events that are deeply connected to everyday life. As such, there is a richness in sculpture, an openness and a sense of generosity in its definition. Sculpture also crosses over into other disciplines, such as design, architecture, fashion and performance. For example, sculptor Rachel Whiteread worked directly with an existing architectural structure in House (1993) and continues to work with architectural form in full scale and as models. Andrea Zittel works with everyday objects, including fashion, as seen in Uniforms (1991–ongoing) and Smockshop (2006– 2010). Nick Cave’s soundsuits (1992–ongoing) blend sculpture, fashion and performance. These works are just a small sample of how malleable the expression of sculptural practice can be. This expansiveness produces complex works that transgress boundaries, evoke complicated feelings, and have the potential to produce strong affective and cognitive responses.

The methods by which contemporary sculpture is approached and understood depend on multiple factors. The complexity of sculpture requires more than simply viewing: it may involve a range of bodily sensations and physical activities to experience a work. These might include seeing, listening, smelling, and using spatial awareness. Sometimes a work might be temporal and unfold over a period of time. It might also involve some physical interaction. For this reason, I have chosen to use the terms ‘encounter’ and ‘audience’ rather than more occularcentric terms based on viewing and the spectator. A dictionary definition might present encounter in a somewhat negative light – as a surprise or problematic event. However, encounter is also a term used by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition where art is understood as an encounter ‘which forces us to think’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 139), disrupting normal ways of being and thinking, and producing knowledge in an affirmative way (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 1). The term encounter is also used by the key figure of the Japanese Mono-ha School, artist Lee Ufan. Through his readings of Western philosophy and Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro, Lee developed the concept of the encounter as focused on the interconnection between the body, consciousness and the world. He sees the process of making art and the experience of viewing it as mediated by the body (Munroe & Akira, 2011). Lee defined the encounter as being stimulated only through the active engagement of the audience with the work and its physical and material presence (Kee, 2008).

The disruption of the encounter can also cause changes in the body known as affect, a concept that originates from Spinoza’s notion of affectus which ‘refers to the passage [or movement] from one state to another’ (Deleuze, 1988, p.48). These changes are not emotions, according to philosopher Brian Massumi, as they occur in external encounters as opposed to internal psychological states and are located in the outside world (Massumi, 2002). This notion of the exteriority of affect is also discussed by Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg in the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader (2010). Affect can also be described as pre-reflective feelings or as the ‘non-conscious, non-cognitive dimensions of experience: sensations, intensities, atmospheres, memories, perceptions and forms of attention that captivate subjects and exceed conscious, rational attention’ (Blackman, 2016, p. 33). This is useful for art, as affect studies in arts and humanities have recently reconsidered the role of

embodied forms of making meaning. This brings these disciplines into dialogue and gives the notion of encounter a richness that is useful in the experience of a sculptural work which might be felt by the body before it is conceptualised.

An example of how an encounter might be complex in sculpture is outlined in philosopher Alva Noe’s article Experience and Experiment. Noe refers to Richard Serra’s large sheet metal work Running Arcs (for John Cage) in Figure 1 as ‘lacking in perspicuity’ (his italics, 2000, p. 131). He takes perspicuity from Wittgenstein’s philosophical idea of the ‘perspicuous overview’ or übersichtliche Darstellung, which refers to the development of a subjective understanding through discovering and making connections. While Wittgenstein was referring to language and the resolution of philosophical problems, Noe extends this idea to the understanding of encountering a sculptural work. He goes on to write that ‘Serra’s sculptures provide us opportunities to understand the environment we live in by exploring bits of it in order to attain a perspicuous overview where at first there is none’ (p. 131). As such, he refers to sculptural work that reveals itself through experience over time and that cannot be understood in its entirety at first glance. This means that a complete sense of the form of the work, or gestalt, cannot be formed initially as it could be with some of the earlier Minimalist works based on geometric solids. Instead, through open ended and constantly changing perceptual bodily experiences, a unified comprehension of the environment is formed. Gregory Minissales argues that ‘Serra’s works attempt to disrupt total visibility of the sculptural object’ and ‘disarm pre-emptive interpretation’ (Minissales, 2013, 190–191). However, what art can do, and particularly sculptural work like Serra’s, is ‘put the experience before the words and does so independently of any theory about what produces perceptual experience’ (Hawes, 2012, p. 133).

Image removed due to copyright restrictions

Fig. 1: Richard Serra, Running Arcs (for John Cage), 1992, steel, dimensions variable

Richard Serra’s work Running Arcs (for John Cage) (1992) is the only sculptural works discussed in depth in reference to Noe’s theories of enactivism or enactive perception. If sculptural perception requires action and thought, then the encounter with art involves more than passively receiving sensory input. Noe asserts that perception does not occur solely within the brain, but is dependent on

the activity of an organism as it interacts with the environment (Noe, 2004). This concept can be applied to an understanding of the sculptural encounter as the body moves from one part of a work to another in order to reveal it, whether it be through one of Bruce Nauman’s corridors or Rachel Whiteread’s 14,000 white polyethylene boxes in Embankment (2005). Rosalind Krauss introduces the important element of time as the ‘experience of a moment-to-moment passage through space and time’ that occurs when experiencing sculpture. Krauss also writes of approaching these types of works with ‘humility’ to allow space to open up between the viewer and the artwork and compares this experience to memory as one where there is ‘presentness’ but also unfolding material experiences (Krauss, 1977, p. 282). This notion of passage – in a physical and metaphorical sense – is important as this research develops through different stages. It is also important in the final works where the audience is invited to encounter the work by moving through it on physical and affective levels.

As the sculptural encounter moves through space and unfolds over time, Henri Bergson’s notions of time, space and experience are relevant as they lend themselves to a more intuitive and embodied approach to perception. Bergson examined the difference between time as defined by science and time as experienced. He understood time as not experienced as a series of film stills: each separate and equally measured. Instead, he theorised time as an unstable blend of perception and memory in continuous flux (Arya, 2015). As such, every experience of sculpture – both in the making and encountering – involves, and is marked and coloured by, memory. In Creative Evolution (1998), Bergson explains this mental state metaphorically. This experience ‘as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing – rolling upon itself as a snowball on the snow’ (Bergson, 1998, p. 4). Bergson sees this process as grounded in the body and the inherent subjectivity of the experience of time. In terms of the sculptural encounter, this understanding of time and the ‘swelling’ of experience enables an audience to develop an understanding through and with the body over time. As such, the experience is constantly in flux, and perception is developing and changing at every stage of the encounter.

In a more pragmatic sense, the sculptural encounter involves moving bodies and can propel bodies to a range of physical activities. Most sculptural works require the whole body to move around them in some way. This may be as simple as walking around a work on a plinth or pedestal, or as complex as navigating a large, experience-based work. In general, sculptural work is rarely fully experienced from a single position and a body must move around it to experience it. As such, the work is in a constant state of emerging, unfolding or becoming, and this is heightened when parts of the work are concealed or hidden from view and are revealed through the experience of the work. This multisensory experience may involve negotiating sight lines from different positions or audio experience in intuitively understanding the form and materiality of the work and surrounding space through sound. It may also involve kinaesthetic and proprioceptor experience (sense of body movement and bodily positioning in space) as the body moves around or within the work. The encounter, therefore, is a complex mix of bodily intensities and subjective thoughts, as well as

analytical, cultural and language-based responses. In this research, the encounter focuses on the embodied and enactive nature of perception.

Through the three bodies of artwork in this research, I have developed a series of encounters for audiences to enact and experience. Each involves the moving body and therefore sensory motor perception. Some of these encounters involve material experiences and play with the artwork as an active participant, others are quieter and more intimate and involve the body in a reflective response. This can occur as structured play or invitations to physically rearrange the work. I also attempt to understand this by reflecting on my own participation in making particular works in the studio. In a sense, I use my own responses to particular conditions or encounters to propel me ‘towards’ thought. Importantly, for the audience and me as the maker, my works are primarily participatory and the encounter is a productive rather than passive experience. I invite my audience to metaphorically ‘bump into’ the work, as Ad Reinhardt suggested, and to experience the work as an extension of the physical world. By existing in the material world as a thing (or things), sculpture becomes part of sensory space. As Merleau-Ponty pointed out, perception is not merely an act of cognition but involves ‘an incarnate person who can perceive by seeing, moving and placing his body in relation to things’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002, p. 80).

SCULPTURE AND EMBODIMENT

Merleau-Ponty used terms such as incarnate and flesh to refer to embodiment, but did not actually use the term as there is no equivalent translatable word in French (Potts, 2000). However, his work, and that of Husserl before him, strongly influences our understanding of embodiment. The term embodiment is now used across disciplines and is defined in different ways depending on the particular needs of the approach in defining the relationship between the body, mind and matter. The central assumption of these different approaches is that the body is directly involved in cognition as an active and integral component rather than a secondary or passive element (Leitan & Chaffey, 2014).

The concept of cognitive embodiment in which the sensate body is seen as strongly influencing cognitive processes developed during the twentieth century as a ‘tool’ to respond to Cartesian Dualism (Nolan, 2014). In the seventeenth century, French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596–1650) theorised the mind and body as connected but materially separate and defined in an oppositional relationship of an immaterial mind and a corporeal body. Descartes conceived of the mind as primary and mistrusted the sensate body. In Principles of Philosophy (1644) he wrote that ‘my knowledge of my thought is more basic and more certain than my knowledge of any corporeal thing’ (Descartes, 1644/1982 p. 5). This focus on the mind as superior to the body had a strong influence on philosophy and culture. While contemporary cognitive science now incorporates concepts of embodiment, acknowledging the body as important to cognition has been a very long process and is still a matter of

contemporary debate (Newen et al., 2018). Undoubtedly this history has a lasting influence on art and other disciplines where knowledge is developed through the body.

My research focuses on sculpture since the 1960s, a time when many artists had moved away from representation and became interested in privileging the experience of the audience. Minimalist artists introduced notions of time and space into their work in parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 work, The Phenomenology of Perception, when it was translated to English in 1962. These artists were particularly interested in Merleau-Ponty’s argument that ‘the body is our general means of having a world’ and that the complex sense we have of our environment cannot be understood purely through the activity of a disembodied eye (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002, p.115). They also believed in the need to experience the physicality of artworks in the everyday world that acknowledged the pre-existing body of the audience and stressed the psychological, spatial and temporal circumstances of the work. They considered the experience of the audience and produced works that demanded an active and participatory, even theatrical, mode of viewing that questioned the spatial conventions of the gallery. This meeting or encounter with the work interrogated the very conditions of sculpture and created new experiences, and ways of seeing and thinking about art. They saw art as forming a system with the audience just as Merleau-Ponty saw the relationship between the body and the world as fully integrated within kinaesthetic (muscle sense) and tactile dimensions of experience.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly and with it forms a system’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002, p. 235).

Artist Robert Morris wrote about this system in Notes on Sculpture (1966) in sculptural terms. This essay begins as a discussion on the relationship of the scale of the human body to art and emphasises the spaces between the body and sculptural objects (Morris, 1966, p.230). Morris points out that larger works demand more of a spatial field, creating an ‘extended situation’ which necessitates bodily movement and puts ‘kinaesthetic demands’ on the body (Morris, 1966, p. 231). Like Merleau-Ponty, he sees the audience not only as an integral part of the spatiality of the work, but he also acknowledges that Minimalism is reflexive through ‘one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space’ as the work (Morris, 1966, p.232).

The importance of the ideas of Merleau-Ponty in relation to sculpture was also acknowledged in the writing of critics Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried. Merleau-Ponty offered a new way of thinking about viewing art and the relation of the body to sculpture that went beyond the more conventional formal analysis of the time. However, Krauss and Fried used these ideas in very different ways. Fried used Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to articulate a critique of Antony Caro’s abstract metal sculptures through figuration and bodily response whereas Krauss focussed on the experience of Morris and Judd’s works as the sum of a series of bodily sensations produced from different standpoints (Potts, 2000). Fried, therefore, uses phenomenology to place the autonomous work of art

as being in dialogue with the human body and Krauss focuses on a more decentred and expansive bodily experience that was temporal and spatialised and sympathetic to the Minimalist project.

At the same time that Minimalist artists were exploring perception and expanded situations, computer science was developing and applying the concepts of computationalism and artificial intelligence (AI). This primarily involved using abstract symbols and rules – an inherently disembodied approach in which cognition was conceptualised as computational and representational with the mind seen as the software running on the hardware of the body (Thompson, 2007). After some initial success in AI, it became obvious in the 1980s, as Hans Moravec wrote in his 1988 book Mind Children, that humans are ‘prodigious Olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy’. He also wrote that, while computers could easily undertake higher level reasoning, they lack the resources necessary for even low-level sensorimotor activities (Moravec, 1988, 15–16). In his 1990 paper Elephants Don’t Play Chess, Rodney Brooks points out that traditional AI’s ‘grounding in reality has rarely been achieved’ and suggested that an ‘ongoing physical interaction with the environment as the primary source of constraint on the design of intelligent systems’ was necessary to build more complex systems (Brooks, 1990, p.1) Interestingly, researchers to returned to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. This is evident in Varela, Thompson and Rosch ‘s pivotal book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) where the authors introduce their work as “a modern continuation of a program of research founded over a generation ago by the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (Varela et al. 1991, xv).

However, concepts of embodiment were not seen as valuable by the broader scientific community until towards the end of the twentieth century (Ramachandran, 1998, p. 1852). While much of the research into neurocognition now involves sophisticated technological imaging, basic neurological testing can still be done with simple analogue objects and embodied physical activity. For example, being able to walk in a straight line is still used to demonstrate healthy neurological function. Simple analogue objects and tests remain useful as little is really known about the brain on a neural level. Researcher Professor William Uttal criticised brain imaging as ‘seductive’, labelling MRIs and EEGs as ‘blunt instruments’ or ‘epistemological sledgehammers’ (2011, p. 46). Uttal describes the brain as a ‘dynamically changing four-dimensional network of interconnecting and interactive components of vaguely defined, redundant and overlapping functions and, thus, everchanging spatial limits’ (p. 45) and writes of the difficulty or impossibility of identifying any kind of mental activity at the neuronal level (p. 19). Ultimately, there is a need to find alternative methodologies for understanding cognition beyond the brain and it seems that a more holist approach through embodiment may be more productive.

This research is not concerned with measuring brain activity or any other sensory phenomena in a quantitative way. It is, however, concerned with experience produced in the gallery and studio where the work is produced and encountered through the body. This research focuses on an embodied approach, which implicates the body, brain and environment in a complex and reciprocal relationship

as a ‘whole brain-body-environment system’ (Kiverstein & Miller, 2015, p. 9), which was developed partly in response to the failures of AI and computationalism in general. This approach focuses on the body as the source of knowing, and the mind as a tool for interpretation. Rather than the mind telling the body what to do, sensory inputs via the body constantly provide information to the mind in a continuous feedback loop. This flow of sensory information and response between mind, body and the world is so dense and continuous that our thoughts about the world and our place in it cannot come from cognition alone. Instead, we think through an ongoing and reciprocal exchange between the mind and our bodily responses to the environment (Gallagher, 2005). These exchanges are multidirectional and become part of our cognitive system, influencing future interactions and decision- making.

Embodiment is a revolutionary concept for psychology, neuroscience and social science that challenges epistemic and cultural assumptions (Papadopoulos, 2011, p. 432). It involves complex interactions between multiple specialist disciplines such as ecological psychology, experimental phenomenology and neuroscience which are outside the scope of this research. However, if we simply theorise that our thinking develops through our bodily interactions with the world as philosopher Shaun Gallagher outlines in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), it then becomes possible that we could change our brains through our actions. This is particularly important as the brain was once thought to be immutable. However, complex experiments and studies have shown that the brain is more flexible and less localised than initially thought (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1999). Malleability, plasticity and flexibility are terms that not only refer to sculpture, but also describe the relationship between the body, brain and the environment.

An embodied approach is particularly relevant when considering the experience of sculpture, given the involvement of the moving body is usually essential during the perceptual process. In fact, the sculptural encounter in this research relies on the presence of a body or bodies that can experience and respond to the work. This embodied experience is partly optical but the emphasis is on affective and lived experience, which involves a tactile approach to the sculptural work. This can also involve giving the audience agency within a work that is interactive and can be played with, rearranged or entered into from different directions. Dorothea von Hantelmann describes this type of work as being part of the experiential turn and defines it as ‘performative’. She argues in her online essay The Experiential Turn (2014) that ‘from the 1960s onwards the creation and shaping of experiences have increasingly become an integral part of the artwork’s conception’ (para. 5). This concept of performativity is important in understanding the sculptural encounter in this research because it focuses on the audience response and how the work shapes audience experience through the body.

SCULPTURE AND COGNITION

As part of this research, I have developed a series of sculptural works that respond in various ways to ideas that extend cognition beyond the limits of the brain and spinal cord and away from concepts of

representation and computationalism. I propose that these works are cognitively embodied, enactive, embedded and extended in different ways in different parts of the research. These philosophical concepts have developed over time and through the work of multiple practitioners (Dreyfus, 2009; Varela et al., 1991; Gibson 1979) as an alternative to cognition based on representation and information processing. A post-cognitive approach sees perception, cognition and action as interconnected and part of the same ‘continuous, spatio-temporally extended process’ (Lobo, 2019, p. 356). In the last decade, these post-cognitivist areas of study have also become known collectively as 4E cognition bringing together embodied, enactive, embedded and extended approaches (Newen et al., 2018). These different approaches are still contested and there are continuing theoretical developments and disagreements as the research develops. However, these ideas provide a useful frame for potential understandings of the sculptural encounter to articulate how sculpture is perceived, felt and understood through the body. They also present gaps in the knowledge surrounding post- cognitivism and its applications to sculpture.

To expand on the usefulness of understanding this approach to the sculptural encounter, it is important to briefly clarify how each of the 4Es of cognition relate to this research project. Embodiment as described by Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) is at the core of this research and is discussed throughout the whole dissertation. Enactive cognition or enactivism as described by Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) and Noe (2004) is closely connected to embodiment and is an essential part of the sculptural encounter as they are mediated and activated by the moving body. Embedded cognition functions in a related external environment (Wheeler, 2013) and extended cognition, as proposed by Clark and Chalmers in The Extended Mind (1998), proposes that cognition extends into the world and outside of the ‘boundaries of the skin and skull’ (p. 7). This is a particularly interesting concept for sculpture if cognition extends into art as a way of making sense of the world or as a method of enquiry.

While these ideas have been applied to a range of situations involving cognition, there has been little research into how these theories can be used to understand cognition through art practice. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris states that there is a critical lack of application of these theories to material culture and the specific practices, techniques and social skills involved (2018). For example, when Clark and Chalmers wrote about the extended mind, they used the example of paper and pencil, notebook, slide rule and other types of media as extending cognition rather than engaging with material culture in a broader sense (Malafouris, 2018). In fact, they use an example of directions to the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in a notebook to describe extended cognition but do not enter the gallery and consider how art or other cultural artefacts might extend cognition. There is only a handful of theorists who discuss contemporary art practice directly in relation to cognition, including Alva Noe (2000) who writes about Richard Serra, Minissales who uses specific examples of contemporary sculpture in his book The Psychology of Contemporary Art (2013), and Penny (2017) who is an artist himself.

This research makes connections between art practice and theories of perception and cognition through active engagement with sculptural artworks. It identifies with embodiment and enaction and considers how cognition can be embedded into and potentially extend into sculptural work. By bringing together brain, body and environment through art practice, the research highlights how the artist and audience can encounter sculpture with an expanded sensory awareness.

CHAPTER TWO: Expanding the Field

This chapter outlines the initial body of work created for this research. These works began from an interest in neuroscience, cognition, embodiment, and questions about where the body and sculptural works begin and end, and where they intersect to create continuity and discontinuity. This chapter begins with a discussion of the mirror box, and describes a series of works that expand bodily continuity through illusion and artifice to create affective responses in the viewer. These works consolidate the connections to concerns in cognitive science, but clearly locate experience within the discipline of sculpture and contemporary art practice. Importantly, they also explore the sculptural encounter through interaction and play.

PART 1: MIRRORS, DOUBLING AND BODILY BOUNDARIES

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Fig. 2: Physical therapist, Jeremy McVay, demonstrating mirror therapy, 2011 (left) Fig. 3: V.S. Ramachandran’s mirror box, 2006, line drawing (right)

This practice-led research was initiated by a simple object: the mirror box devised by neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, first used in 1993 (Ramachandran & Altschuler, 2009, p. 1697).This built on the research of neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita who first researched neuroplasticity and sensory substitution in the late 1960s (Bach-y-Rita, 2004). The mirror box is a form of sensory substitution in which visual information is linked to and substituted for tactile sensation and is used clinically by occupational therapists to treat the pain and discomfort often experienced by people with phantom limb pain as shown in Figure 2 (McVay, 2011). The mirror box is employed in this project as the conduit to connect sculpture and cognitive science. It is formally similar to sculptural objects and demonstrates the potential creativity and inventiveness involved in developing and transforming physical objects to test perception in clinical settings. This can be seen in the mirrored cubes of Robert Morris (Untitled 1965), Olafur Eliasson’s suspended glass and mirrored work Seeing Yourself Seeing (2001), and in Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrored rooms, which she has been exhibiting since the mid-1960s. While these works and the mirror box involve mirrors and vision, they also directly engage with notions of embodiment through the perception and understanding of bodily boundaries. Importantly, the phantom limb is a presence which is ‘felt rather than seen’ (Frank, 2007, p. 524). This

encounter with the absent body, and subsequent ways of thinking about and through different configurations of the body, provided a strong starting point for a more open-ended creative exploration of the sculptural encounter.

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Fig. 4: Robert Morris, Untitled, 1965 (reconstructed 1971), mirror, glass and wood, each cube: 914 x 914 x 914 mm

The phantom limb sensation represents a loss of bodily continuity in both space and time and is an example of the complex sensations that constitute human consciousness. Phantom limbs are a well- known phenomenon in which a part of the body that has been lost or amputated continues to feel vividly present and is often painful or uncomfortable. Importantly, phantom limbs feel like they are still part of the body. While pain and paralysis is common, some people can move and feel their phantoms just as they feel the rest of the body (Ramachandran & Altschuler, 2009, p. 1696). It is more commonly seen in upper limb amputees than lower limb amputees (Subedi & Grossberg, 2011, p. 1), but phantom sensations and pain have also been reported upon the removal of other body parts, such as the eyes, teeth, tongue, breast, penis, bowel and bladder (Weeks et al., 2010, p. 270). In this research, the focus is predominantly on the upper limbs, but it is important to note that almost any sensate part of the body can develop a phantom.

While the phantom limb phenomenon has been discussed widely in the scientific literature, it poses questions about the phenomenology of bodily experiences, and contributes to the strong connections between the concern of artists with the sensate body as both object and subject. The concept that a physically displaced body part could still be felt and have enough latency to be neurally memorialised is engaging and has been studied in a range of disciplines, including contemporary art. There have been a number of exhibitions using the idea of the phantom limb curatorially and many artists who have worked directly with the concept. Vanessa Beacroft’s marble work le membre fantome at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Diana Al-Hadid’s series of gypsum abstracted figures Phantom Limb (2014), Odani Motohiko’s Phantom Limb (2011) exhibition in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s installation Potentiality for Love (2018) all explore absent body parts in sculptural form. Photographer Alexa Wright created a series of photographic works that documented the experience of phantom limbs through photography and text (these works will be discussed later in this chapter). These

phenomena have also been popularised by books such as Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1985), V.S. Ramachandran’s A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Imposter Poodles to Purple Numbers (2004) and Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself (2007), which all discuss phantom limbs and other ideas in neuroscience that relate directly to the body in vivid detail. For example, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Oliver Sacks writes:

A sailor accidentally cut off his right index finger. For forty years afterwards he was plagued by an intrusive phantom of the finger rigidly extended, as it was when cut off. Whenever he moved his hand toward his face – for example, to eat or to scratch his nose – he was afraid that this phantom finger would poke his eye out. (He knew this to be impossible, but the feeling was irresistible) (Sacks, 1985, p. 61).

This and many other descriptions of intriguing neurological conditions in which the body is conceived of in other ways has a resonance with Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny. While Freud’s definitions of the uncanny were initially elusive, it is clear that the experience of the phantom limb echoes Freud’s thinking: it is both familiar and unfamiliar, and it causes anxiety and doubt. However, the uncanny also refers to a range of other uncomfortable feelings, which come from a variety of experiences with phenomena such as ‘doppelgangers or doubles, waxwork figures, corpses, dismembered limbs, automata, coincidences, presentiments (which come true), and other apparently supernatural or magical phenomena, such as apparent hauntings and magical powers’ (Windsor, 2019, 53–54). Windsor also writes of the importance of the concept of the uncanny for aesthetics, as it accounts for our experience with many creative works from Gothic novels to Surrealist work, to more contemporary works, such as the photographic portraits of Cindy Sherman, Rachel Whiteread’s cast of internal architectural space, and Ron Mueck’s hyperreal figurative sculpture (Windsor, 2019, p. 52). This experience of the uncanny, according to Gregorio Kohn, is also shared with the psychoanalytic experience in that they are both permeated with ‘uncertainty, anxiety, alienation, silence, opaqueness, aloneness and doubt’ (Kohn, as cited in Bronstein & Seulin, 2019, p. 76). These ideas exhibit the deep connections that exist in the sculptural encounter, which are felt through the body and have a resonance with the existence or absence of the phantom limb.

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Fig. 5: Ron Mueck, A Girl, 2006, mixed media, 110 x 501 x 134.5 cm

Historically, the phantom limb phenomenon can be traced back to the sixteenth century. There is some contention over when the condition was first noted, but one of the first doctors to document the condition was Ambroise Paré, a French military surgeon. Paré wrote a series of books on surgical techniques, in which he noted phantom sensations, and developed successful surgical and post- operative treatments for gunshot wounds (Finger & Hustwit, 2003, p. 676). In the seventeenth century, French philosopher Rene Descartes argued that the phantom’s presence could be explained by the transmission of information pertaining to the lost limb by nerves adjacent to where the amputation took place (Russon, 2013, p. 82). Locating the sensations at the site of the lost limb supported Descartes’s theories of dualism and, in particular, the unity of the mind compared to the fragmented body. It was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon was understood and used to understand connections between the brain and the body. The term phantom limb was first used by military doctor Silas Weir Mitchell in the early twentieth century (Wade, 2004). This history is important to this research as it demonstrates how understanding the pathology of the body was implicated in opening up broader notions of human consciousness.

Despite this history, the exact mechanism of phantom limb pain is still not known. It is widely thought that multiple mechanisms are most likely responsible. Most research focuses on central neural mechanisms involving neural plasticity, resulting in changes to the ‘body schema’ and the presence of mirror neurons (Subedi & Grossberg, 2011, p. 3). The body schema is the ‘internal, dynamic representation of the spatial and biochemical properties of one’s body, and is derived from multiple sensory and motor inputs that interact with motor systems in the generation of actions’ (Giummarraa et al., 2007, p. 223). These interactions occur without awareness or the need for perceptual monitoring (Gallagher, 2005, p. 24). It was originally thought that the brain, and therefore the body schema, was relatively fixed by adulthood. However, while the brain may not be as infinitely malleable as contemporary sculpture, it is now understood that changes in neural pathways occur throughout healthy adult life via learning and memory, and in response to changes in embodiment due to injury and illness. Most importantly, specific functions may not be limited to particular areas of the brain. Environmental factors can markedly affect neural plasticity in both positive and negative ways. Although phantom limb pain is generally caused by injury and is viewed as negative or maladaptive, successful treatment for phantom limb pain shows that the brain can compensate for the loss and that it continues to alter and reprogram neural pathways throughout life (Ramachandran, 1998, p. 1852). For patients, understanding the phantom sensation as a relevant and important part of sensate experience, rather than an illusion or merely a psychological state as the name suggests, not only offers a more holistic view of their experience in the world, but also expands understandings of how a sensate body might be constituted.

Consequently, I suggest the experiences of both phantom limb and mirror box are disruptive and have created a shift in the way cognitive science understands the connections between body and brain. The work done by Bach-y-Rita, Gibson and then Ramachandran confirmed that, rather than brain functions being hardwired and localised, and any damage being permanent, the brain and body are in

a state of dynamic equilibrium with each other with connections being constantly formed and reformed as environmental conditions change (Ramachandran & Altschuler, 2009, p. 1708). This has resonance with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of bodily integration within the environment forming a system. Drew Leder expands on these ideas, suggesting that bodily ‘presence is fleshed out by a ceaseless stream of kinesthesias, cutaneous and visceral sensations defining my body’s space and extension and yielding information about position, balance, state of tension, desire and mood’ (Leder, 1990, p. 23). This research does not seek to isolate any particular sensation but rather to explore what Leder defined as an assemblage of ‘immediately lived sensations’ (p. 23).

In response to these ideas, I began my research project by taking a series of photographs of my own hands using the mirror and then considering structures that, in full scale, could contain and mirror parts of the body. As a researcher, these photographs are important as they demonstrate the illusory strength of the mirrored surface, as well as the potential embodied knowledge that can be captured within the photograph. By touching the mirrored surface, the body develops an uncanny continuity created by the doubling of a single body part. As a simple analogue technology, the mirror has a very contemporary sensibility in its capacity to create hybrid structures. As the mirror box illustrates, this can have a profound effect on our comprehension of our bodies and their boundaries and edges.

Fig. 6: Fleur Summers, Hand and mirror experiment, 2013

These photographs document this experiment. In each photograph, the actual hand appears on the right with the mirror image on the left. The images are simple, however the actual experience of fracturing, doubling and reimagining my body is of profound importance in this research. Despite my knowledge and experience of using mirrors every day, I was forced to reconsider the experience in a new light. Phenomenologically, it produced an unsettling and uncanny feeling despite my understanding of the illusory space beyond the mirror. Additionally, the surface of the mirror appeared to act like a membrane or portal between the two parts of myself. This extension of space emphasised a psychological space and, like the self-portrait, represented my body but also questioned and disrupted reality. The resultant photographs, in which the mirror itself becomes invisible and immaterial, provide clear examples of the possibilities of the material continuity of the

body. As a very simple experiment, these photographs show the capacity of the mirror to cause at least a momentary sense of proliferation and extension of bodily boundaries. The experience of the extension and doubling itself is not an illusion. The environment in which the experience occurs is extended and becomes part of the perceptual field and my experiments demonstrate my attempts to discover the affordances of the mirrors. Affordances are the possibilities for action contained within an environment and were described by psychologist James Gibson in his book The senses considered as perceptual systems (1966/1983). Gibson defined affordances, as follows, in his later book The ecological approach to visual perception (1979):

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (Gibson, 1979, p.127).

Affordance is also a term used in interactive design, although the definition is slightly different. In his book The Design of Everyday Things (1988), Donald Norman described affordances as something an object suggests to the user which is more specific and less open than the environmental possibilities that Gibson originally proposed. Despite these different definitions, the mirror offers an environment, that in collaboration with my body, offers an experience of the reorganisation of the body and has the potential to create new sensations, thoughts and actions simply through reflection.

Fig. 7: Fleur Summers, Experimental photographic series of hands and mirrors, 2013

Artist Alexa Wright attempted to visualise these experiences of hybrid and extended bodies in her 1997 photographic series ‘After Image’. This work was a collaboration with the neurologist John Kew and the neuropsychologist Professor Peter Halligan to research and visualise phantom limbs (Wright,

1997). These digitally enhanced images enabled amputees to describe and visualise their phantom limbs alongside their prostheses. Wright’s photographs endow their subjects with agency and validate lived experiences of body image. In Figure 8 (Wright, 1997), the portrait of ‘LN’ shows the amputee with his prosthetic lower arm (from the elbow down) straight alongside his body and the phantom bent at the elbow and behind his back. This digitally altered photograph reflects LN’s sensate experience. Alongside the photograph, the artist documented the amputee’s experience:

The phantom and the prosthetic arm are two independent arms. Bending or straightening the prosthesis makes no difference to the phantom, but if I can’t move the stump I can’t move the phantom. When the stump is angled backwards the phantom passes through my body to the back: the actual position of the stump affects the position of the phantom. I only Image removed due to copyright restrictions notice the phantom if I think about it or if it is doing one of its twinges; otherwise it is not there. The wrist where the intense radiotherapy was done is more noticeable than any other part of it. The phantom doesn’t respond to anything. It’s just there. I can’t scratch it, I can’t hit it, I can’t do anything with it; it’s not there except that it feels as though it is there. I know it is mine because I can move it, but I don’t really Fig. 8: Alexa Wright, After Image LN2, 1997, regard it as part of myself (Wright, 1997). digitally manipulated C-type photograph, 56 x 75 cm

The phantom limb is both present and not present. It is only activated under certain conditions, and exists in addition to the prostheses. ‘After Image’ not only questioned bodily boundaries but also critiqued ‘dominant discourses that construct the boundaries of subjectivity’ (Irwin, 2012, p. 72). It visually breaks down Descartes’s theorised divide of mind and body, and offers the possibility of other ways to experience living in a body. In Time Travels, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz questions whether prostheses should be ‘understood more in terms of aesthetic re-organization and proliferation, the consequence of an inventiveness that functions beyond and perhaps in defiance of pragmatic need?’ (2005, p. 147). Grosz refers to the capacity of prosthetic bodies to generate new fields of action. While many phantoms are dysfunctional, their presence alongside a prosthetic device also creates multiple sensate experiences.

While Alexa Wright’s photographs photographically re-articulate the phantom limb in a concrete and visual way, my research initially explored the encounter of the moving body by expanding perceptual and prosthetic boundaries through experiments based on the mirror box. The mirror box is used as a strategy for complicating subjective and individual boundaries – both physically and through illusory

and extended space – to create other phenomenological experiences. The mirror is used to provide artificial visual feedback to the brain by causing it to view the reflection of the healthy limb in the visual plane of the missing limb and in effect ‘tricking’ the brain into believing the missing limb is moving. This is not unlike an illusionistic magic trick using mirrors to create a disembodied head or a levitating body. These magic tricks and the mirror box rely on our inability to distinguish between an object and its image, as well as our strong affective responses to these optical illusions, especially when we know that a talking disembodied head is impossible. They illustrate the potential of mirrors in other perceptual situations.

If the phantom limb pain is induced by a conflict between visual feedback and proprioceptive representations of the amputated limb, then illusions or imagery of movement of the amputated limb have the potential to reduce the pain (Chan et al., 2007, p. 2206). This potentially releases the phantom from its disembodiment by reinstating the motor-sensory feedback loop. By providing visual feedback of a limb that is not actually sending back any sensory information this actual neuronal activity may disrupt the negative pain cycle (Lamont et al., 2011, p. 370). Mirror box therapy is also theorised as demonstrating the function of mirror neurons. These neurons are thought to be activated both when individuals carry out motor tasks and when they see similar activities undertaken by others. This activity accounts for learning via demonstration. The pain relief associated with therapy for phantom limbs may be due to the activation of these neurons that occur while watching the healthy limb move (Chan et al., 2007, p. 2206). While this research acknowledges the neural involvement of the pain, it is important to note that it is through the experience of embodiment that neural changes can occur.

As mirror boxes are known to alter clinical and neural responses and share formal relationships with sculptural objects, these physical structures were used to begin a sculptural investigation into embodied perception. Ultimately, it appears that if the study of phantom limbs ‘provides a valuable experimental opportunity to investigate how new connections emerge in the adult brain, how information from different sensory modalities, e.g. touch, proprioception and vision, interact, and how the brain continuously updates its model of reality in response to novel sensory inputs’ (Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1998, p. 1626), then it may also be possible to study sculptural and installation practices that experiment with the body in a similar manner. Not only do these creative practices actively interrogate and experiment with knowledge from neuroscience, they also have the capacity to create new methodologies to extend knowledge of the conceptualisation of space and the body through embodied experiences.

The use of mirrors focuses on the ocular, which is critiqued in the introduction to this research. However, mirrors have been used extensively in sculpture. Sight and the mirrored image are important in embodiment, as they are part of a system of internal and external stimulation that make up the ever-changing body schema. Mirrors also provide a vehicle for exploring embodiment that critiques vision. Mirrors are also a relatively contemporary technology despite their ubiquity, having

first become widely available through mass production in the nineteenth century industrial revolution. Materially, the flat surface of the mirror gives an illusory sense of transparency as mirrors are actually opaque surfaces that are almost 100 percent reflective. While mirrors have a long cultural history as a perceptual device in western art and culture, I am interested in how artists have used mirrors spatially to expand and contract space and to de-centre and displace the body – particularly in sculpture. In these works, mirrors were used with bodies and/or objects in strategies of repetition and inversion, spatialisation and fragmentation creating virtual images of bodies disrupted through spatial dislocation. In terms of the phenomenological encounter, mirrors provide feedback. They allow the subject to watch themselves and act as a vehicle for self-knowledge. However, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, they can act as a dialectical device giving information about one’s body that also creates a sense of alienation.

At the same time that the image makes possible the knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately, to be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror. To use Lacan’s terms, I am “captured, caught up” by my spatial image. Thereupon I leave the reality of my lived me in order to refer myself constantly to the ideal, fictitious, or imaginary me, of which the specular image is the first outline. In this sense, I am torn from myself, and the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious alienation, which will be the alienation by others. For others have only an exterior image of me, which is analogous to the one seen in the mirror. Consequently, others will tear me away from my immediate inwardness much more surely than will the mirror (Merleau- Ponty, 1962, p. 136).

As Merleau-Ponty points out, mirrors are often contradictory in their effect on consciousness. On one hand they confirm consciousness, endow self-recognition, and in Lacanian terms, define and further our understanding of the difference between self and other. On the other hand, they also act as a conduit between the real and illusionist or virtual world. Through these mechanisms, they provide feedback. Merleau-Ponty discussed this mechanism in his discussion on the role of the mirror image in his essay Eye and Mind:

the mirror image anticipates, within things, the labor of vision. Like all other technical objects … the mirror arises upon the open circuit [that goes] from seeing body to visible body...The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 6).

This reflective circuit and the resultant continuity and discontinuity is often explored in artworks. Danish contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson considered the notion of continuous feedback in Seeing Yourself Seeing (2001). The viewer experiences this work by looking through a suspended piece of glass with thin mirrored vertical strips. Thus, they see themselves reflected back as well as simultaneously looking through the glass to the space beyond. This creates a fragmented double

image that fractures and re-aligns each time the viewer moves and provides a different experience for every viewer. In this situation, the viewer cannot remain a passive observer; they are implicated in the work and consequently embedded within it. The mirror accentuates the subjectivity of the activity of spectatorship and forces the viewer to reconsider their role. In a similar manner, the contradictory feedback from the mirror box causes a crisis in representation and forces active changes in neuronal activity in the brain.

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Fig. 9: Olafur Eliasson, Seeing Yourself Seeing, 2001, glass, mirror, wood

This can also be seen in the work of Jeppe Hein work in Semicircular Space (2016), a loose labyrinth of evenly spaced vertical reflective mirrored stainless strips. The encounter of this work creates confusion in understanding what is your reflection, and what is real in the spaces between reflections. There is a flickering between objects and bodies as you walk through the work that is reminiscent of the cinematic. This movement through the work and the temporal nature of the encounter is an essential experience of the work, as is the constant fractured recognition of self. This inability to control one’s image is confusing and can result in feelings of dissociation and disembodiment. The encounter then becomes one of recognition and dislocation. Through the experience of the work as a phenomenological fragmentation or loss, we learn to negotiate and understand the relations between the images and our bodies, and to potentially reconstitute ourselves.

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Fig. 10: Jeppe Hein, Semicircular Space, 2016, stainless steel, dimensions variable

Seeing Yourself Seeing and Semicircular Space acknowledge the viewer and complicate the encounter through the inclusion of mirrors. Like the mirror box, they ask the viewer to negotiate structures that create, through temporal and physical encounters, an unfolding experience of consciousness involving a continual adjustment in the way the body is embodied and felt. The dislocation and disruption experienced reflects normative values of wholeness, and as Linda Nochlin describes in her seminal essay The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994), fragmentation is a symbol of loss and of the body in chaos. However, Modernist and contemporary artists have used these ideas of transgressions of the body to create new forms and experiences, and this can be seen in the work of artists such as Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois. Both artists go beyond the boundaries of the skin and use the fragmented body to explore gender through narrative and memory. It is worth noting that while that neither Nochlin, nor any of the artists she discusses, consider this fragmentation in relation to the intersections of disabled subjectivity (Cachia, 2013). I would like to add that while the subject of this project does not include disability, I am aware that this is a topic that deserves further investigation.

My own experiences with the mirror also illustrate the capacity to extend and comprehend the body in a different way. As a very simple phenomenological experiment, photographic documentation demonstrates how the body can very simply be extended spatially and augmented. While the outcome of these experiments is documented by a series of photographs, it is the embodiment experienced that informs my unfolding perception, despite my conceptual knowledge of bodily boundaries. While mirror box therapy is used to explain the neural basis of the phantom limb, it is the perception of embodiment experienced through movement of the body that achieves this. Despite the ocular nature of the therapy, it is embodiment and enaction which creates the illusion of bodily continuity and can help to resolve the pain. This shift in the way of thinking about cognition and the

body is productive and can be used to further understandings of cognition in our lived experience and in contemporary sculpture.

PART 2: MODELLING SENSATION AND PLAY

The mirror box uses illusion as a way to alleviate the pain of a phantom limb through alternative ways of conceiving the boundaries of the body. In this section, I discuss projects that used this knowledge to create a series of hybrid objects and structures with mirrors to be encountered as sculptural works. This is achieved through the construction of models, undertaking visual research, and constructing full-scale experiential sculptural works. These works use play to encourage the audience to interact with the work.

Fig. 11: Fleur Summers, Studio models, 2013, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard, paper, table tennis bat and ball

In response to my earlier photographs, I created a series of models initially consisting of hybrid structures related to the mirror box that combine mirrors, tables and desks. The aim was to create structures that naturally involve interaction with moving hands and arms in a similar way to the mirror box. These elements connect to create embodied experiences in which sculptural works are encountered through active engagement. The models, constructed from balsa wood, coloured and mirrored cardboard, offered a range of propositional structures that allowed me to think through the potential sculptural outcomes as physical forms. Models were important throughout the entire research project. They operate not only as pragmatic, to-scale miniatures, but also as ways to generate ideas and model thought processes. They also became objects in their own right, and gave me the opportunity to experience the strength of the illusory space of the mirror on a small scale.

Just as the experience of documenting my hand in the mirror was an important encounter, the role of the hand in both making and testing models has important implications. There is a direct and reciprocal relationship involving neurological and physical elements in making and testing objects with the hands. As Frank R. Wilson wrote in The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, ‘the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand’ (Wilson, 1998, p. 276). Pallasmaa in The Thinking Hand also states that the ‘three-dimensional material model speaks to the hand and body as powerfully as to the eye’ (Pallasmaa, 2009, p. 57). This dialogue

between the hand, model and brain was experienced with one of the first rough models I made. I tried placing one of my fingers perpendicular to the mirror in a similar position to Ramachandran’s mirror box. Even without the clarity of a glass mirror, the rudimentary mirrored cardboard surface was strong enough to create the illusion of having an extra or supernumerary finger. The experience of virtual prosthesis so early in the process was unexpected and powerful. This is clearly illustrated in the photograph and created a strong although temporary sensation.

Fig. 12: Fleur Summers, Testing studio models, 2013, balsa wood, cardboard

Through these early stages of this research, my growing awareness of my own encounter with the work as it developed flagged an important broadening of my definition of the sculptural encounter which was not fully considered at the beginning of the process. If we look towards phenomenological research methodologies, acknowledgement of the lived experience of the researcher is of great importance and I began to understand the relevance of accounting for my own subjective perception of the research. It was important to experience the work as it developed without being ‘obstructed by pre-conceptions and theoretical notions’ (van Manen, 1997, p.184) and to try to capture these feelings as they emerged. While there is a purely pragmatic side to model making for sculpture, the process of model making simulates the construction process. It is an encounter with the materials through construction, and with the finished model, with the hands and mind. As I constructed the models, I considered the materiality of the balsa wood, which enables rapid and simple construction. It is light and easy to work with, a scalpel slices through it easily, and ideas can be quickly materialised. Despite the difference between this material and the 18mm thick large plywood sheets eventually used in construction, this process of making and thinking through ideas also allowed me to experience an embodied encounter through my hands, which had a central role in this stage of the research.

Each of the models I constructed used props, supports and formal structures and arrangements to frame the mirrors just as the original mirror box did. The planar structure of the mirror and relative

fragility of glass requires support and framing within more rigid materials. The reductive nature of the mirror box and its formal relationship to Minimalist primary structures led me to consider other basic structures and constructed spaces that contain individual bodies or parts of bodies. Using internet searches and through photographic documentation, I collected a series of images of desks, chairs, polling booths, library carrels and tables. Many of the objects in my visual research were repetitive and essentially reductive, Modernist constructions from educational institutions, the library in particular. These are known, recognisable formal structures that contain embodied knowledge about their intended function. Not only do these structures restrict, contain and divide bodies, they also potentially provide the separation necessary to facilitate active focus on the experience and subsequently the capacity for developing knowledge about the body in a similar way to the mirror box. This was an important part of my strategy in trying to use known structures or ready-mades to create expanded experiences or encounters. I was looking both for furniture formally similar to the mirror box to encourage similar neurocognitive and physical engagement, as well as familiar structures to encourage direct engagement with the work. It was important that the objects implied interaction and that my audience felt comfortable in touching and being physically engaged with them. My aim was to build affordances into the works, as described by psychologist James Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), so audiences could understand the relational nature of the works without instruction.

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Fig. 13: Fleur Summers, Visual research for library furniture and polling booths

As well as constructing and experimenting with individual models, I also made a model for a proposed work titled Sensory Field (2013). This model included a mirrored library cubicle, a mirrored tabletop partition placed on the ground, a lump of green putty on a mirrored plinth, a mirrored tunnel big enough to crawl through, a large piece of paper on a round mirrored dais for the audience to crush, a low table with a mirrored divider to bounce a ball over, and a large gymnastic mat to lie on. This group of objects was in part inspired by occupational therapy rooms used for paediatric physical therapy. These therapy rooms can be used to help children develop new brain connectivity over a range of sensory concerns including the haptic or tactile, proprioceptive, or vestibular. Like the mirror box, these therapies involve harnessing the potential of brain plasticity through embodied activities. As a potential artwork, it allowed me to consider a range of activities that could occur simultaneously. They

also indicated the open-ended nature of this stage of the research. This was an important part of this research: my heuristic approach and these ideas, realised as models, were an essential part of my physical and conceptual encounters with the work.

Fig. 14: Fleur Summers, Model for Sensory Field, 2013

Playtime (2014) The work Playtime included three of the forms developed as models and explored them in full scale, as part of the 2014 Substation Contemporary Art Prize. Playtime was loosely named in reference to the 1967 Jacques Tati film of the same name, in which Tati explored the formal qualities of institutional structures and used spatial incongruity, play and humour as a critique of modernity. In one scene of the film, Tati explored a Modernist office of identical cubicles which appeared to mirror each other to confound and confuse the central character. In a sense, the film is a discourse on boundaries and identities challenging both the central character and the viewer to identify and understand complex ‘scenic construction and multiple-plane choreography of humans and objects’ (Hilliker, 2002, 319–20). For similar reasons, I used institutional furniture and architectural structures with reductive characteristics. However, while Tati’s work was a critique of the uniformity and repetition of utopian French hyper-modernity, my interest was not so concerned with how bodies are controlled by reductive design but how sensations and perception are produced within these structures.

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Fig. 15: Still from Jacques Tati’s film Playtime, 1967

Playtime consisted of three distinct encounters for the viewer. Firstly, a mirrored double library carrel was constructed of plywood with simple steel legs. It was lined with acrylic mirror and divided by a double-sided mirror the height of a standard table tennis net. Secondly, a simple table divider was constructed of two pieces of plywood each with mirror on one side, slotted together and placed on the ground. Thirdly, a 5kg lump of orange plasticine was placed on a small plywood box with a single piece of acrylic mirror on the top. Together these objects operated as a kind of indoor play area where the viewer could move from work to work and experience each in a haptic, engaged manner. The library carrel provided the most recognisable experience especially with the provision of table tennis bats and balls. The plasticine also invited interaction as it was obvious that it had been handled and experienced. The plasticine was a reference to malleability and is similar the therapeutic putty used by physiotherapists to help patients exercise particular muscles of the hand, often used in conjunction with the mirror box. The mirrored divider was more abstract in a formal sense as it was difficult to see as fifty percent of the divider was mirrored. It was displaced by being on the floor rather than a table, and it was also grounded by a square of synthetic grass that indicated the space around it, which could be entered. All three of these structures contained mirrors that could be looked into or faced inwards and as thus created an expanded interiorised mirrored field.

Fig. 16: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, plywood, mirrored acrylic, steel, artificial turf, table tennis bats and balls, plasticine

I spent considerable time exploring this work and documenting it photographically. The library carell/table tennis dictated that two people should experience this work at one time. The tabletop divider worked best with an observer. Only the plasticine seemed to be something that one person could engage with alone for a more intimate experience. The act of playing of table tennis was difficult and required the development of new skills. The table was short and it required participants to use considerable space surrounding it. It was much faster and louder than conventional table tennis, and invited relational activity.

Fig. 17: Fleur Summers Playtime, 2014, table tennis library carrel, mirrored table divider and mirrored box with plasticine, plywood, mirror acrylic, steel, artificial turf, table tennis bats and balls, plasticine, dimensions variable

The most interesting of the three structures was the mirrored table divider. While it is normally used to separate people and give privacy on a large tabletop during tests and examinations, adding mirrors and placing it on the floor confounded this use. The work is experienced by looking down upon it and the feet are first reflected. Like the illusionist’s floating head, this work created third and fourth legs, as well as floating bodies. However, this was not directly experienced by the participant, but primarily by observers and in documentation. Of all the works constructed, this seemed to directly connect to the experience of the mirror box. The sensation of body swapping is reminiscent of the collaborative word and drawing chance-based game devised by the Surrealists and titled Cadavre Exquis (exquisite corpse). This work was the most interesting and revealing, and provided a range of ways in which the body of participants could be experienced. Viewing my own images after the event allowed me to recognise the potential for my own body. I still felt a strong sense of bodily displacement even from looking at a photograph, as I had experienced in my earlier mirror experiments.

Fig. 18: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Detail of mirrored table divider (left) Fig. 19: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Close up of lower legs and mirrored table divider (right)

Fig. 20: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Body with mirrored table divider

Similar effects can be seen in the documentation of American artist Joan Jonas’s performances from the 1960s and 1970s. Jonas used mirrors as a central motif. In Mirror Piece (1968–1971), in which performers carried full-length mirrors that fractured the performance space and turned the gaze of the viewer on to themselves (Rodenbeck & Lixenberg, 2007). This resulted in a dislocation of bodies by negating and reflecting other bodies. Jonas described it as follows:

From the beginning the mirror provided me with a metaphor for my reflective investigation. It also provided a device to alter space and to fragment it. By reflecting it, I could break it up. I could mix reflections of performers and audience, thereby bringing all of them into the same time and space of the performance. In addition to making a space, a mirror also disturbs space suggesting another reality through the looking glass – to see the reflection of Narcissus, to be a voyeur, to see one’s self as the other (Jonas, 2003, 117–118).

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Fig. 21: Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece, 1968–1971

The idea of being a voyeur and seeing one’s self as the other is relevant in my research. This momentary and short-lived illusion is unsettling and potentially productive as it asks what our bodies could be, and how they can grow or diminish in relation to objects we interact with. This is undoubtedly important in the sculptural encounter and how these experiences change the way we

think about our bodies and our relationships with the world. It relates to the rubber hand illusion, which is a type of body transfer illusion that involves vision, touch and proprioception and can produce the sensation of touch from an unconnected and non-corporeal body part (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998).

Unlike the clinical users of the mirror box, those involved in this research are not missing limbs nor do they suffer from phantom limb syndrome. However, at times, there appeared to be the illusion of an affective additional limb. This could be compared to supernumerary phantom limbs, in which a person feels they have an extra limb as a phantom, but it is a limb that has never existed. Another condition in which body ownership is pathologised is somatoparaphrenia, where patients deny that parts of the body actually belong to them. For example, Oliver Sacks experienced this himself and wrote about it in A Leg to Stand On after an accident in which he injured his leg:

I knew not my leg. It was utterly strange, not-mine, unfamiliar. I gazed upon it with absolute non-recognition. The more I gazed at that cylinder of chalk, the more alien and incomprehensible it appeared to me. I could no longer feel it was “mine”, as part of me. It seemed to bear no relation whatever to me. It was absolutely not-me and yet, impossibly, it was attached to me and even more impossibly, “continuous” with me (Sacks, 1984, p. 51).

This individual subjectivity of the lived body is important and points to the potential of a more holistic phenomenological understanding of body continuity and wholeness. It also creates the capacity for intersubjectivity and empathy. Cognition can be seen as embodied and enacted in these artworks, which visually create discontinuity and the potential proliferation of the body.

PART 3: TRANSPOSITIONS

The final work in this chapter expands on the encounter with library carrels, table tennis, and the mirror box. During the research, I became very interested in the library as a site of knowledge production, just as the mirror box provides knowledge of the body. Library furniture (tables, desks and carrels) provide a ground, or formal tradition of learning, which can be broken open to create new knowledge just as the library, as a site of knowledge production, has already been disrupted and is in an ongoing process of renewal. Thinking phenomenologically, the library as a site is also useful as it sustains a particular lifeworld. As architectural researcher David Seamon points out, it is the ‘constellation of experiences, actions, situations and events, all generated by and related to the individuals and groups’ within particular architectural spaces that produce ‘the ordinary, everyday taken-for-granted experiences, events, and worlds within’ (Seamon, 2016, p. 67). The contemporary library is in a state of flux as it reconstitutes itself spatially and moves from solely managing physical books, journals and microfiche, and focuses more on the business of digital information management. As libraries potentially move from places of quiet contemplation to include more active modes of thinking, I proposed the inclusion of more kinaesthetic activities to enhance and aid cognition, and to boost creativity. In particular, I became interested in table tennis as a game that is known to aid

cognition and creativity. I was aware of its presence in some workplaces, schools and rehabilitation centres to facilitate different ways of thinking through movement and play. Playing table tennis is thought to increase concentration and alertness, activates multiple regions of the brain, and develop tactical thinking skills. It also provides aerobic exercise, and social and recreational interaction (Naderi et al., 2018, p. 200).

Christine Madsen (2013) asserts that libraries should be ‘inherently social places’ and that an academic library, in particular, should be a ‘collection of services that support the creation of new knowledge’ (p. 144). Since beginning this research, the Docklands Library in Melbourne has taken on some of these ideas: ‘A recording studio, editing facilities, a big-screen TV and even a table tennis table – this is what a new library looks like in 2014’ (Nicholson, 2014, para. 1). This library provides a site for different modes of learning and there is an implicit understanding that there are different ways to use a library as social space, as well as multiple modes of knowledge production and communication.

The inclusion of the table tennis, which involves active movement, play and social activity, makes a particular statement about what constitutes a library. It acknowledges, accepts and encourages the moving body as constituent to the library. It creates a more embodied condition for library patrons that acknowledges experience in the learning paradigm. This is part of the understanding that cognitive functions alone are not sufficient and other activities may create knowledge through cognitive, affective and physiological modes. A library of the future could be described as follows:

Their emphasis will be on connectivity, not just physically providing technology to patrons, but also in linking them with sensory experiences. They will connect experience with the ever- present technological movements of social media, streaming content, and data (Kaser Corsillo, 2016, para. 1).

Interested in these notions of how sensation could be produced within the library setting, I extended my ideas about the composite library carrel, the mirror box, and table tennis table. This methodology of composite objects and altered situations is important in the research. By utilising table tennis as a readymade, and changing the rules so the participant is forced to improvise (to some extent), is a strategy that several artists have worked with. Phenomenologically, most of us have already experienced table tennis and have a sense of the rhythm and timing involved. The game has a strong social and political history. As a recognised sport, however, it is relatively new. It was devised in nineteenth century England and did not become an Olympic Sport until 1988. However, the sport played an important role in the relationship between the United States and People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. As Nicholas Griffin outlines in his book Ping Pong Diplomacy (2014), table tennis played a leading role in Communism when Chairman Mao introduced it as China’s national sport in the 1950s. At the time, table tennis was financially and spatially economical and was used as a tool for Communist propaganda. It was also used as a tool of international reconciliation by bringing

together Chinese and American teams and facilitating the meeting of President Nixon and Chairman Mao and (Griffin, 2014, p. 236) softening Cold War tensions.

The trope of table tennis as a political go-between has undoubtedly influenced artists who have made humorous and playful works using table tennis. The founding member of the group Fluxus, George Maciunas created Fluxus Ping Pong in 1976. Humour and play were an essential part of many of the works that this interdisciplinary and international group of artists produced in the 1960s and 1970s. These works also considered connections between art and life through the ‘reconfiguration of everyday day actions’ (Stiles, 1993, p. 3). Maciunas’ work included an altered table tennis table and paddles. He also made the paddles earlier without the table as Ping Pong Rackets in 1965. The commercially made table had been altered so that one side had a large hole cut into the surface and the other side was cut and hinged horizontally into an inverted ‘V’ shape, creating an apex to hit the ball over. Foam, wood blocks and tin cans were attached to the paddles, and others had holes cut in them. While it appeared to be primarily humorous, the work was essentially subversive in its attempts to break the rules and disregard the regulations. It also attempted to break down the boundaries between art and life by including sporting activities as art. This work was one of a series of paradoxical approaches to physical play called Flux-Sports. Other examples include Stilt Soccer and 220 Yard Balloon Dash (Lushetich, 2014, p. 148).

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Fig. 22: George Maciunas, Fluxus Ping Pong, 1976

My research project also uses known activities as art research and to ‘perplex the player and confound the body, requiring its realignment with conceptually implausible behavior’ (Stiles, 1993, p. 148). In this research, I proposed that perplexing the participant through the encounter has the potential to make meaning. Table tennis is a very accessible game (most people have embodied knowledge already or bodily experience) with simple rules. Sport is a useful way to test embodiment as it allows adults to play. As psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott theorised ‘it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self’ (Winnicott, 1971, p. 73). His understanding of playing referred not just to children but also to adults and their play through sport, theatre, art, humour and friendships. Open-ended and altered games are even more playful according

to author and psychiatrist Stuart Brown (2009). What makes an activity play, is that the focus is on the actual experience rather than accomplishing a goal. It is often fun, pleasurable and purposeless (Brown, 2009). Open-ended play also allows for, and accommodates failure, as it is inherently an iterative process.

Merging the sensate and embodied experiences of sport with the experience of art forces participants to think through their actions. Each sport has a specific phenomenology, which may be as simple as the smell of a new tennis ball or the crunch of the clay tennis court underneath the feet. Table tennis has its own phenomenology. The ball is smooth and light and the rubber on the bats has a particular smell and feel. The table is of light construction and is often green or blue in colour. The ball makes a brittle, hollow sound when it hits the table. We also use our bodies in particular ways – ‘the angle of the head and torso, for example, or stride length, arm movement, and leg cadence are all particular corporeal choices made on the basis of such sensory information, which will be specific to particular sports’ (Vannini et al., 2013, p. 27). Altering the game physically alters these experiences. For example, artist Gabriel Orozco created a work called Ping Pong Pond in 1998 (recreated at Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in 2015). In discussing the differences between his work and the original game, he states:

It is of course a slower game because you have a big pond in the center, and even if you know how to play Ping-Pong, you quickly realize the movements are different, the timing is different, the whole thing changes. And that’s why time, the notion of time, is completely altered. And I think this happens in many of my works (Orozco, as cited in Temkin, 2009, p. 138).

I experienced this work first-hand in Japan in 2015 when visiting Orozco’s retrospective Inner Circles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. The work celebrated the spectacle as onlookers watched four of us attempt to not only return the ball to the four different quadrants of the altered game, but also avoid hitting the ball into the pond in the centre. This pond contained water lilies surrounded by a number of already floating table tennis balls. While the work had elements of the original game, the layout was completely altered and the timing complicated. Participants had to learn how to play under these conditions. Intermittently the gallery attendant would fish out the lost balls, dry them and return them to play. The colour of the table, its basic construction, the bats and balls, are what connects the work to table tennis. However, the work is contextualised by the conventions of the gallery and the influenced by the presence of other work surrounding the table.

Fig. 23: Gabriel Orozco, Ping Pong Pond, 1998/2015, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Photo credit: Oskar Summers Dixon)

Like the work of Maciunas and Orozco, my works are hybrids of an everyday object. Maciunas uses table tennis as a readymade but, like Orozco, my works remake an altered version of table tennis that present new and different cognitive and sensate experiences that involve playful interaction. The location of these works is also pivotal. While table tennis is often played indoors, different locations frame and influence the experience. Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who is known for his participatory installations, especially those involving cooking and serving food, made a series of highly reflective stainless steel and ‘made to regulation’ table tennis tables. Tiravanija’s international exhibition, Tomorrow is the Question (2015–2016), included the table tennis works. The interactive work invites the audience to play on the mirrored tables, often in outdoor spaces, and attempts to blur the boundaries between art and life. While Tiravanija’s work has a strong focus on the relational, the intersubjective is also important in my work as a strategy to get participants to move around the work, and to experience the movement of upper limbs in the mirrored zone.

Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library (2014)

Fig. 24: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, in the West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo credit: Christo Crocker)

It seemed appropriate that Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, a full-scale hybrid table tennis table, was located in the Reading Room of West Space, a large artist-run gallery in central Melbourne. The Reading Room normally consists of three long tables with a series of bench seats adjacent to shelves containing books and magazines and other works published by or about artists. This furniture was designed and built by Melbourne artist Spiros Panigirakis and provided an ideal setting as I could place the work within a space that is both library and gallery. I did not remove anything from the Reading Room and, through a peer-reviewed process as a potential exhibitor, proposed a series of dividers on the existing tables to accommodate different activities. I suggested that the work could transform the area into a creative and interactive space, incorporating study and discussion cubicles, with space to play table tennis. I aimed to create an interactive and playful space that encouraged both individual scholarship (activities such reading and thinking) and relational activities. This was to explore what kinds of phenomenological relationships could be developed to the mirror box through the movement of the body.

The dividers were constructed with plywood and acrylic mirror and placed on the existing tabletops to create three discrete zones. Adjacent to the publication shelving, I constructed four separate cubicles

for individuals to study privately. The vertical interiors of each cubicle were mirrored and created a condensed and intimate yet expanded field that repeatedly mirrored the participant and other objects in the cubicle to create an infinite sense of interiority. The central zone was constructed as a narrow table tennis table consisting of two long vertical mirrored sides with a two-sided mirrored net. The third zone consisted of a single large open cubicle or desk intended for small group discussion, meetings or a larger individual study space where papers and books could be laid out, which also had vertical mirrors on the inside. Materially, the work was intended to be minimal and pared down and seamlessly integrated into the existing furniture. The plywood surfaces were simply sanded, and the edges exposed the layers of the plywood and the edges of the mirrors reflecting an authenticity in material and construction. Included were two altered table tennis bats, which had red or blue rubber on one side and acrylic mirror replacing the rubber on the opposite side. There was also a small red plastic bucket of pale, yellow table tennis balls. The addition and colour of these objects were intended to be playful and to encourage potential participants. There was no particular activity prescribed and the work was intended to be indeterminate and open-ended.

As sculptural objects, these works created stimulating and unusual spatial relationships within the Reading Room, interrupting and reflecting the collection and the users. The work altered the function of the original space, but still presented opportunities for individuals and groups to use the table. As an artwork, it remained formally engaging and could still be simply encountered by walking around the work to receive visual feedback without actually touching the work.

As a participatory work, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, was inviting and challenging. While many people have played table tennis (or at least are familiar with it), the centre section of the table was narrower than usual and was contained by mirrored dividers. From my own experience, this made it more difficult to play and it took time to adjust to the altered conditions. It also was quite humorous and there was lots of laughter – from myself and others – both playing and watching. The mirrors were distracting but, once a rhythm developed, we began to adapt and focus on the ball. Following the coloured, moving ball, as well as the sound it made when hitting the plywood table, reduced the visual disorientation caused by the mirrors. Clearly, this shows how quickly we can learn and develop knowledge about the work to successfully negotiate it. It was also a very social experience as I played with people I did not know, while others sitting beside the table looked on.

Fig. 25: Fleur Summers, series of photographs from Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, in the West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo credit: Stephen Dixon)

I also conducted a short workshop in the gallery with four participants. At first, the participants were awkward and unsure about what to do. I asked them to interact with the work, but left them to choose how to begin. It soon became obvious that interacting with the work necessitated communication and collaboration. Two of the participants began to play table tennis and, not surprisingly, it took time to adapt to the novel conditions. They found it difficult at first and the play was more cooperative than competitive. At the same time, the other two participants bounced and rolled the balls in the smaller cubicles. This offered the opportunity to create infinite and repeating reflections of the bouncing table tennis balls. One of the participants stated they felt like a circus clown performing with table tennis balls. At the conclusion of the game, the four participants began exploring other possible uses of the table. They used the mirrored bats and looked across the table tennis table at each other. These responses were more thoughtful and observational. They squatted down to look across the table so the mirror was more centrally in their vision line. They discovered that, in the reflection of the net, they could see themselves from the neck down, seemingly joined visually to the head of the player opposite in multiple reflections. One of the participants then commented ‘I felt like you were me’ and discussed how strong the illusion was and how easy it is ‘to be fooled’.

This confusing feedback posed questions of identity. Another participant commented on the sense of ‘a denial of self … I can’t actually see myself’. Again, these activities create an assemblage of bodies or compositional dislocation through reflection which is similar to ‘exquisite corpse’ drawings and is also developed through a collaborative process. This process involves chance and teamwork and provides a framework for developing a composite figure. The mirrors in the table tennis work also re- integrate real-time images of the body, creating a powerful experience concerning embodiment

framed by a physical framework. The effect of disembodiment has a strong momentary effect. The mirrors provide a believable image that momentarily ‘dissolves reality’. Not only does this create the potential of new bodily assemblies, but it also questions identity. This creates a crisis in bodily representation given it is a confronting and disorientating fragmentation of the body.

Most important to this research is how this feels. One participant said it reminded him of the mirror room in the Kung Fu movie Enter the Dragon (1973) starring Bruce Lee. This scene involved a room full of mirrors in which reality and reflection were conflicting. Ultimately Bruce Lee’s character solves the problem by breaking the mirrors to break down the illusion and reveal what is real. It questions Lee’s ability to discern reality and put him in a psychological state where he was constantly faced with his own self-image and had to overcome doubt by destroying it.

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Fig. 26: Bruce Lee in the mirror room in the film Enter the Dragon, 1973, directed by Robert Clouse

It is interesting whether participants choose to accept and enter into the illusion or disrupt and destroy it as Bruce Lee’s character did. The participants pointed out the destabilising and disorientating nature of the mirrors. Comments included that it was: ‘like losing balance’, a ‘loss of equilibrium’ that disrupted ‘internal gyroscope’, ‘don’t know which way is up’ and ‘I’m finding I’m not aware of the mirrors’. There was also a sense of gain: ‘it’s about growing and learning’ and ‘could create a sense of three hands…[it] felt powerful’. As one participant stated, it ‘felt voyeuristic’.

If we see the mirror as a threshold, accepting the illusion can also be seen as spatially expansive. The mirror acts as a metaphor for an expansion and amplification of the way we think about the world. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama uses this strategy in her work. She began using mirrors in the 1960s in her infinity rooms to expand space and to reflect her own experiences of mental illness. These rooms also create ‘tensions between expanded perceptions of space and dense reflected surfaces of repeating shapes and colours that make walls of pattern that seem to enclose, making claustrophobic interior spaces’ (Bell, 2010, p. 89). They rooms include either dots or her trademark phallic forms in unending proliferation as mirrors reflect mirrors and create fields of reflections of these objects.

Importantly, like my work, these works cannot be encountered without the body becoming part of the pattern. The body is not fragmented but endlessly repeated in a playful and intense way which is somewhat disorientating. This creates a potential world of continuous and unending self-reflection which creates an embodied experience through the immersion into the space.

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Fig. 27: Yayio Kusama, Studio Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011, installation, Tate Modern

Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library was also exhibited at the Design Hub at RMIT University as part of an exhibition titled Design and Play in 2016. It was altered slightly as a new base was constructed to replace the original tables at West Space. A simple table was constructed of plywood sheets with steel tube legs and a set of stools were included. Design and Play was a curated exhibition by Larissa Hjorth and Lisa Byrne, ‘prob[ing] the interdisciplinary and poetic role of play within the everyday through the eyes of designers and artists. Through a diverse range of research projects, installations and artist works, this exhibition explores play as a creative, social, cultural and political act and mode of practice’ (Design Hub, 2016, para. 1).

Fig. 28: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Framing the work through an exhibition focused on play and the everyday, enabled the audience to freely interact with the work. Nearly all of the works in the exhibition were participatory and it was understood that most of the works were interactive. On opening night, the participants played table tennis enthusiastically and extended the game formally to include the walls of the gallery by hitting and bouncing the ball off the walls and onto the table. The concrete walls and general utilitarian nature of the exhibition space also encouraged this.

Fig. 29: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Ultimately, participants were surprised by the possibilities for perception presented by the work. They found the work playful and interesting, offering new ways to experience play and thinking. Most interesting was how the participants perceived themselves in the distortions of the mirror while moving. The fragmentation of the body and the acceptance or confusion caused by new combinations of body parts was acknowledged but also confronting. This contradictory feedback causes a crisis in representation, which we can assume forces active changes in neuronal activity in the brain. While it is acknowledged that this is an ongoing experience in the perception of the world, the similarities of the work to the mirror box give these experiences of fractured and substituted body parts a particular significance. If we view these changes themselves as prosthetic, then they have the potential to transform us. Elizabeth Grosz questions whether prosthetics, such as architecture and clothing, operate to contain and extend us or transform us into something unknown. This ‘ambiguity of the material world for human consciousness’ (Grosz, 2005, p. 152).

CONCLUSION

While mirrors and spatial relationships have no lasting effects on healthy individuals, they have been used in this first body of works to experiment with the sculptural encounter as an embodied

experience. This has involved multiple participants, intersubjectivity and loud playful activity at times. There have also been quieter and more contemplative moments where individuals or myself as researcher have considered the experience in more intimate ways.

Overall this artwork, alongside my research into the mirror box, has developed into a deeper understanding of embodiment in sculptural work. Despite the fragmentation of the body through both the moving body and mirror reflections, these works give participants an opportunity to explore the boundaries of their bodies in playful ways enabling a creative approach and encouraging expansive thinking. There are many ideas that could still be explored and models that could be scaled up. However, after working with the table divider in Part Three, experimentation with the mirror box had confirmed the possibility of transforming neurocognitive ideas and structures into transformative sculptural works. It also confirmed the strong embodied nature of the work. At this point, the work also opened up some other questions. In particular, I began to consider the moving body in more detail. In this first body of works this was a given as I needed arms and hands and other body parts to move in and out of the reflective and illusory space of the mirror. However, the complexity of this movement and the focus on neurocognition began to bring up other questions about how cognition might be affected more specifically by sensorimotor activity. This activity might be simply walking around a work, or it might involve physical participation and haptic or other bodily sensations, so the audience is ‘not passive receivers of input from the environment, but are actors in the environment such that what they experience is shaped by how they act’ (Hutchins, as cited in Stewart et al., 2013, p. 428).

CHAPTER THREE: Thinking Machines

The first body of works produced for this research focused on embodiment and employed mirrors, movement and play to activate bodies and objects. These works focused on the participation and response of the viewer through a series of hybrid structures based on library carrels and table tennis tables. The aim was to expand and explore Ramachandran’s neurologically focused mirror box as a way to experience and encounter extensions and expansions of the body using the mirror. This used movement to focus on the extended body, illusion and the concept of neural plasticity.

In this chapter, the movement implicit in encountering sculptural works becomes the main focus through a second body of works. In particular, I consider how movement can facilitate, enhance or complicate our experience of sculpture. For example, how does the physical activity of walking affect our understanding of an artwork? This is especially pertinent when considering free-standing sculptural works, installation work or participatory or interactive works, which cannot be fully comprehended from any particular position or moment in time and are ‘lacking in perspicuity’ (such as Richard Serra’s large works as discussed in Chapter One).

These works often emerge through the encounter or inherently involve particular types of movement, such as walking, turning, bending, peering up, or looking around a corner. Movement may be integrated into the work or even be the subject of the work. If movement in a contained, mirrored space can have a clinical effect on phantom limb pain, then what happens cognitively when we move our bodies to approach sculptural works can also have an effect on how we understand our bodies in relation to art objects. The complexity of the environment, whether it is the white cube of the gallery or a public space, is implicit in these complex phenomenological events and has an effect on perceptual and cognitive processes. Therefore, in phenomenological terms, bodily movement can be seen as implicit in perception as Merleau-Ponty explored:

We grasp external space through our bodily situation. A “corporeal or postural schema” gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them. A system of possible movements, or ‘motor projects’, radiates from us to our environment. [Our body] is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements ... help to shape our perception of things (1964, p. 5).

As Merleau-Ponty states, our body movements are implicated in our perception of the world. That movement and our bodily schema gives us a sense of our relationship to objects in the world, including art. The strength of sculpture lies in how our bodies come to understand a work when we move around it. An understanding of the concerns of sculpture is interdependent on the ways in which we move our bodies to encounter it. This is essentially an enactivist approach to cognition, as it involves bodily and environmental factors in perception.

Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) were influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach and defined embodiment simply as the experiential nature of having a sensate body. However, they also wrote that ‘these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context (Varela et al., 1991, p. 173). Varela Thompson and Rosch’s quote not only refers to embodiment, but also to enactive perception and embedded or situated cognition and illustrating the overlapping of these theories. Enactive cognition or enactivism developed alongside embodiment and suggests that organisms generate and create meaning by moving and physically interacting with their environment. This brain-body-world system is therefore dependent on bodily processes of the organism, its sensorimotor circuit and the environment. Philosopher Alva Noe sees perception as a skilful activity of the entire body, including the brain, but focuses on touch and movement as central in enacting our perception (Noe, 2004).

This chapter considers these issues in relation to the second body of work in this research project. It focuses on the kinaesthetic and how the movement of our bodies around a sculptural work can influence our encounter, experience and subsequent responses. This chapter is also concerned with the dialogue between the work and the body through spatial arrangements, in conjunction with physical materials, thoughts, images and text. While it does not rely on the movement of the hands in the production of optical illusions, it is largely reliant on the audience and artist’s ability to move objects and make marks with the hands – although not in every work. It also relies more directly on the movement of the audience and embodied responses. These works employ improvisation and abstraction through the use of various devices, from modified educational toys, to furniture and exercise machines. Most importantly, there is a critical moment in the research where the focus becomes more inward looking and retreats from participatory work and the social space of the gallery. At this point, the research becomes more reflective and moves to the studio to focus on my own phenomenological experience as an artist. This proved to be a productive process, and allowed the research to develop a deeper and more solid footing as a creative project, which was ultimately resolved in the final chapter and body of work.

This chapter will discuss three main works. Supreme Red Rods uses educational toys and concepts to develop a work dependent on the audience’s kinaesthetic movements for spatial arrangements. Dissociative Dialogues uses beanbags and exercise bikes to explore ideas of daydreaming, and the third, Walking the Studio uses a modified treadmill to explore the effect of movement on the production of work in the studio.

PART 1: SUPREME RED RODS

Supreme Red Rods 2014 Supreme Red Rods emerged partly out of my early primary school years in Australia where Cuisenaire rods were used extensively in numeracy teaching. Cuisenaire rods were designed by Belgium schoolteacher Georges Cuisenaire in the 1950s. They were used in classrooms around the

world due to their ‘strong visual and tactile appeal that relates well to how children learn’ (Delaney, 2001, p. 27). Images of the simple wooden rods, each stained a different colour, imprinted strongly in my memory and I made a scaled-up version of them in my first year of university art education. I sensed at the time that the experience of handling these rods, whether to solve a mathematics problem or to build a tower and then knock it down, was potentially part of a larger project. Some years later, I conceived of Supreme Red Rods as a seemingly simple experimental work for Blindside. The work consisted of 60 pieces of wood of various lengths and thicknesses, stained red in a similar way to Cuisenaire rods, leaning up against the gallery wall, accompanied by a video work. The video work was a 10-minute continuous loop of a scale model of the work being rearranged by various pairs of hands.

The work’s title refers to the early twentieth century art movement Suprematism as part of the Russian avant garde, and to the artist Kazimir Malevich in particular. Malevich worked around the time of the October Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent birth of the Soviet Union. While his work did not directly critique of the dominant political system, it was revolutionary through the application of reduction and abstraction (Groys, 2016). My interest in Malevich initially arose from his approach to the abstract and how this related, could be applied, to simple three-dimensional forms. I was also interested in Malevich’s attempts to create ‘objectless’ forms, which he conceived of as essential and at the core of the natural world, alongside art and culture. Malevich saw great potential in Suprematism as a way to understand the underlying organisation of the world, and focused more on pure feeling rather than representation (Lodder, 2019).

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Fig. 30: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles 1915 oil on canvas, 80 cm x 62 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

While Malevich also made sculptures, I am primarily interested in his paintings and their potential to be activated in three-dimensional space given the sense of movement within his compositions. As art historian Patricia Railing explains, Malevich rejected conventions of gravity, clear orientation, horizon line and perspective systems, and produced art that ‘stimulated an experience of space-time in the universe rather depicting the world of objects belonging to the earth’ (Railing, 1998, p. 72). From this perspective, this phenomenological investigation of the line was more concerned with Malevich’s concepts of sensation and perception. This resonates with the research of neuroscientist Semir Zeki and others, who theorise that the stimulus of straight lines and bars in various angles in Modernist art by the Suprematists and others has a strong physiological effect in the visual cortex of the brain (Zeki & Lamb, 1994, p. 627). This potentially creates a strong response in an audience, as a cognitive response to the lines and the movement created when the eye moves across and down the lines. Additionally, the colour red has strong cultural and physiological effects. It has been shown to capture attention and facilitate motor response more than other colours (Kuniecki et al., 2015).

Fig. 31: Fleur Summers, video stills from Supreme Red Rods, 2014

My video work was pivotal in encouraging movement and attempted to create a compositional response to Malevich’s work Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles (1915) using a thick piece of felt as a ground and painted red balsa wood as the linear elements. While this activity was captured at a different time and place, it was intended to act as a cue to indicate to the audience that the wooden rods and small planks could be moved and reconfigured around the gallery space. The video monitor was placed to the left of the work in portrait orientation (rather than the usual landscape position). The size of the hands, when compared to the work, was not to scale. The video also included the sound of the pieces of balsa gently clinking against each other. It acted both as suggestive and instructive, as well as background to gallery activity. The action in the video was slightly speeded up to disrupt and

create a contrast to the real-time gallery activity. As mentioned, the flat screen was placed on the left side of the gallery, falling into the peripheral vision. As vision in the periphery is good at detecting movement, this captures the audience’s attention despite its position, and keeps the potential for movement in view. In retrospect, the video work and its containment within the frame of the screen, clearly relates to the mirror box and the table tennis works without the limitations of mirrors and symmetry. It breaks down the illusionist space, potentially creating a more embodied and immersive relationship to constructing the work and participating in it more fully. It also presents this activity from overhead, which has resonance with Malevich’s interest in aeronautics and aerial photography (Lodder, 2004).

The video work also added a sense of temporality that punctured the potential stillness and stability of the objects leaning against the wall. The activity and its transmission via the screen added a temporal endlessness and presented the viewer with a visual prompt to consider moving the work before physically doing so. In this way, the work has a relationship to serial art of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the work of artist Sol LeWitt who described the conceptual nature of his work thus: ‘all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art’ (LeWitt, 1967, p. 80). Prior to the audience encounter, Supreme Red Rods had the potential, like LeWitt’s, to present ideas about seriality, time and movement without the red rods being moved at all. However, the addition of the more contemporary element of a flat screen mounted to the wall ultimately changed the dynamic. I was unsure how people would react. On the opening night, however, the audience entered, saw the hands and movement in the video, and began moving the red wooden pieces around.

Fig. 32: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods, 2014, Blindside, wood, video monitor, dimensions variable

This potential for movement and rearrangement was also implied by the materials used, the history of interaction with my previous works, and the similarity of the wooden rods to Cuisenaire rods and other materials used in schools to aid numeracy. As part of my earlier research in looking at objects used to develop physical and cognitive skills discussed in the previous chapter, I became interested in constructivist learning paradigms in which learning is student-centred, active, and occurs through

experience by ‘engaging the entire physiology’ (Bada, 2015, p. 69). Specifically, I explored red rods, which are part of the Montessori sensory curriculum. Montessori is a sensory-based, process orientated and indirect approach to learning designed to promote multisensory awareness (Marshall 2017). This ‘playful learning embodies cognition’ (Lillard, 2013, p. 144) with the intention that children learn through play and movement, especially through the manipulation of objects using the hands. In particular, Montessori red rods are designed to help children develop spatial awareness through the exercise of visual discrimination of length. They consist of ten 25mm square red rods in different lengths ranging from 100mm to 1000mm. There are very specific instructions as part of the learning system about how the rods should be presented to the child: using two rugs and then arranging them on the horizontal plane of the floor (Montessori Academy, 2017).

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Fig. 33: Montessori Red Rods, Montessori Academy, 2017

In comparison to the table tennis works in the previous chapter, Supreme Red Rods (2014) is more open ended and focused on free play. The previous works were implicitly spatially inscribed by the form of the tables and the known phenomenology of the game. In a similar sense, the Montessori system has instructions, limits and expectations as part of the curriculum. For example, the Montessori rods are designed to lie flat on the floor and are not intended to be used for construction. My aim was to allow my audience to experience the space and the work through their own movements, whether this occurred as a social group activity or as a more intimate and individual event. The intention was to encourage the audience to freely move through the work and construct it spatially as a physical experience and as a way of constructing and conceptualising the space through the encounter. By actively engaging the audience – not just in interacting with the work but physically changing it and creating new forms and encounters through their own gestures – I planned to encourage participants to think through their movements. As Beilock and Goldin-Meadow wrote in relation to play, ‘Gesture changes thought by introducing action into one’s mental representations. Gesture forces people to think with their hands’ (Beilock & Goldin-Meadow, 2010, p. 1609). Like the altered table tennis tables discussed in Chapter One, this work uses the rods as backbone or exemplars for embodied experience. Through the encounter, the audience employs both cognition and gesture to create and recreate the work. The work does not lie in any particular form created, but in the continuous remaking by the audience.

A number of other artists have incorporated ideas from educational programs and construction toys into their artwork, including continuous remaking. Olafur Eliasson’s work The Cubic Structural Evolution Project (2004) consisted of a long table covered in white Lego pieces, which the audience was invited to build with. Eliasson describes it on his website simply as:

Three tons of white Lego bricks are spread out over a long table, where visitors are invited to build their vision of a future city. The models made by each person are modified and elaborated by subsequent visitors throughout the course of the exhibition (Eliasson 2004, para. 1).

In 2007, this work was exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria. The long table was positioned in front of the gallery’s water wall so that the structures could be seen from the outside. They were obscured and softened by the falling water and were then revealed in sharp contrast upon entry. Like my work, this work had certain ‘rules’ – only white Lego could be used and participants were directed to ‘build their vision of a future city’ (Eliasson, 2004, para. 1). The work, which has been shown in many cities around the world, is always restricted to a white tabletop that participants sit around. This restricts the activity and restrains the work to a certain scale and size. Despite this, participants were able to use the work to express different responses to the city, which reflected their own urban environment. Subsequently, the work is endlessly evolving and reflects the diversity of urban experience through divergent spatial understanding of the built environment. Architectural writer, Karen Burns, argues that this ‘reflects on the continuous production of urban space and the fluctuating demolition and rebuilding of cities’ (Burns, para 5, 2007). Burns also points to a relationship to Modernist architecture and to perhaps an ironic critique of Modernism ‘critical of architecture’s institutional power and residual Modernist impulses’ (Burns, para 7, 2007).

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Fig. 34: Olafur Eliasson, The Cubic Structural Evolution Project, 2004, white Lego, table, dimensions variable

Despite these potential questions and critiques, Eliasson’s work is accessible to a range of audiences. While Eliasson uses a well-known readymade, my work uses simple lengths of wood which have the potential for a range of spatial arrangements beyond the tabletop. While they are reminiscent of children’s blocks, the longer lengths and thicknesses of the wood lend themselves to larger

constructions and potentially other sculptural forms. Before placing the work in the gallery, I had no fixed expectations for the outcome. I was more interested in the potential interactions rather than any resultant formal relationships. I initially set the work up by leaning the wooden rods against the back wall. In retrospect, this position, combined with the continuous activity visible in the video work, subtly indicated to the audience that they were to participate in the work. The exhibition’s opening night was a hive of activity as the work was arranged and rearranged. There was no doubt that most participants saw the wooden rods as objects to be touched and moved around in a way that they determined. I was surprised at how readily and easily this occurred. Most viewers appeared very comfortable in moving the rods around into new and sometimes very precarious and experimental configurations, such as jamming the longer pieces of wood between the ceiling and floor. This continued after the opening night of the exhibition and visitors, either in small groups, pairs or as individuals, engaged with the process so the work was continuously reconfigured. I was constantly surprised by the inventiveness and improvisational processes of the participants. I often walked into the gallery to see the work arranged in completely novel ways, sometimes with a gallery visitor deeply engaged in planning their next move.

Fig. 35: Fleur Summers, series of configurations of Supreme Red Rods, 2014, wood, video monitor, dimensions variable

It is the improvisational frame that gives bodies agency to explore and experiment in time and space in this way. This frame is dependent on the perceptual abilities of the participants or audience, and the variables of the medium. This constrains the range of improvisational possibilities and provides the formal variables with which the audience can create meaning. In this work, the audience is invited

to interact with and perform the work. As each different person or group has a different phenomenological response to the work, the possible configurations were seemingly endless during the exhibition period.

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Fig. 36: Olafur Eliasson, The Cubic Structural Evolution Project 2004, white Lego, table, dimensions variable

The capacity in an artwork for ‘endlessness’ and the facility ‘to go on and on, even having to go on and on’ was at the heart of Michael Fried’s seminal essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, in critique of Minimalist works in 1967 (Fried, 1998, p. 144). While Fried framed this lack of stability as a negative quality in relation to the properties of modernism, it is this very theatricality and experiential facility that concerns this research. In relation to the sculptural encounter, this endlessness is important as the participant is given agency to engage actively in time and space to construct the work rather than merely view it. This is of particular importance to the research as it provides capacity for an experience of sculptural work as a co-ordination of perceptual, cognitive and motor skills. The various arrangements and subsequent photographic documentation show a series of highly experimental shared experiences that are playful and open ended, but could not be achieved without the participants moving around, bending, reaching and moving things with their hands.

Not surprisingly, most participatory works involve the manipulation of objects using the hands. This has implications for the nexus between cognition, embodiment and sculpture, and is connected to language. The series of abstract forms in both the video and the work have a relationship to language and the involvement of human hands in this construction relates to what philosopher Martin Heidegger termed ‘manual intelligence’. Heidegger links speech and the ability to make (especially in relation to woodwork and manual labour) to thinking:

Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork (Heidegger,1954/1968, p.17 ).

While my work does not involve the skilled craft of cabinet making or carpentry, it connects the hand, spatial arrangements and the movement of the extended body to thinking. The video work actively asserts this by placing the hands and lower arms in the frame to continually disrupt the two- dimensional space and encourage the participant to mirror and extend the activity. The activity involved in making and remaking the work therefore can be seen as a way to understand the living body, as the body is open to latent meanings and allows the body to enact its relational abilities. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty saw the body as open to the world and phenomena through embodied methods of understanding, as opposed to mechanistic or more instrumental methods of understanding (Perez, 2013, p. 135).

Each of the works made for this research to this point involve the participation of the viewer and, in particular, the interaction of the body as part of the work, especially the hand. Supreme Red Rods asked the audience to encounter the work by reconfiguring it and therefore being involved in its spatial ontology as part of that encounter. This activity is improvisational as it endows freedom within a particular frame. Indeed, it can be compared to improvisational dance. Dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone extends Heidegger’s ideas about thinking to conceptualise improvised dance as ‘thinking in movement’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2006, p. 96). I suggest that participating in a work such as Supreme Red Rods suggests similar concerns. Sheets-Johnstone proposes that perception and movement are interlinked, so that thinking, doing, sensing and moving cannot be separated, and that this can be seen in dance, and human and animal development, especially in very early life:

To think is first of all to be caught up in a flow of thought; thinking is itself, by its very nature, kinetic. It moves forward, backward, digressively, quickly, slowly, narrowly, suddenly, hesitantly, blindly, confusedly, penetratingly. What is distinctive about thinking in movement is not only that the flow of thought is kinetic, but the thought itself is. It is motional through and through, at once spatial, temporal, dynamic (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009 p. 96).

After observing the audience create variations of this work, I considered how I could capture this thinking and moving process in the gallery. While Supreme Red Rods facilitated this process, the focus appeared to be on outcomes rather than the experience. These outcomes were spatial, relational and involved sound and movement, yet they retained a focus on visuality. I became very interested in focusing on the flow of thought that occurred during these bodily movements. I turned to find ways of concentrating on the moving and thinking itself, distinct from the focus of moving things around.

PART 2: DISSOCIATIVE DIALOGUES AND DAYDREAMING

Tim Ingold identifies the kinetic nature of thought and how actual corporeal movement is critical to cognition and refers to ‘the flow of the thinking mind’ (Ingold, 2010, p. 17). This flow is not merely metaphorical but refers to both the physical movement of walking across the landscape and the kinetic nature of a dance improvisation. Sheets-Johnstone (2011), who has an interest in biology and evolution, posits that everything moves: from cells dividing, flowers opening and closing in response to light, and animals responding to their environment. However, she is most interested in animate forms that are not only sensitive to movement in the outside world, but to internal movement within their bodies. Using an evolutionary lens, Sheets-Johnstone argues for a corporeal and temporal consciousness that has internalised sense organs over time, so that their tactile, proprioceptive and kinaesthetic sensitivities connect to a more complex affective and cognitive life (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011, p xxi). The connection of this complexity in movement, and its subsequent relationship to cognitive ability, is mirrored in studies of cognitive abilities during space flight. They have shown that the lack of gravity and subsequent weightlessness can result in a decrease in cognitive and perceptual motor performance. This can also be observed in individuals who require prolonged bedrest (De la Torre, 2014). It appears that these psychomotor functions are essential in maintaining healthy cognition: thinking about moving parts of the body, or the entire body, is essential. This section explores and expands on the potential of the flow of thought in relation to the sculptural encounter.

As I began to focus on the centrality of the audience’s movement in relation to embodiment and the encounter, I considered how the development of my ideas for works was itself embodied and enacted, and therefore deeply connected to my own moving body. Many of these ideas took form while riding my bicycle between work and home. In the mornings, I was more focused on getting from A to B and the tasks to be done. However, on my way home, I would find my rhythm on the bike and the ride became a kind of meditation to the day. It allowed an unravelling of events and thoughts and became a site of emergent ideas. I began to become aware that I was unconsciously solving problems and sometimes even developing new works. This primarily occurred on the least complex part of the ride down a long tree-lined boulevard on a wide path shared with pedestrians. It involved riding in a straight line with no cars to contend with, very few pedestrians, dogs or joggers. Under these conditions, my physical activity became automatic. Just as we can walk without thinking, we can cycle without thinking about the process of riding. Artist and musician David Byrne writes about this process in his book Bicycle Diaries (2010):

[R]iding a bicycle, puts one into a zone that is not too deep or involving. The activity is repetitive, mechanical, and it distracts and occupies the conscious mind, or at least part of it, in a way that is just engaging enough but not too much – it doesn’t cause you to be caught off guard. It facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much of the unconscious to bubble up. As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to

be gleaned from those bubbles, it’s a reliable place to find that connection. In the same way that perplexing problems sometimes get resolved in one’s sleep, when the conscious mind is distracted the unconscious works things out (Byrne, 2010, p. 25).

The previous work in this chapter involved actively participating in the construction of an artwork by moving parts of the work around with the audience’s body to create an evolving series of formal arrangements. This work, Dissociative Dialogues, focuses on what can occur when attention is shifted to how unconscious thoughts can be developed through movement, and how to potentially recreate this sensation in the gallery for the viewer.

As both Byrne and I have experienced, tasks such as walking, running or riding a bike become almost automatic when practiced over a period of time. This is partly explained by the concept of procedural memory. Procedural memory is one of a series of memory systems involved in learning. Storing and retrieving these motor skills is considered to be implicit as conscious awareness is not necessary (Lum & Conti-Ramsden, 2013). Research has also shown that everyday activities, such as walking and cycling, promote thinking through a process of dissociation similar to daydreaming – this is known as ‘perceptually decoupled thought’ (Smallwood et al., 2013, p 120). Neuroimaging studies have explored areas of the brain known as the Default Mode Network (DMN) in relation to this type of spontaneous thought. The DMN is thought to be active during daydreaming or mind wandering and less active when focused on a task that is less automatic and therefore requires more attention (Shamloo, 2016). Additionally, and most importantly for this research, studies have also found that ‘physical exercise does have beneficial effects on cognition by enhancing neuroplasticity’ (Hötting & Röder, 2013, p. 2243).

It is worth noting that while daydreaming was once considered to be maladaptive, especially in educational settings, it is now understood to be a common normal mental activity that is experienced by almost everyone (Soffer-Dudek & Somer, 2018). Daydreaming allows us to access unconscious thoughts, which Freud referred to as ‘involuntary ideas’ in Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Freud believed that we can gain access to these involuntary ideas by relaxing rational control over the imagination (Gay, 1995). This also connects to the visual-spatial dissociation that occurs in the use of the mirror or rubber hand illusion. It is the dissociation from the actual to the unconscious understanding of the body that is therapeutic.

In summary, it is recognised that we can think through and in movement, and undertaking simple physical tasks not only relies on procedural memory and suppresses active thought, but allows the mind to wander, consider alternate, potentially rhizomatic ideas and promotes complex problem solving. These activities can create new intensities of thought, expand neural possibilities through neuroplasticity, and are strategic as cognitive and cultural enablers. Not surprisingly, these ideas have been applied in educational settings and workplaces. Kinaesthetic classrooms have been devised, which focus on active and hands-on learning. While some of these programs encourage children to

move around and run around outside between lessons, others have stationary bicycles and stand up desks in classrooms so that the movement is actually occurring while learning is occurring. An example of this is the ‘Read and Ride’ program, which has improved literacy levels and health (O’Brien, 2015).

Dissociative Dialogues 2014 Movement is not only an integral part of lived experience but is an essential component in our encounters and experience of sculptural work. The work Dissociative Dialogues engaged with these ideas in a form that aimed to locate the activity in the gallery and attempted to decouple perception from thought and potentially enable participants to experience dissociation or daydreaming. To facilitate the activity, I used a well-known social object, the beanbag. Like table tennis and educational coloured wooden rods, beanbags are objects that are recognisable and approachable in social spaces. They also have an interesting connection to soft sculpture. The beanbag references the body as a biomorphic form and responds to the shape of the body. While it contains the body and grounds it, it also creates sensations of instability and formlessness. Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto explored some of these ideas in his participatory installation works, such as Humanoids Family (2001), which appears to engulf participants. Neto’s work is often biomorphic and is concerned with sensation and perception. His work is often playful and can be manipulated by the participant. As Neto states: ‘My work always contains the desire for movement, and it moves with time’ (Buhmann & Neto, 2010, p. 29). This ‘desire for movement’ was also embedded in my work, although the work itself does not actually move in space despite the addition of moving parts. However, like Neto, my works are also filled with polystyrene like a beanbag. The small balls are light and, under pressure, rearrange themselves to accommodate body mass.

While the beanbag formed the base of the work, to recreate the biomechanical movement of pedalling a bicycle and to potentially create the conditions for dissociation or daydreaming, I added pedals to the beanbag. The beanbag needed to be elongated to accommodate the length of the seated figure with legs extended and able to pedal. The combination of beanbag and pedals created a curious, hybrid and readymade object that could receive the entire body in a state of repose with the potential to pedal or even exercise. Like an exercise bike, the participant pedals and moves without actually being propelled forwards. It created a curious dichotomy that can be seen in other artworks, such as Jeppe Hein’s 2016 work Modified Social Benches, which Hein described as ‘somewhere between a dysfunctional object and a functional piece of furniture and thus point out the contradiction between artwork and functional object’ (Jagganath, 2016, para. 7). Like Hein’s benches and Neto’s biomorphic forms, a sense of humour and play was encouraged, which reflects and connects to the absurdity of the Surrealist hybrid object.

The beanbags were covered in an unremarkable muted grey and blue woollen fabric, similar to that of a dressing gown. I intended for the beanbags to be inviting and approachable, and I imagined that a participant would sit back and start pedalling. Once the novelty had worn off, I expected the

participant to stop noticing the activity and begin to think of other things. As such, the work aimed to become a body extension and be implicated in thought production. While they do not integrate the body like Neto’s Humanoids Family, they offer an engagement beyond passively sitting upon them.

The beanbags proved a physical struggle to make. They were constructed in the studio and stuffed with polystyrene balls. While they were light, I felt like I was wrestling with them as they were a similar length to an average body. In the end, I made three separate beanbags: two solo, each with a set of pedals, and one double-ended with a single set of pedals. I wrapped them in plastic and carried them to the gallery; I felt like I was moving a body. The work was exhibited at King’s Artist-Run in Melbourne. The two solo beanbags were placed adjacent to each other. Side by side they reminded me of gym machines or lounge chairs, which offered the possibility of social interaction or dialogue. The third beanbag was an after-thought and was doubled ended but had only one set of pedals. This meant that while two people could sit on it, only one person could pedal.

Fig. 37: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, cloth, pedals, polystyrene

This work was a speculative experiment. I did not want to interfere with the audience’s encounter of the work at any stage of their engagement. It became evident, at least to me, that I might not ever know if it worked – that is, did participants begin thinking about other things? Did people realise they were daydreaming? What were they actually thinking about? I also felt it was important to consider the sculptural quality of the work, and that looking and walking around the work was still engaging and cognitively productive for an audience.

Fig. 38: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues (close up), 2014, cloth, pedals, polystyrene

As with the earlier participatory works in this research, there was much activity at the opening night. Participants pedalled as rapidly as possible, and there was laughter and interaction between audience members. Despite the celebratory nature of the opening, it was obvious that the works were activating the space and creating social exchanges. While there is much value in this, my intention was for the work to be more contemplative and that the audience would spend time with it. However, an exhibition opening is a social event. The number of beanbags, and the exhibition’s spatial layout, created a social space for interaction rather than a contemplative space. Two or more beanbags in the space led the audience to engage socially and be in dialogue with each other. The work needed more space and time to be contemplative: it may be too much to ask the audience to sit and spend time doing this while in a public space. An enclosed and quiet space may have been more conducive to thinking and daydreaming.

The aim of this work was for the participant to lose awareness of thought processes. I did consider how I could document this without inhibiting the process. Several approaches could be taken using phenomenological research methods, as outlined in Mark Vagle’s Crafting Phenomenological Research (2018). Most of these methods involve gathering data through interview and I considered the possibility of using a relational methodology to understand the phenomenological experience in a dialogic research encounter. However, after my experience in interviewing participants with the works in Chapter Two, I felt this would disrupt the encounter and was potentially interrupting the process of daydreaming if indeed it was occurring at all. Additionally, I felt that the outcomes I could achieve through using qualitative research methods, even using a holistic phenomenological account, turned the research into words and data rather than the artwork being seen as the research. As Barbara Bolt points out Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm (2016) about practice-led artistic research, the creative work is the major component and the dissertation provides contextualisation so that ‘the art is the research’ (Bolt, 2016, p. 131).

Fig. 39: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014 (opening night)

After exhibiting the work and bringing it back to the studio, I pondered its problems and limitations. After reconsidering my own experience on the bicycle and then my experiences on the beanbag, I decided that I needed to shift the research and focus on the production of my own interior thoughts and ideas. I could then consider how bodily movement could influence these or be implicated in the production of thought through the encounter with sculptural work or events. This led to making a conscious decision to locate the research in my studio and to use myself as the subject. While I could have continued on this line of research more focused on the social space of the gallery, it became clear to me that in the ‘doing’ of the research I had reached a point at which I could either continue to develop the work as participatory objects and try to create certain experiences for my audience, or I could take the research in a different direction, which made sense to me more subjectively. This disruption meant that I had more control of the research from a particular perspective – my own internal thoughts and embodied actions and to do this, I returned to the studio.

PART 3: STUDIO THINKING MACHINES

The studio has been an important site in the materialisation of each artwork in this research project. The methodologies, materials and technologies, and the phenomenological encounter of myself as the artist in the making of the work, are essential parts of the process. In the studio, I have undertaken a range of activities essential to the material manifestation of each artwork through drawing, model making and construction. Some were finished or partly made in an external workshop. The latter were returned to the studio for finishing. The work in this section marked an important turning point in the research, as the focus turned to the creative process in the studio, rather than the public outcome. This activity was both physical and neurocognitive and explores my own embodied thoughts and responses in relation to movement and walking in particular. I also took on a self-reflexive approach by attempting to use my own reflections to understand the sculptural encounter during the processes of production. This marked a very particular change in the research where the work moved from the social space of the gallery to the more intimate setting of the studio. The focus on process subsequently moved from audience participation in the gallery to an emphasis on my own responses

in the studio. While the public outcome was not at the centre of this research, it ultimately did occur as a time-based video work titled Walking the Studio (2016).

My use of the studio is sporadic and is spread across several sites. At times, I use my backyard studio as a place to develop ideas and works, but I have also developed an expanded practice that occurs and develops in a number of locations. Like many artists, I also use my kitchen table to work on, my shared university office, and the studio workshops in which I teach. As an academic, artist and parent, I have written about the importance of dissolving the boundaries between different creative spaces, which is necessary for working on creative projects alongside the demands of children and family (Summers & Clarke, 2015). In this work, returning to the studio was an opportunity to consider my own embodied place in the research, to consider my own cognition, and to focus on my work away from the distractions of the outside world. Even when the world outside the studio was described in the work, it was about looking out from the site of production through the window from a position of interiority.

My decision to focus on my studio activity is foregrounded by a critique of the studio in the second half of the twentieth century. Daniel Buren’s critique of the studio and gallery and museum systems in The Function of the Studio (1979), flags the studio as site to be reconstituted as part of a larger project of institutional critique. Buren sees the studio as the ‘first frame’ that artwork exists in and the gallery as the ‘second frame’. Artwork in the studio is ‘closest to its own reality’ and the origin of the work is private and fixed. Artwork is most vital in the place of production and is seen in its most meaningful and significant state. Buren uses this as a reason to ultimately abandon the studio and work directly into sites and situations (Buren, 1979).

At the time Buren was writing, his ideas resonated with the broader project of the dematerialised art object. However, at the same time, other artists used the studio itself to reconsider what constituted art and to critique institutional approaches. Bruce Nauman is well known for his work in the late 1960s, which focused on responding to and documenting the empty studio. Bruce Nauman’s 1968 work, Stamping in the Studio, used the empty studio as a both provocation and content for his work. At the time, Nauman was unsure of what to do in the studio soon after leaving art school. He stated, ‘If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product’ (Nauman, as cited in Benezera, 2002, p. 122). Similarly, my work is about being alone in the studio, moving and thinking about what embodiment and different modes of cognition can contribute to creative practice. Most importantly, I wanted to understand how movement would affect my flow of thinking. Like Nauman, I was focused on the process. However, unlike Nauman, I did not have an empty studio to work with. Mine was crammed with old works, materials, models and things that may or may not have a use in the future. Within the studio, I wanted to use a device similar to the beanbag with pedals that would support both embodied movement and thinking or daydreaming. While cycling had initially led me to consider internal cognitive processes such as daydreaming, I also considered walking as a way to explore

embodiment and, on a more pragmatic level, as the simplest way of moving around and encountering sculptural works as physical objects.

Walking the Studio 2016 While Nauman had a studio large enough to walk and dance around, my studio was much smaller. I found a second-hand domestic electric treadmill and altered it by adding a piece of plywood, which I could use as a surface for making while walking. I had no particular outcome planned initially, however the flat surface lent itself towards two-dimensional work. It became a receptive surface or ground for ideas or thoughts, and I experimented with several approaches, including writing, drawing and painting. The effort required to remain upright while walking on the treadmill made it impossible to make anything with both hands, so I chose to write. I made a plan to begin by walking for ten minutes with the treadmill set at the lowest pace and writing down ideas by hand as I walked. This activity was carried out ten times over a two-week period. I walked once or several times a day, or not at all. Some days I was very keen to walk, other times it felt arduous. I made notes while writing and focused on what I was thinking about at the time, and what was happening in the immediate surrounds inside, and nearby outside, the studio.

Fig. 40: Fleur Summers, treadmill in the studio, 2016

As the treadmill has an even and steady speed, I needed to develop the right pace and rhythm. In a similar way to cycling, walking relies on procedural memory and, once learnt, can easily be repeated. Both activities involve making the same set of movements over and over again. The repetition creates the conditions for thinking. This repetition is important as it is this repeated physical activity that promotes dissociation and enhances neuroplasticity (Hötting & Röder, 2013). The treadmill running belt also creates a continuous surface that threads through the front of the machine, so that the user

is repeatedly walking or running on the same surface. It is a continuously moving planar surface that becomes a ground for creating the work. This ground, while always the same, is unstable and has potential for infinite kinetic energy and repetition. As Gilles Deleuze argues, ‘repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but it does change something in the mind that contemplates it’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 93). This performative and iterative activity allowed me to work with the rupture caused by my response to the previous work, and to create something new that was still connected to previous ideas about daydreaming and dissociation.

Writing while walking on a treadmill initially brought my focus to repetition. In the first ten minutes of the process, I was immediately acutely aware of the repetitive nature of the work I was undertaking, noting it within minutes of beginning to walk. Walking on the treadmill was tiring and required discipline. Despite the comparatively short period of time, the first session seemed to stretch out ahead of me. The motion of the treadmill belt was constant and unrelenting. Not surprisingly, treadmills were once used as punishment devices in prisons. The relationship between prison exercise and punishment and control was explored by Ruth Burgon in relation to Bruce Nauman’s work in Pacing the Cell: Walking and Productivity in the Work of Bruce Nauman (2016). Burgon describes Nauman’s work as controlling and compared it to enforced and unproductive exercise in the penal system, as described in Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (1975). Similarly, I used unproductive exercise in a confined space with self-imposed time limits. This notion of working within limits and pushing bodies to extremes is not uncommon in art practice. It can be seen in the work of many performance artists such as Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraints films (1987–ongoing), in which the artist makes a series of drawings while suspended from restrictive harnesses (Latimer, 2010), or Marina Abramovic’s well-known performance The Artist is Present (2010), in which she sat in MOMA, New York, for eight hours a day for almost three months (Jones, 2011).

Making art while walking on a treadmill is not particularly extreme, but it is not undertaken by many other artists. The most notable, American artist John Kilduff, combines ‘live’ instructional oil painting in the style of Bob Ross with either walking on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike on his popular television show, Let’s Paint TV on YouTube (Harvey, 2004). Kilduff takes multitasking to an extreme in his work, and has been described as a ‘postmodern parody’. He combines an interest in plein air painting with cycling, treadmill running while also cooking, mixing drinks or playing table tennis (Longhurst, 2013, p. 311). While Kilduff undertakes this activity in a ‘tiny’ TV studio like my small studio, his work is performed to an audience, is humorous, and involves ‘a complex improvisational relationship among the painter, the subject and the canvas, enacted in real time, unscripted and deeply rooted in the human body’ (Harvey, 2004, para. 4).

Image removed due to copyright restrictions

Fig. 41: John Kilduff from Let’s Paint TV, 2019

These notions of performance and control informed the work, yet the main focus was on the experience of the work and how that emerged through my bodily engagement in the process, through walking and writing. Not surprisingly, the first text was primarily concerned with understanding the process through a direct description of the experience. It was difficult to write while walking, so I began by writing single words or short phrases with the longest being five words long. The text was improvised without any prior planning, aside from the parameters of walking on the treadmill, clipboard, pen and paper. These possibilities and constraints were important as they set implicit boundaries from which the work could be developed. The text provided a frame in which the process could unfold. It also helped capture and document the process, while creating new material for a final work. This maintains the focus on activity and process, not on endpoint. This is similar to the conditions underpinning my earlier work Supreme Red Rods, where the improvisation process is pivotal: structure is provided by the constraints which, in turn, enable creative improvisation.

Fig. 42: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio 2016, clipboard with handwritten text

In the second session, I engaged with the process of walking more closely and experimented with the types of steps I could make as I walked. I noted the interaction of the two surfaces: the bottom of my shoes and the treadmill mat and how they were all in constant contact. This makes sense biomechanically, as walking involves the strategy of the ‘double pendulum’ in which the one leg swings, the heel strikes the ground and rolls through to the toe. This is repeated by the other leg and coordinated so that one foot is always in contact with the ground (Usherwood et al., 2012, p 1).

two surfaces interacting moving flat rubber the bottom of my shoe friction grip staying in contact flowing over feeling the movement thinking the movement

Fig. 43: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio 2016, (excerpt 1)

As I experimented with different types of steps, I noted the monotonous and flat surface of the treadmill. This was an important observation as walking on a treadmill disrupts the visual or optic flow that normally occurs when moving. Optic flow is an essential component of mobility. When a body moves through an environment, a flow of images of the outside world is received by the retina of the

eye and this enables the body to move forward in a range of settings (Bremmer, 2008, p. 263). Treadmill walking, however, involves walking with reduced optic and perceptual flow, given the walking is on a stable surface in one position (Brennan et al., 2012, p. 527). Normally, when walking in a natural or constructed environment, we would be visually scanning the ground ahead, adjusting our steps, and slowing down when necessary. This sensory reduction is important and reduces the opticality of walking in this situation. Similarly, sensation is reduced under the feet as the surface never changes in texture or incline. Together these factors keep the focus on steady walking without some of the perceptual sensations normally experienced.

walk tall, straight feel your body terrain is monotonous no variation, flat little steps big steps long steady steps

Fig. 44: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio 2016, (excerpt 2)

While the other works in this research to date focused on active and social participation with artworks, walking has always been an integral part of the activity, just as it is a central part of experiencing the world as an able-bodied human being. In fact, it is difficult to perceive the world without locomotion in general. Even seeing, for example, involves movement of the eyeballs. Experiencing any type of artwork involves movement. The range of experiences involved in encountering sculpture from the miniature to large earth works all involve embodied movement with walking being particularly important. Like many automatic skills, walking is not noticed until there is a problem. Because walking is a complex activity, the inability to walk, stumbling or falling is often a sign of a neurological deficit in an otherwise healthy person. This is why the abilities to stand and walk are such useful and simple neurological tests. Watching a patient walk along a line is central in neurological exams, as is standing with eyes closed. In the same way that amputees opened up the study of the brain and movement, problems with walking also provide information about the brain-body system and again demonstrate the embodied nature of cognition.

Not only do humans find walking easy, evidence shows that ‘slow walking can assist in diverting greater attention towards complex cognitive tasks, improving its performance while walking’ (Patel, 2014 p. 140). This explains why pacing when trying to solve a problem is useful. Not only does walking have a positive effect on creative ideation, it also has an influence on associative memory (building relationships between unrelated objects) so that very individual and novel ideas can be developed (Oppezzo, 2014, p. 149). Walking is also important in an evolutionary sense and particularly in brain development. It is seen as a major milestone in child development in terms of physical and cognitive development. It is also important in robotics, and research into replicating human gait is ongoing (Torricelli et al, 2019).

increased surface area walking around and around while staying in the same place walking on one side of the loop the treadmill mat reduced surface a path well travelled pacing myself

Fig. 45: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 3)

As I became more comfortable with the physical demands of the process, my focus moved from the experience of walking on the treadmill to noting the colours and forms of the contents of the studio. I found myself looking for things outside of myself to reflect and comment on. The text became more poetic, even in its quotidian nature, and I began to understand its potential as creative work in its own right. Not only is there a deep association between thinking and walking, there is also a strong nexus between walking as an embodied activity, thinking and writing. In the eighteenth-century philosopher, writer and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously stated that ‘my mind only works with my legs’ and writer Henry David Thoreau spent up to four hours a day walking in the forest developing his ideas concerning nature: ‘the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow’ (Rousseau and Thoreau, as cited in O’Mara, 2019, p. 145).

While the earlier experiments with painting were interesting, I undoubtedly felt walking and writing to be more productive and conducive to the focus of the research. These ideas have been studied and written about extensively by philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, and have been outlined in writing by Rebecca Solnit (2001), Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008), and Shane O’Mara (2019). The sheer volume of material relating to walking as a creative practice illustrates its ongoing influence. Rebecca Solnit’s ideas of walking and the imagination are intimately connected to the movement of the body through the world: ‘Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world’ (Solnit, 2001, p. 29).

white chair with white tubing set square made at high school white plastic rubbish bag hanging old brown exercise bike pale pink watering can stick electrical cords double adaptor

Fig. 46: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 4)

My writing also uses text in short phrases and without punctuation, due to the physical demands of walking on the treadmill. This closely resembles automatic writing or stream of consciousness in literature, which is often used as a strategy for accessing characters’ inner thoughts, such as the Modernist works of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. In Ulysses, a novel in which Stephen Dedalus, the central character, is often walking, Joyce wrote:

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves (Joyce, 1922/2010, p. 191).

This sense of meeting oneself through the writing and walking is important. My writing undoubtedly is about myself, even when it is focused on a mark on the wall or the colour of a chair. This stream of consciousness, like daydreaming, is related to internal thoughts and ideas, and this becomes apparent as the text moves through different stages. By the end of the treadmill writing session, I am using the activity as a conduit to my interior world. In the final sessions, I write about dreams which are completely unrelated to the activity. This cognitive state is perceptually decoupled and again demonstrates how important embodied activity is for cognition.

70s curtains my mother made green + yellow + white ferns, yellow flowers, green leaves maybe I should look at them outside it’s dark + cold there are ferns + dog poo this is more interior inside my head trying to get inside my head last night I dreamt about catching a plane but first I had to clean up the holiday house it was a mess

Fig. 47: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, (excerpt 5)

While the main focus of this work was on the process of production in the studio, it was ultimately presented as a time-based video work. Artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have also engaged with walking as a central part of their work, and have translated their activity into text-based works such as 60 Minute Walk (1990) and Water from the Mountains (2009) (respectively). In my work, the video acts as a document or translation of the activity, but often exists as a work in its own right.

Time was important in this work as it is both dependent on being ‘performed’ and viewed over a specific period of time. The work unfolds over time both in production and viewing. In the final video, the text is translated into a simple white on black scrolling text in a standard font, and the text is

looped so it scrolls endlessly, similar to the endless loop of the treadmill mat. The institutional feel of the final video work acts as a frame for the text. It also reflects the control that the treadmill as a machine exerted over the process. While this outcome can be exhibited, it was the making that most informs this research. Walking the Studio (2016) was exhibited in Open House, an exhibition at the Alderman in Brunswick, Melbourne as part of the Future Estate art project.

Fig. 48: Fleur Summers, Walking the Studio, 2016, video still

CONCLUSION

The work in this chapter marked an important turning point in the research. It began with a focus on the kinaesthetic and how the movement of our bodies in a response to a participatory sculptural work can influence our encounter, experience and subsequent responses, with a focus on enactivism. However, there was a movement away from the participatory and social space of the gallery to a more inward-looking approach. This involved working in the studio and focusing on the movement and cognition of the artist. Through a simple process involving walking on a treadmill and writing a text while moving, an improvised work was made, which was more focused on process and content than outcome. The text produced is improvisational and taps into unconscious thoughts through the DMN and, as Tim Ingold identifies, the ‘flow of the thinking mind’. The final work provided a way in which I could use my own body to understand the process. The phenomenological nature of the work located in the studio with reduced sensory interruptions was important, as was the repetitive nature of walking on the treadmill. The resulting text was poetic and quotidian, and is a document of my thoughts as I moved.

The final work Walking the Studio documents my mind wandering as I walk. It brings together observations of my immediate environment, my responses to the activity, and sometimes my dreams. The artwork produced is the result of creating an environment to respond to via sensorimotor activity, which I specifically designed to capture my cognitive experiences. I have done this in response to the ideas of Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) in an attempt to create sensorimotor activity that can co-constitute an environment, and Noe’s ideas that this activity actually determines what can be perceived and understood (Noe, 2004). In this way, through the relatively skilful activity of walking on the treadmill, I have used my agency to constitute a world, or environment, that endows me with a particular access to perception and cognition in my encounter with the work.

CHAPTER FOUR: Dark Adaptation

This chapter begins with the proposition of making and encountering a sculptural work in the dark and the phenomenological experience that follows. Experiencing sculpture without light or in reduced light can become a potentially expansive proposition both at an affective and subjective level, and in the broader context of contemporary art practice. It also creates environments that can embed and extend cognition.

This connects to the body of work discussed in Chapter Three in several ways. Firstly, the work initially becomes even more intimately focused on the studio activity, and the direct, embodied relationship between artist and artwork. Secondly, the interest in movement continued in relationship to touch, which can only occur with movement, and in the movement of the body between light and dark spaces. The chapter concludes with a return to the concept of the phantom limb to complete the research by creating a final work that addresses an understanding of the connections between sculptural forms, embodiment and neurocognitive states through phenomenological experiences.

This chapter also introduces concepts of empathy in relation to sensorimotor activity and connects this to the concept of extended cognition and embedded approaches to experience. In the next work, Merge, the studio is again used as the location for the work, which is made in the dark. Cognition is embedded in this very particular environment and through my studio activity. In a similar manner to the work Walking the Studio in Chapter Three, cognition is embedded as ‘the mode of activity on which it essentially depends simultaneously constitutes both the cognitive life of the subject, and the environment to which the subject is responsive’ (Ward & Stapleton, 2012, p. 99). This occurs in both of these works by creating boundaries and rules, and controlling the environmental conditions under which cognition and the creation of the artwork can occur. In Walking the Studio, the boundaries involved include the site, the activity undertaken on the treadmill, the time limit, and the notation used. In Merge, the studio is darkened and a single material is used in the initial step of making the work. It is through this material that cognition is potentially extended and understood through the concept of sensorimotor empathy as an ‘expansion of the lived body’ (Chemero, 2016, p. 145).

This empathy is based on material sculptural experiences and the resultant artwork relies on translations of figuration ultimately returning the research project to the concept of the phantom limb and of the possibilities of sculpture as a prosthetic device. These experiences are embedded within an environment of reduced opticality, which is mediated through architectural space in the form of a darkened passageway. Together these perceptual encounters attempt to reconstitute the experience of the fragmented body conceptually and materially.

PART 1: MAKING SCULPTURE IN THE DARK

English sculptor Phyllida Barlow once stated that sculpture was best viewed in the dark so that its presence could be felt without the interruption of its image (Lack, 2009). This is a curious statement from an artist who makes enormous, materially based sculptural assemblages, employs volume, mass and gravity, and often uses vibrant colour. However, as the sculptural encounter is a multisensory experience also involving sensorimotor activity, Barlow’s assertion becomes a very interesting proposition for viewers and practitioners. Not only did Barlow talk about viewing in the dark, she actually worked at night in a dark studio when her children were young.

I would go into the studio very late at night, and I actually didn’t have a clue what to make, so I’d turn all the lights off … it was a very, very pivotal moment, when making things not through an image, but through touch... (Barlow, as cited in Cochrane, 2014, p. 65).

Barlow’s assertions about viewing sculpture in the dark had a profound effect on me. I considered the possibility of making a work and putting it in a completely dark room and asking people if they could ‘feel it’. I wondered if there needed to be a work at all in a similar way to Martin Creed’s work The Lights Off Work No. 270 (2005) in which he simply left all the gallery lights off at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. The subtlety of the incidental light throughout, and the emptied out feeling of the gallery, was an unusual, subtle and sensorial experience for the audience. I also considered the possibility of including sculptural works that people could bump into or even fall into in the dark, such as a big soft sculpture that could only be navigated by touch.

I had contemplated the idea of a totally dark room with a sculpture in it since I began this research. I had considered what sort of encounter could be experienced. The work would need to be robust, soft, maybe a relief on the floor or walls, or perhaps something large and soft that could receive an encountering body, something that you could feel and try to understand its form and mass, surface and materiality. Understanding and encountering a sculpture purely with the body and through touch is not a new idea and a number of museums have provided materials or facsimiles for people who are vision impaired. The Tactual Museum of Athens, for example, has exact plaster facsimiles of famous Greek sculpture and architectural models, which can be touched. Sighted visitors are offered masks to fully experience the sensation of touching the works which include the statue of Aphrodite (130BC), Hermes by Praxiteles (330BC) and Poseidon of Artemision (450BC) (The Tactual Museum of Athens,1989, 78–79). However, most galleries and museums focus on occularcentric methods of viewing collections to protect potentially sensitive materials. When touch is allowed, it is very rarely original objects (Christidou & Pierroux, 2019).

Image removed due to copyright restrictions

Fig. 49: The Tactual Museum of Athens, 2019 (Photo credit: Michael Turtle)

Merge 2017 These early thoughts confirmed the role of touch in the studio and during the encounter as pivotal in this third body of work. Touch is the first sense to develop as it is thought to develop in utero after the eighth week of conception (Gallace & Spence, 2014). Touch also sets the boundaries of the self and allows us to differentiate our bodies from others and the external world. Our bodies are covered with receptors sensitive to touch, so that even when we cannot see parts of our bodies, we can feel them. And touch is incredibly important to art and particularly to sculpture as a discipline. In 1778, philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder wrote an essay about sculpture and argued that we can only understand sculpture as three dimensional because sight and touch are developed in tandem. He also argued that sculpture was spiritually superior to painting: ‘The sculptor stands in the dark of night and gropes towards the form of gods. The forms of poets are before and in him’ (Herder, as cited in Forster, 2010, p. 32). Herder writes of an embodied approach that not only denies sight, but refers to sculpture as uncovering and enacting sacred forms through touch.

This focus and interest in tactility has a long lineage and can be traced from very early hand-held amulets such as Venus figures. Feeling and touching were ideal ways to prove the real existence of a phenomenon. For many historically European Christian communities, touch was the ‘simplest and most basic form of communion with the sacred’ (Jutte, 2008, p. 7). In other words, enactive touch became the site for the intersection of body and mind. The Venus figure therefore mediates cognition concerning the sacred through touch. It follows that sculptural objects more broadly can extend cognition through touch in their making and in reception if they are involved in making sense of the world. To extend cognition, sculpture needs to ‘structure and constrain the subject’s cognition while simultaneously being a potential object of experience’ (Ward & Stapleton, as cited in Paglieri, 2012, p. 103). I suggest that both the sense-making involved in modelling sculptural work by hand, and the subsequent haptic perception involved, has the capacity to extend cognition.

In his defining work The Art of Sculpture (1956) Herbert Read discusses the ‘sensation of palpability’ in relation to sculpture’s capacity to of be handled, touched and felt and claimed this preference for tactility essential: ‘sculpture attains its highest and unique aesthetic values’ (1956, p. 70). This has an interesting contemporary resonance with Krauss’s ideas of sculpture being ‘infinitely malleable’. While Krauss meant this metaphorically, plasticity and malleability – literally and metaphorically – is a strength in contemporary sculptural practice across a range of materials and methodologies.

As a contemporary practitioner, I have the capacity to use traditional methods and contemporary frameworks. For this part of the research, I needed a material that was malleable and I could manage and transform in the dark. I chose to work with wax with the plan to cast in bronze. Wax is a pliable material that is receptive and impermanent, with the potential for endless change. It can be continuously added to and extended, but can also be divided into a manageable handheld amount. In the foundry, these forms can be captured and translated into bronze using one of the oldest sculptural methods, the lost wax method. Lost wax casting dates back to approximately 4000 BC when wax from wild bees was used encased in clay, which was then heated to harden the clay and melt out wax (Hunt, 1980, p. 64). This method captures a moment in time when a malleable material such as wax is modelled and translated into bronze through the foundry process. It produces a stable bronze work that is enduring and can be touched by numerous people without the form changing dramatically. Bronze has a sense of permanence, but it still has a reactive surface.

With this in mind, I began work in my dark studio outside my suburban house in Melbourne one late summer night with a small amount of wax. I began to produce Merge, a series of small hand-held bronze works. Making sculpture in the dark was an intensive activity. Like many artists who want to focus on process, I use deskilling by working in the dark as a strategy. This could also be described in cognitive terms, as working with a reduced sensory capacity or a ‘neural frugality’ (O’Hara, 2016, p. 2). I started making the work without any particular outcome in mind and focused initially on the feeling of the material in my hands. To keep the wax malleable, and before I could even begin to consider the possibilities and potentials of creating forms in the dark, I had to keep folding it and pressing it together using the heat of my own body to keep it workable. I became aware that each fold, each time I pressed into the wax, kneading it like dough, that an impression of my touch was recorded and erased and re-recorded and erased. I began to consider how embodied the process of modelling with wax is when the heat of the body is involved. If the wax is too cool, it is almost unworkable. If it is too warm and too soft it can sag and lose its shape. Like the wax, our own bodies respond differently to environmental conditions – our skin sweats and feels softer when warm – it relaxes and contracts depending on the ambient temperature. Modelling wax therefore has a very direct relationship with the body, so the transfer of body heat breaks down the boundaries between the body and the work. As I transferred my body heat into the wax, I also developed the capacity to extend myself conceptually. Salman Rushdie referred to this idea in more metaphorical terms: ‘during the creative work, this borderline softens, turns penetrable and allows the world to flow into the artist and the artist to flow into the world’ (Rushdie, 1996, p. 8). This flow relates to ideas about how we

conceive of our body image when we come into contact with materials and concepts that have the capacity to break down the edges of our bodies. In Volatile Bodies (1994), Elizabeth Grosz wrote about the dynamic nature of the body image:

The body image is as much a function of the subject’s psychology and sociohistorical context as of anatomy. The limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical “container”, the skin. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges, and contours are “osmotic” – they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange (Grosz, 1994, p. 79).

This ‘osmotic’ exchange in the darkness of the studio, where the boundaries between the body and materials are not visible, led me to trace and reflect on my body and particularly my hand. As the dominant hand-eye connection was severed, the most important relationship occurred between my hand and the wax mediated through touch. It was not only a different way of making, but also a different way of conceptualising the work. My entire focus was on the material in my hands, and my first response was to use it to trace the entire surface of my palm and fingers. I then moved on to make a series of forms in response to my hands that became less about representing the hand and more about forms that spatially reflected and connected my hands. These forms became tools for representing and re-representing the experience over time and in the dark. The making was necessarily more embodied, more connected to materiality, and conducive to a different kind of thinking.

Fig. 50: Fleur Summers, Studio at night, 2019

As a phenomenological event, the experience of working in darkness potentially opens us up to different possibilities or affects. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas and using a Deleuzian framework, Robert Shaw argues that light can create a protective zone ‘whereas in darkness, we are rendered more open to the affectivity of other’ (Shaw, 2015, p. 596). Vision, he argues holds objects separate from the self and in darkness an ‘openness to affect also allows flows to come out from the body, so

that the gap between the ‘internal’ space of the self and the ‘external’ space of the world becomes much more porous. This porosity is at once opportunity, and vulnerability’ (Shaw, 2015, p. 596). Similarly, John Tallmadge in his 2008 essay Night Visions contends that in darkness the body ‘relaxes, opens, breathes, extends its attention outward into the world the way a plant feels its way into the soil with roots or into the air with leaves’ (p. 140). This sense of porosity and of ‘feeling the way’ in the art making process is palpable in the darkness of the studio. The darkness reduced sensory inputs and gave me the opportunity to focus on touch and, in a way, that maintained the connection and autonomy of my body and my hand in particular. I was able to work in an embodied, direct, expressive and affective way. By combining the potential flows and openness of darkness and the deliberate decoupling of the skill of the hand-eye connection, I was able to develop a different kind of embodied knowledge that centred on touch but flowed through and extended into the material I was working with.

Fig. 51: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, wax form ready for casting

Artist Paul March, who once worked as a clinical psychologist, describes his experience working with clay as an extension of his own body and as an act of co-creation: ‘Sculptural forms seem to arise directly from the interaction between my body (eyes, arms and hands) and the clay. It feels like the clay and I create something together’ (March, 2019, p. 134). March recognises the same boundaries and permeabilities in his engagement with the clay as I have with the wax, also acknowledging how cognition extends into his material. March writes that there ‘no longer appears to be a sharp division between what is me and what is not me’ and suggests that ‘the mind extends to include the clay in its act of plastic deformation’ (March, 2019, p. 134). My experience working in the dark with the wax was similar, and the sense of connecting and co-creating flowed through the experience.

I undertook this process on a number of different occasions. Each time, in the light of day, the indexical trace of the body was not only clear visually in the wax in the indelibly fine lines of my fingertips, but also when I felt the forms and re-engaged with them. The deeper indentations of my thumbs, the points where my fingers had pinched the wax together and where the layers of wax met through the kneading process became important tactile positions in which I could re-position my hands. Importantly, this documents a recursive action in which forms made by the hand hold

information about the hand. This represents the making by the hand, which can then be felt by the hand. The wax forms mirror the hand and act as a model for a reflexive trace of the hand made by the hand. The wax forms celebrate and reflect the work of the hand in the creative process, but also bring into sharp relief the importance of skin in touch.

Fig. 52: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of wax showing fingerprints (left) Fig. 53: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of bronze showing fingerprints (right)

Casting in bronze results in a finished lasting work. It is a technical process that involves preparation and casting of hand-modelled waxes, and then primarily machine finishing of the bronze works. Through this process, the wax becomes completely fluid and is burnt, or pours, out of the mold. The bronze is then melted and poured into the space left by the wax. The wax and the bronze move through a series of states of solidity and fluidity. The process allows matter to form and reform, and the fine impressions of fingerprints and other fine lines on the hands are translated into bronze. Bronze legitimises the process and the activity. It produces small works that carry the history of sculpture in their cold and dense presence. Like the wax, the bronze warms up through touch and captures body heat, although the potential to alter the form through body heat is no longer palpably present. Bronze still has the capacity to record touch and the material connection to the process of the object being made by the hand for the hand is still strong.

Bronze is durable, but it can be damaged and worn away if it is touched by many people over time. This is due to the reactivity of bronze and the oils naturally present on the surface of our skin. Touching bronze with these oils tends to remove the darkness of oxidation that occurs when air comes in contact with the surface, burnishing it and making it more reflective. Its reactivity means it records touch on its surface. For example, Peter Corlett’s full-scale figurative sculpture in Brunswick of Father John Brosnan (2004) has a burnished outstretched hand, the result of many people touching it in passing.

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Fig. 54: Peter Corlett, 2004, Father John Brosnan, bronze

The works that make up Merge have been finished and wire brushed to expose the bronze surface to oxidation and to the oils in the hands of those who interact with them. They fit neatly into the hand and are smooth and easy to touch. They carry all the marks of their making – the folds and fingerprints, creases and indentations. Many have one side, which records how I have pushed and modelled the wax with my fingers, and another side which has direct impressions and traces of my hand. They represent active and passive modes of working with and against the body. Sometimes, I have the urge to close my eyes while touching them and to re-engage with the conditions of their making. When they are touched by others, they present an opportunity for a very personal type of experience.

Fig. 55: Fleur Summers, Merge, close up, 2017, bronze

These works record my physical interaction with materials under particular conditions. They offer an audience the opportunity to put their hands where mine have been and feel the negative space of my touch against their own skin. It is undoubtedly a multisensory experience – the texture of the hand is visible and the materiality of the bronze is palpable in its weight, relative hardness and its initial coldness. The works in Merge are not replicas of my hand, instead they represent the space around and between my hands. Much like many of Rachel Whiteread’s sculptural works, they represent negative space or the space surrounding the body and other objects. For Whiteread, this is the space

inside a bath or under a chair. In this work, this means that the bronze works fit neatly into the liminal spaces that exist close to our bodies. This also reflects our ability to both touch and be touched. More specifically, the audience can touch the work where it was touched in the making. Merleau-Ponty wrote of this potential from a phenomenological perspective: ‘I can meet in things the actions of another and find in these actions a sense, because they are themes of possible action in my own body’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1947/1968, p. 117).

Fig. 56: Fleur Summers, A selection of works from Merge, 2017, bronze

This notion of meeting the ‘actions of another’ through touch, and therefore action, is particularly important in this research and has the potential to create an empathic response from the viewer. The word empathy comes from the German word einfuhlung which translates as ‘feeling into’ and refers to the act of ‘projecting oneself into another body or environment’ (Ganczarek et al., 2018, p. 141).

While empathy is studied in a number of disciplines, it is not a well-defined concept and has been ascribed to various categories, causes and mechanisms, including cognitive and affective models. Other studies also note the concept of somatic empathy, in which a person feels actual physical pain in response to another’s pain. Kinaesthetic empathy, for example, can occur when people watch a dance performance (Cuff et al., 2016). Each of these definitions refer to empathy that occurs without physically connecting to the other bodies or objects it responds to. Empathy based on a material engagement, which involves connecting bodies to objects or other bodies through movement, has been defined as sensorimotor empathy by philosopher Anthony Chemero (2016). He defines the experience of sensorimotor empathy as occurring when the ‘lived body expands, and temporarily includes aspects of the non-bodily environment, whether they are tools or other humans’ (Chemero, 2016, p. 145). This is an active and connective empathy felt through the moving and malleable boundaries of the lived body. It involves ‘feeling into’ other objects and potentially bodies. This can also occur in the experience of music simply by an audience moving in time to the music as musicians are playing. As a result, social and affective meanings can be developed (Walton et al., 2018).

Fig. 57: Fleur Summers, Holding works from Merge, 2017, bronze

Describing the experience of handling these works through the lens of sensorimotor empathy is useful in understanding the sculptural encounter. These works are designed to be touched. As noted earlier, touching involves movement, and through this engaged movement or motor activity, the audience can begin to ‘understand’ the object through material and physical contact. Chemero suggests that this occurs with objects by forming ‘temporary synergies with them, by feeling them as parts of ourselves’ and that a unity emerges ‘in which you and the world you engage with, and which engages with you, is for the moment, at least, not separate from you’ (Chemero, 2016, p. 151). While this may be similar to the way that tools can become an integrated extension of the body, sensorimotor empathy

suggests a deeper engagement, and a more complex way of comprehending the value of the sculptural object.

The way in which the body emerges directly in this work created a pivotal moment in the research. It has a very strong relationship to the very early photographs of my hands and the mirror. Other works have invited participation or have involved my body in the studio as a performative body. However, this work becomes figurative and makes palpable an experience of an unseen or absent body. Additionally, this is a body that cannot see itself and translates these feelings into wax and bronze and so that an audience can then experience them in a deeper way themselves through touch.

Merge also was the foundation of a sculptural commission that I proposed and completed during the research process. While it is not included as an integral part of the research project, it is closely related to the work in this section and therefore worth noting. It was proposed for the Jewell Station redevelopment in Brunswick in Melbourne in 2016 and is titled Making Sense (and was named before Simon Penny’s book Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment was published). It consists of arching steel cylinders that emerge from the ground with bronze ends covered in impressions from fingertips from the modelling process. The bronze ends are designed to be touched in a similar way to the bronze works in Merge and to therefore create connections between the audience and artist. This work also engages with Chemero’s ideas of sensorimotor empathy, and extended and embedded cognition.

Fig. 58: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, clay modelling (left) Fig. 59: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, close up of bronze showing impressions of fingers (right)

Fig. 60: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, bronze, stainless steel, installed at Jewell Station, Brunswick, Melbourne

PART 2: DARK ADAPTATION

It is rare to experience complete darkness. Light spills out from urban life into our experience of darkness. Even outside of cities, the landscape is illuminated by the moon. On reflection, it seems very possible that artist Phyllida Barlow probably did not work in the studio in absolute, total darkness when she worked at night with the lights off. Her experience of the space might have changed over time. Similarly, my backyard studio, even with a blanket over the window, still had some very low-level illumination – not enough light to see what I was doing, but I was aware that the space was not completely dark. Over time, my eyes adjusted and I began to get a basic sense of the overall studio. This is a common, well-documented and understood experience that occurs when entering a darkened area from a well-lit area. Initially, it is difficult to see but, over time, visual sensitivity returns. This transition is called dark adaptation and refers to the gradual process by which the eye becomes more sensitive to light under conditions of reduced illumination. The work in this section connects to the bronze work made in the dark by further exploring darkness over time and by creating a conduit for the experience of dark adaptation.

Dark adaptation occurs when intense illumination is reduced suddenly, and visual sensitivity recovers slowly over a period of time. Generally, there are two phases that are mediated by photoreceptors known as rods and cones in the retina of the human eye. The cones (responsible for colour vision and high spatial acuity are more active at higher light levels) undergo a rapid process of adaption, but the rods are responsible for vision at lower light levels, which allow us to see in reduced light. The process involving rods is much slower and can take up to 40 to 50 minutes (Reuter, 2011). This explains why we can gradually see more in reduced light, especially when there is a sudden change,

such as a blackout or how our eyes become better at seeing at night at a campsite. As such, visual perception emerges slowly over time and we become dependent on other senses in the initial encounter with a darkened space.

Passage 2019 Passages 2019 is an exploration of the experiential and temporal nature of dark adaptation, and consists of a simple passageway built inside Site Eight Gallery in the School of Art at RMIT. It is a work in its own right, but is also as a transitional space between sections of the gallery. The work is liminal in that it conceptually sits between experiences and spaces. It relies on what precedes and what is revealed to create a phenomenological space. It is also large and site-specific, built especially for the exhibition space. The passageway is a simple construction across the middle of the gallery, meeting and wrapping around the central column. It is painted black to absorb rather than reflect light. It is designed to mimic the entrance to a photographic darkroom and to therefore occlude light. In this situation, however, it does not have to be completely light proof. The structure reduces light transmission and creates a physical, temporal and spatial interruption within the gallery space.

Fig. 61: Fleur Summers, model of Passage 2019, scale 1:20 (left)

Fig. 62: Fleur Summers, model of doorway of Passage 2019, scale 1:20 (right)

This work attempts to mirror the experience of moving through a space of almost complete darkness to experience the transition from a well-lit space to one of reduced illumination over a period of time. The passageway is not intended to be completely dark nor give a complete experience of dark adaptation as it does not allow the eyes enough time to completely adapt. However, even in this somewhat truncated form, it is a device intended to physically and metaphorically move the viewer from one state to another in a condensed space. This creates an encounter where there is nothing but a space to move through, enveloping darkness, and a sense of expectation of what will come next.

Nothing Under the Sun (2014), a work by Melbourne artist Scott Miles, explored a similar experience, albeit it with a focus on painting, after a residency in Greenland in winter. Miles constructed a series of small rooms accessible via a corridor within West Space in Melbourne. His work was described as ‘an installation of painting and sound works within a constructed environment that encourages an

immersive, durational and sensory engagement with painting’ (Miles, 2014, para. 1). While Miles did not specifically mention dark adaptation in his artist statement, he is undoubtedly employing it as a strategy in the work. He describes the work as ‘informed by the experience of reduced optical capacity and explored through an investigation of the nocturne’ (Miles, 2014, para. 2). From my perspective, the encounter of Miles work was mediated and sustained through the mechanism of dark adaptation. While his paintings and video works and the experience of viewing them was visually engaging, it was the mode of presentation, and his spatial constructions that makes the work so relevant to my research. He also relied heavily on a subtle soundtrack to extend the spatial experience and create the feeling of an unfolding event. It has the effect of feeling ‘pursued by weird taps, pitches and clicks that remind me of bat or dolphin sonar; and pale, flange-ing drones like humming hard-drive fans’ (Dawkins, 2014). These sounds added to the disorientating nature of the sudden darkness and together they seemed to slow time down as the encounter became more embodied. It was extremely dark at the entrance and the scale of visible paintings was not quite discernible. There is no doubt that the optical effects of the work drew the participant through the work, but it was the experiential unfolding nature of the work that ultimately created such a successful and embodied encounter.

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Fig. 63: Scott Miles, Nothing Under the Sun, 2016, West Space, plywood, wood

My work attempts to strip back the optical to focus on the experience itself. The architectural construction in the gallery, the psychological potential and feelings of entering into the unknown, and the embodied feeling of containment, were at the centre of the encounter. Like Miles, the duration of the experience was important. The work slows down the audience, reduces opticality and extends the gallery spatially. Miles reduced opticality so he can then highlight it, focus on it, and bring it into sharp focus in an engagement with his paintings and video work. My work attempts to reduce and subvert

the optical so the audience has a transformative experience, which prepares them to experience the space and work beyond in subdued lighting when they walk through the corridor.

The time taken to move through the work is important. As Krauss stated, ‘into any spatial organization there will be folded an implicit statement about the nature of temporal experience’ (Krauss, 1997, p. 4). The passageway acts as a spatial strategy to create a pause and indicate the opportunity for transition. This is reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958/1994), a phenomenological exploration of hallways in houses as spaces in which move you from one room to another or one state to another.

Fig. 64: Fleur Summers, Passage, 2019, plywood and pine

The passageways in my work, and in Scott Miles’s installation, were influenced by the passageways of artists such as Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and Robert Irwin. Nauman’s corridors (1969–1974) focused more on control and, in some cases, surveillance given he strongly guided and controlled audience experience. Nauman aimed to direct ‘the situation so that someone else can be a performer, but he can do only what I want him to do. I mistrust audience participation. That’s why I try to make these works as limiting as possible’ (Nauman, as cited in Kraynak, 2003, p. 26). His use of video cameras and monitors follow and further disrupt audience experience. In Passage, while employing similar structures to Nauman, I aimed to give the audience more agency. The corridor does not preclude the audience from access to the whole the gallery, they can simply walk around the side of it. It offers an experience that is voluntary and could be renegotiated in either direction. Unlike many of Nauman’s works, it could be entered from either side so the audience can also transition from the dark to the light. The audience therefore has more choice about how the work is performed and if it is to be performed at all. My aim was to offer an intimate and embodied experience that extends a participant’s encounter, rather than forcing a particular sensory approach. The potential vulnerability of crossing thresholds and boundaries, and entering darkness or subdued lighting, creates an opportunity for the audience to open up to the possibilities of a potential experience.

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Fig. 65: Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor, 1969, wallboard and wood bracing, 2.4 x 6.1 x 0.5 m, Guggenheim Museum

Rosalind Krauss suggested in relationship to the work of Nauman, that unfolding experiential works need to be approached with ‘humility’ to allow space to open up between the viewer and the artwork and have ‘moment to moment material experiences’ (Krauss, 1977, p. 282). This is the idea of humility, of being able to stand back and not make assumptions about previous knowledge or status, of trusting that a simple experience, when given space and time, can be of value. Simon Penny, writes of this notion at the end of his book Making Sense, when he refers to artworks as being metacognitive in that ‘they provoke us to consider, for instance, not just what we are seeing but the experience of seeing itself and our assumptions about it’ (Penny, 2017, p. 440). Penny is referring to the experience of art beyond just seeing, that is at times perceptually very subtle or is about the ‘unspeakability of things that are as quotidian as they are unspeakable’ (Penny, 2017, p. 441). Martin Creed’s work, which is mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is a good example of this. The act of doing nothing in the gallery created an ordinary experience, which left the audience to question just what they were ‘seeing’ and feeling, and to consider the nature of contemporary art practice.

This process of metacognition helps with managing the uncertainty of a multisensory situation. It endows an audience with the capacity for reflection and the ability to both understand the sensory characteristics of the passageway and its capacity to transport the participant to memories and associations such as the darkroom, a cupboard, hallway or being underground. As such, the passageway is a work in its own right and perceptual preparation for the experience of the final work in this research project. It is both disorientating and reorientating and creates additional architectural layers in the exhibition space, endowing an experience of interior and exterior space within the gallery. This expands the surface area of the entire space, allows the encounter to occur inside and outside of the work, and creates a private space within the public site of the gallery. Not only does it

enhance the embodied experience of the audience, it also stands in for a metaphorical body by posing questions about boundaries and edges.

PART 3: FEELING THE WAY

This research project is mediated through the moving body, including my own, as I feel my way, stumble in the dark, and follow my nose – physically and metaphorically – in the production of the work. This final work provides an embodied encounter with a figurative sculpture where the optical experience is secondary to the spatial and haptic, an encounter where the audience is encouraged to feel their way around the work with their bodies, an encounter where sight is still valued, but is not the main focus.

This part of the research also returns to the concept of the phantom limb or at least, the idea of experiencing the edges of the body differently to the reality of bodily boundaries. While phantom limbs are only experienced by a small proportion of the population, most people have experienced sensations that transcend the edges or borders of the anatomy. The experience of numbness or lack of sensation after a local anaesthetic, or of reduced blood flow to a peripheral part of the body, can produce altered experiences of bodily boundaries. For example, many people have experienced the feeling of having a ‘fat lip’ after visiting the dentist for a procedure that required a local anaesthetic. This can result in part of the body, in this case the lip, feeling enlarged and swollen. In reality, the lip is of normal size and the local anaesthetic has the somatosensory effect of expanding the edge of the lip. According to Gandevia and Phegan in their paper Perceptual distortions of the human body image produced by local anaesthesia, ‘perceived size of parts of the body can change rapidly when the afferent input from the part is altered’ (Gandevia & Phegan, 1999, p. 614). This change in sensory, or afferent input, occurs due to the lack of feedback from the body part. It is interesting that this reduction actually results in the body part feeling as if it has been enlarged. While this experience is relatively fleeting in comparison to the phantom limb phenomenon, it similarly illustrates how malleable the edges of the body actually are and how this can be embodied in everyday experience.

This breaking down of boundaries and differing experiences of the scale of body parts has potential in expansive cognitive, sensory and embodied experiences. While this research began with a strong connection to concepts of the figurative, with a focus on phantom limbs, most of the works have involved the enactment and embodiment of the audience, rather than representations of the body. Earlier in this research, I explored the work of photographer Alexa Wright. Her digitally altered photographs in After Image gave the audience the opportunity to understand, through text and image, the range of different ways individuals experienced their phantom limbs. Some limbs were larger and extended further into space than before, and some telescoped right up to the stump of the lost limb. They were sometimes in odd positions, while some were not felt at all or seemed to be floating away. All of the sensations were described in relation and in comparison, to the normative body. This is particularly interesting in terms of prosthetic devices which aim to reconstitute the body but also have the potential to create new configurations. As Elizabeth Grosz wrote in Time Travels (2005)

‘prostheses both augment and generate, they both confirm an already existing bodily organization and generate new bodily capacities’ (p. 152). This ambiguity creates potentials for contemporary sculpture in the way it can augment and reflect the body through scale, materiality and figuration, and how this can then enact and affect the embodied encounter.

Phantom 2019 For the final work in this research, I created a large soft form that mirrors and distorts the form of the hand, using my own hand as a reference point. The work consists of a large soft sculpture made of grey felt and filled with stuffing. At one end is a 1:1 scale copy of my own hand in fabric, which is connected to an extended long stuffed arm of the same fabric. This continues along the floor and gradually telescopes and increases in size until another hand is formed on the other end. In comparison, this hand is large and bulky. At 1:20 scale, it is approximately 1.0m high. The enlarged portion of the hand is designed to be experienced in semi-darkness and is not immediately recognisable as a discrete form. As a large soft object, it is designed to feel somewhat domestic and familiar, one that could be touched, handled and felt. It is soft and passive and lies inert on the floor.

The hand in art is a strong symbol of action from the very earliest cave painting to more contemporary works, such as Lisa Roet’s large bronze and gilded primate hands such as Chimpanzee Hands (2007). Roet’s primate hands are also enlarged and disembodied. However, they are made of durable sculpture materials such as bronze and hold their form, unlike my horizontal, almost formless and floor-based work.

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Fig. 66: Lisa Roet, Chimpanzee Hands, 2007, bronze, 110 cm high

The use of felt as a material has an interesting presence in contemporary art. It was a recurring motif in the work of Joseph Beuys, who made a series of works using felt and fat. For Beuys, these materials had a healing potential and warmth and he developed a spiritual connection to them. Robert

Morris also made a series of works using thick industrial felt offcuts to explore ideas of anti-form. He saw these works as haptic and receptive (Rivenbark, 2017), although they were never exhibited to allow the audience to touch them. During the 1960s and 1970s, when these works were made, soft sculpture emerged as part of the post-Minimalism movement, when artists continued to question the changing nature of sculpture through materials and their malleability. For example, while my bronze hand works in Merge have a stage of malleability in their production, they tap into the history of traditional sculpture that relies on the permanence of bronze. This emphasis on permanence can also be seen in figurative monuments and commemorative sculpture which is elevated and made of weather resistant materials such as bronze or stone. Soft sculpture breaks down the idealisation and verticality of the figure or body claiming horizontal space.

In his essay The Poetics of Softness (1967), Max Kozloff points out that sculptures constructed of rigid materials reject gravity and entropy, and ultimately lack the more anthropomorphic features of soft sculpture. Kozloff points out that soft sculpture retains the ‘fatigue, deterioration or inertia’ of the body regardless of its form and as such reflects the temporality of the body with the potential for change (Kozloff, 1967, p. 224). This can be seen in Claes Oldenburg’s early soft sculptures of food and everyday objects that are scaled up and sag like a human body, or Surrealist Dorothea Tanning’s works made of tweed upholstery fabric that extend out of sofas and other furniture, such as Rainy Day Canape (1970).

Image removed due to copyright restrictions

Fig. 67: Dorothea Tanning, Canape en temps de pluie (Rainy Day Canape), 1970, tweed, upholstered wood sofa, wool, ping pong balls, cardboard 32 x 68 x 43 in

Like these early soft works, my large soft hand pushes beyond normative bodily boundaries and projects into another scale. This changes the way it is materially experienced in space. However, it still mirrors my own body and the hand in general, and creates a sensation of doubling despite it clearly being constructed out of felt. There is a synergy here with the rubber hand illusion, which is a type of body transfer illusion. This illusion is also related to the clinical treatment of phantom limbs using the mirror box, which was discussed in Chapter Two. The rubber hand illusion involves vision,

touch and proprioception, and can produce the sensation of touch from an unconnected and non- corporeal body part (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). It is often demonstrated with a lifelike prosthetic rubber hand, but can also be done with a rubber glove. With one hand out of the line of sight, and the rubber hand positioned next to the other and opposite hand, the rubber hand and absent hand are simultaneously stroked with a small paintbrush. This simultaneous stroking is important, as it leads to the feeling of the absent hand being stroked with seeing the rubber hand being stroked. If the rubber hand is then stroked without stroking the absent hand, it can still be felt. Most interestingly, participants in these experiments attribute the feeling of the rubber hand to their own bodies: ‘[I] feel like it’s my hand’ (Tsakiris & Haggard, 2006 p. 80).

The potential of these studies can be seen in virtual reality (VR), in which the use of VR headsets that input differing bodily feedback, such as the visual feedback of the body of a doll, changes the way we sense and experience the world. This has been explored in the experiment Being Barbie: The Size of One’s Own Body Determines the Perceived Size of the World (van Der Hoort et al., 2011) and David Byrne’s collaborative work Being Britta (2016). These experiments showed that perceived body size affects how we visually experience the world. In both cases, participants’ bodies felt small and the world was perceived as larger in comparison. A rare body image disorder, called Alice in Wonderland syndrome, similarly can cause macro or microsomatognosia, where the body is perceived as larger or smaller than it actually is (Blom, 2016).

Fig. 68: Fleur Summers, Phantom, 2019, felt, stuffing, 2 m H x 1 m W x 22 m L

While these experiences of altered body size are rare, scale is a strategy often used in sculptural practice. Scale can be used to create more intimate encounters or experiences in which bodies, objects and forms are large scale and tower over the body of the audience. Scale is affective and can create feelings of awe and intimacy. It can affect how the space around the work is experienced. In

this work, the audience first experiences the 1:1 scale hand, but then experiences the enlarged and soft hand. While the large hand is twenty times the size of an actual hand, it still becomes a recognisable form once the audience is able to walk around it and understand its shape and form. There is a sense of this recognition unfolding over time in a similar sense, as discussed earlier in relation Richard Serra’s work. The sculptural encounter with the large hand is enacted through an open-ended and perceptually changeable embodied experience. The subdued lighting disrupts visibility, and the hand is eventually experienced as a disembodied, large, monstrous and yet recognisable form. The experience of the work as a material and haptic encounter in the reduced lighting primarily occurs before it can be understood symbolically. Once the recognition of the figurative form occurs, other associations connected to ideas of the hand can emerge. The audience can use the combination of the embodied and enacted experience to understand the work.

Fig. 69: Fleur Summers, studio model of Phantom and Passage, 2019, felt, MDF, paint

The oversized hand is also reminiscent of illustrations of the cortical homunculus, which were developed in the 1940s and continue to be used as a teaching aid (Catani, 2017, p. 305). These diagrams represent the relative somatosensory and motor sensitivities of body parts in the form of simplified diagrams and drawings. The parts of the body most involved in the activity of sensing through motor activity or movement are enlarged. In the drawing, the male figure has enlarged hands, lips, tongue and mouth, which have been modelled as fully formed figures by Sharon Price-James. This diagrammatic version of bodily intensities is mirrored by a photograph in Herbert Read’s book The Art of Sculpture in a sculpture called Youth Imploring, which he describes as ‘modelled in clay by a congenitally blind youth of 17’ (1956, p. 30). This sculpture is primarily focused on the hands – the

upper body and the hands are exaggerated and the lower body is proportionately much smaller. The work materialises and embodies the most sensitive parts of the body, and Read describes the sculpture as ‘built up from a multitude of impressions’ of ‘muscular tensions and reflexive movements … giving expression to his haptic sensations’ (Read, 1956, p. 30). This reflects Read’s focus on the haptic as mediating both sculpture and embodiment in the broader environment (Getsy, 2008). Read stated that our ability to understand the world through touch and embodiment gives us the ability to understand three-dimensional forms. This again is seen as a strength of sculpture as existing fully within the world: ‘for the sculptor, tactile values are not an illusion to be created on a two-dimensional plane: they constitute a reality to be conveyed directly, as existent mass’ (Read, 1956, p. 49).

Image removed due to Image removed due to copyright copyright restrictions restrictions

Fig. 70: Youth Imploring, 17th century, clay (left) Fig. 71: Sharon Price-James, Sensory Homunculus, resin (right)

The final work in this chapter asks the audience to feel the work through their own bodies, as manifest through their own embodiment and haptic sensibility. It materialises and meets with the body in scale and reminds us of the latent presence of the human body despite it being obscured in contemporary life (Leder, 1990). The cognitive dissonance of the normal hand versus the enlarged hand in the dark creates an unsettling feeling. The dysmorphia of the work is palpable through its figuration despite the materiality. The large soft hand acts as a body-double or stand-in rather than replica and asks us to question where our bodies begin and end and how we can understand this in an embodied and cognitive way. With this in mind, sculpture has the potential to act as a prosthetic, to extend our experience of our lived environment and attempt to create new configurations through fragments of experience. This process is generative and occurs repeatedly as we encounter the world and particularly when we enact cognition through sense-making art objects. As Grosz writes in Time Travels (2005), there is scope to ‘generate new bodily capacities’ (2005, p. 152) – and therefore expanded relationships between mind, body and environment – through the sculptural encounter.

CONCLUSION

This final body of work explores touch and working in the dark, transitional spaces such as passageways and corridors with reference to Bruce Nauman, and finally attempts to create an affective experience and encounter with a figurative and dysmorphic large soft sculpture. The research returns to the concept of the phantom limb, but approaches it in a more embodied and figurative way to focus on how we encounter the world and sculpture through our bodies. As a concept, it has allowed the research to develop and unfold, and to consider the boundaries between the body and art, particularly through embodied experiences.

The theories of Chemero in relation to sensorimotor empathy have been useful in understanding how physically coming into contact with sculptural objects can expand thought and extend cognition through embodied experiences. This was heightened by making and experiencing sculpture in the dark or with reduced illumination and sensory capacity. These experiences involved touch and movement through space, and the unfolding of experience over time to reveal figurative elements.

The narrative of these final works also has connected more deeply to post-cognitivism and to the concepts of cognition being embodied, enacted, embedded and extended. Understanding the sculptural encounter through these concepts, and applying them to the production and reception of artworks as an integrated system, has been productive. Together these experiences in the gallery map out a path for the audience to experience.

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CONCLUSION

Exploring the sculptural encounter as an embodied and cognitive experience created a research project that began with a focus on understanding it from a neurocognitive perspective. It concluded in a space where the encounter was understood as a felt and affective experience for me as an artist and researcher, and the audience. The artwork itself expanded from an exploration of the mirror box using play in a social space, which was extended in ocular and kinaesthetic ways through the use of mirrors and kinetic devices, to a space that was dark and intimate and that privileged touch and proprioception. It was expansive in a more intimate and affective way. Each of the research questions were addressed through three bodies of work, and contextualised through concepts of embodied, enactive, embedded and extended cognition.

This study unfolded over six years and this is reflected in the organisation of the research outputs in three distinct chapters in the dissertation. These chapters represent a thematic approach to the broader aims of the project to create a series of artworks that explore the sculptural encounter as a way to experience embodiment, and to create new knowledge through interdisciplinary research. Each thematic body of work reflects my thinking over time in response to the research questions. By dividing this work into three chapters, I was able to develop the project through cycles of concentrated conceptual development and reflection as well as more intense periods of construction and exhibition. As a whole, the dissertation records the development of the research as a dynamic generative process involving emergent and experimental methodologies which are common in the visual arts.

The main title of the research, Making Connections, indicated from the very beginning of the project that its goal was to create new knowledge through an interdisciplinary approach. The research focuses on embodiment and how perception is enacted through objects in the world, including the mirror box and contemporary sculpture. Conceptually, the title Making Connections refers to the potential of creating new networks of experience and expanded fields of thought by creating neural connections, kinaesthetic interactions, and conceptual couplings through a range of sensory phenomena. These varied experiences, and the linking of ideas from the fields of phenomenology, neuroscience, psychology, embodiment and sculpture, developed an interdisciplinary understanding of how we produce and encounter contemporary art.

My own background and interests in the ideas and histories of medical science and the visual arts led me to develop ways to investigate these relationships in practice-based research. My methodology included researching scientific literature about phantom limbs, daydreaming, sensory deprivation and kinaesthetic perception. This knowledge enabled me to embed concepts and methodologies from cognitive science into my artwork in a concrete and authentic way. As a result, I was able to create works that engaged with science but were primarily situated in a dialogue with the histories of modern and contemporary sculptural practices.

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This interdisciplinary approach was productive in two ways. Firstly, it provided a methodology for understanding sculptural works through contemporary ideas about cognition. As sculpture inherently involves the coupling of sensorimotor and perceptual skills in its production and encounter, the application of ideas of embodiment and enactment creates original and meaningful ways to further the understanding of artwork. In particular, this research project demonstrated how ideas in cognitive science can be used to access and understand experience at an affective and subjective level in the context of contemporary art practice. Future research projects could extend this connection to cognitive science through further exploration of fields such as ecological psychology, experimental phenomenology, process philosophy, object orientated ontology and speculative realism. Secondly, through this practice-based project, a number of strategies were developed that could be used by other creative practitioners whose works connect directly to studies in cognition. These strategies involve the use of mirrors, the moving body, sensory reduction and touch. While these strategies are not new, the research locates them in the larger project of consciousness and perception. The artworks in this project materialised these theoretical connections in novel and unusual ways, and allowed the audience to interact directly with them through touch. Ultimately, this creates an extended sensory awareness within sculptural practice so the resultant encounters have the potential to create expanded fields of thought and rich affective states.

The research also created new ways to understand the sculptural encounter or experience. It applies Rosalind Krauss’s notion of sculpture being infinitely malleable in a different way by considering the malleable boundaries between audience and object. By using embodied and enactive perception as a framework, the encounter of the audience was understood in an active and kinaesthetic sense. In all of the works, the engagement of the moving body was an essential part of the research, and the boundaries between bodies and objects were potentially altered through the encounter. This engagement was largely accomplished through the participatory nature of the works, which facilitated direct and physical encounters. This was expanded further through the introduction of the concept of sensorimotor empathy, as described by philosopher Anthony Chemero, towards the end of the project. I have used these ideas to understand the relationship that occurs between the moving body of the audience in relation to the sculptural or installation. I posit that this sensory motor experience, coupled with cognition, allows the audience to develop a dialogic empathy with the work, both physically and conceptually. This perceptual relationship creates continuity between the body and sculptural objects through movement and touch. The work discussed in Chapter Four opens up new ways to understand and mediate empathy through sculptural objects and installation as negotiated through the experiences of scale and proportion, altered light conditions, and the audience relationship to figurative elements. This helps us to understand the affective nature of sculpture and creates an original contribution by incorporating kinaesthetic modes of perception as a way to develop a relationship to the physical attributes of the sculptural work, in conjunction with conceptualisation of the work.

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There is also a thread that runs through the research related to the fragmented body. This begins with an interest in the phantom limb as a symbol of physical and cognitive uncertainty, alongside loss and potential reparation in the creative project. In a sense, the entire project concerns the metaphoric fragmented body and our experience of it in the world, and of trying to reconstitute and create a holistic account of our own bodies through the engagement of art practice. This reconstitution is ultimately affected by experience and seeks to reassemble the body in new and different ways. This research project expands on this, reconstituting the body through the encounter with the sculptural project.

If we begin with the concept of the phantom limb and the loss of body continuity, sculpture, in attempts at wholeness, can act as a manifestation of a prosthetic device for affective responses in the world. As such, sculpture acts as a tool or body extension that physically extends into the world and helps us to understand our bodily experiences. In this research, sculpture uses the fragmented body as an opportunity to extend and situate cognition within the artwork and create opportunities to understand our body image in relation to sculpture. As sculpture is felt and embodied, it has the power to affect how we see ourselves and, conversely, how we understand our bodies is reflected in how we understand sculpture.

To resolve the research, I returned to the mirror box and used figuration in the final work to understand it. I began by examining the phantom limb and the mirror box and its relationship to sculpture, and find this is still relevant at the end of the research project. However, the relationship of this phenomenon to the research has markedly altered. The research began with a neurocognitive perspective, but ends with a more open and affective exploration of the hand and the potential of touch to create an expanded notion of our lived experience through creative practice. Touch extends consciousness. As an enduring feature of sculpture, touch continues to create physical connections and extended fields between materials, people and ideas, giving a broader meaning to the title Making Connections.

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IMAGES

Eliasson, O 2001, Seeing Yourself Seeing, glass, mirror, wood, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Germany, Photo Franz Wamhof, viewed 8 May 2016, .

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Serra, R 1992, Running Arcs (for John Cage), steel, viewed 24 April 2018,

Tanning, D 1970, Canape en temps de pluie (Rainy Day Canape), tweed, upholstered wood sofa, wool, ping pong balls, cardboard 32 x 68 x43, Philadelphia Museum of Art, viewed 28 November 2019, .

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Youth Imploring, 17th century, clay, in Read, H, The Art of Sculpture, Pantheon Books, New York.

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VISUAL DOCUMENTATION OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT

EXPANDING THE FIELD

Fig. 72: Fleur Summers, Experimental photographic series of hands and mirrors, 2013

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Fig. 73: Fleur Summers, Series of models for Playtime and Transpositions, 2013, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard

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Fig. 74: Fleur Summers, Testing studio models, 2013, balsa wood, cardboard

Fig. 75: Fleur Summers, Model for Sensory Field 2013, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard, paper, cloth, plasticine

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Playtime 2014

Fig. 76: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Substation Contemporary Art Prize, installation view

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Fig. 77: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014, Substation Contemporary Art Prize, installation view (reverse view)

Fig. 78: Fleur Summers, studio test installation of Playtime, 2014

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Fig. 79: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (table tennis carrel) from Playtime 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

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Fig. 80: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 1) from Playtime 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

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Fig. 81: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 2) from Playtime 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

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Fig. 82: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 3) from Playtime 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

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Fig. 83: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (mirrored divider 4) from Playtime 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

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Fig. 84: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (plasticine and mirrored box) from Playtime 2014, workshop, Substation Contemporary Art Prize

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Playtime 700s Festival – RMIT University Library 2015

Fig. 85: Fleur Summers, Playtime, 2014/2015, 700s Festival, RMIT University Library

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Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Reading Room (West Space 2014)

Fig. 86: Fleur Summers, model for Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, balsa wood, mirrored cardboard

Fig. 87: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo credit: Christo Crocker)

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Fig. 88: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, close up, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014 (Photo credit: Christo Crocker)

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Fig. 89: Fleur Summers, Photographic series from Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, workshop, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014

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Fig. 90: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (composite figures) from Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014

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Fig. 91: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (reflecting on the process) from Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014, West Space Reading Room, Melbourne, 2014

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Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library and Playtime (Design Hub 2016)

Fig. 92: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, Opening Night 1 in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 93: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, Opening night 2 in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

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Fig. 94: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library, 2014/2016, installation view in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016 (Photo credit: Tobias Titz)

Fig. 95: Fleur Summers, Transpositions – A Proposition for the 21st Century Library and Playtime, 2014/2016, installation view in Design and Play at the RMIT Design Hub, 2016

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THINKING MACHINES

Supreme Red Rods (Blindside 2015)

Fig. 96: Fleur Summers, Model making 1 for Supreme Red Rods, 2014

Fig. 97: Fleur Summers, Model making 2 for Supreme Red Rods, 2014

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Fig. 98: Fleur Summers, video stills from Supreme Red Rods, 2014

Fig. 99: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods, 2014, installation view 1, Blindside

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Fig. 100: Fleur Summers, Photographic series from Supreme Red Rods, 2014, installation view, Blindside

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Fig. 101: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (details) from Supreme Red Rods, 2014, installation view, Blindside

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Fig. 102: Fleur Summers, Photographic series (audience participation) from Supreme Red Rods, 2014, installation view, Blindside

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Supreme Red Rods and Rectangles (RMIT Gallery 2019)

Fig. 103: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods and Rectangles, 2019, RMIT Gallery

Fig. 104: Fleur Summers, Supreme Red Rods and Rectangles, 2019, RMIT Gallery

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Dissociative Dialogues (Kings Artist-Run 2014)

Fig. 105: Fleur Summers, Studio models for Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, fabric, wire, balsa wood, filling

Fig. 106: Fleur Summers, Photographic study for Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, fabric, wire, balsa wood, filling

Fig. 107: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling

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Fig. 108: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling

Fig. 109: Fleur Summers, Dissociative Dialogues, 2014 (opening night), Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling

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Fig. 110: Fleur Summers, pedalling Dissociative Dialogues, 2014 (opening night), Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling

Fig. 111: Fleur Summers, pedalling Dissociative Dialogues, 2014, Kings Artist-Run, fabric, pedals, filling

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Walking the Studio (Open House 2016)

Fig. 112: Fleur Summers, Walking on the treadmill for Walking the Studio, 2016 (left)

Fig. 113: Fleur Summers, Notes and clipboard for Walking the Studio, 2016 (right)

Fig. 114: Fleur Summers, Treadmill for painting for Walking the Studio, 2016 (left)

Fig. 115: Fleur Summers, Experimenting with painting for Walking the Studio, 2016 (right)

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Fig. 116: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 1 for Walking the Studio, 2016

Fig. 117: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 2 for Walking the Studio, 2016

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Fig. 118: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 3 for Walking the Studio, 2016

Fig. 119: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 4 for Walking the Studio, 2016

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Fig. 120: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 5 for Walking the Studio, 2016

Fig. 121: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 6 for Walking the Studio, 2016

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Fig. 122: Fleur Summers, Notes from Walk 7 for Walking the Studio, 2016

Fig. 123: Fleur Summers, video still for Walking the Studio, 2016

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DARK ADAPTION

Merge 2017

Fig. 124: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of wax showing fingerprints (left) Fig. 125: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of bronze showing fingerprints (right)

Fig. 126: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Wax form ready to be prepared for casting

Fig. 127: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Wax forms ready for casting

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Fig. 128: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2017, Close up of wax form ready for casting

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Fig. 129: Fleur Summers, A selection of works from Merge, 2017, bronze

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Fig. 130: Fleur Summers, Fine lines from Merge, 2017, bronze

Fig. 131: Fleur Summers, Fine lines and fingerprints from Merge, 2017, bronze

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Fig. 132: Fleur Summers, Holding works from Merge, 2017, bronze

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Fig. 133: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, clay modelling (left) Fig. 134: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, close up of bronze showing impressions of fingers (right)

Fig. 135: Fleur Summers, Making Sense, 2019, bronze, stainless steel, installed at Jewell Station, Brunswick, Melbourne

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Passage 2019

Fig. 136: Fleur Summers, model of Passage, 2019, scale 1:20 (left)

Fig. 137: Fleur Summers, model of doorway of Passage, 2019, scale 1:20 (right)

Fig. 138: Fleur Summers, Entrance to Passage, 2019, plywood and pine

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Phantom 2019

Fig. 139: Fleur Summers, Models and tests for Phantom, 2019, felt, stuffing

Fig. 140: Fleur Summers, studio model of Phantom and Passage, 2019, felt, MDF, paint

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Fig. 141: Fleur Summers, Phantom, 2019, felt, stuffing, 2 m H x 1 m W x 22 m L

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Dark Adaptation Examination February 2020 The work for examination was presented in almost complete darkness.

Fig. 142: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2020, bronze, felt, plywood, steel, dimensions variable.

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Fig. 143: Fleur Summers, detail from Merge, 2020, bronze, felt.

Fig. 144: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2020, bronze, felt.

Fig. 145: Fleur Summers, Merge, 2020, bronze, felt, plywood, steel, dimensions variable.

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The following images show the work with the gallery lights on.

Fig. 146: Fleur Summers, Passage, 2020, plywood.

Fig. 147: Fleur Summers, Phantom II, 2020, felt, straw

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Fig. 148: Fleur Summers, Phantom II, 2020, felt, straw.

Fig. 149: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Passage, 2020

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Fig. 150: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Passage, 2020

Fig. 151: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Passage, 2020.

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Fig. 152: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II, 2020.

Fig. 153: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II, 2020.

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Fig. 154: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Phantom II and Merge, 2020

Fig. 155: Fleur Summers, installation shot of Merge and Passage, 2020

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Fig. 156: Fleur Summers, installation shot – Dark Adaptation (with the lights on), 2020

Fig. 157: Fleur Summers, installation shot – Dark Adaptation (with the lights off), 2020

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APPENDIX 1: Ethics Approval

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Design and Social Context College Human Ethics Advisory Network (CHEAN) Sub-committee of the RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) Notice of Approval

Date: 07 December 2015

Project number: CHEAN A 0000018710-05/14

Project title: Making Connections: The Sculptural Encounter as a Neurocognitive Experience

Risk classification: Low R isk

Investigator: Dr Kristen Sharp and Ms Fleur Summers

Approved: From: 07 December 2015 To: 31 December 2016

I am pleased to advise that extension of ethics approval until 31 s t December 2016 has been granted ethics approval by the Design and Social Context College Human Ethics Advisory Network as a sub-committee of the RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC).

Terms of approval: 1. Responsibilities of investigator It is the responsibility of the above investigator/s to ensure that all other investigators and staff on a project are aware of the terms of approval and to ensure that the project is conducted as approved by the CHEAN. Approval is only valid whilst the investigator/s holds a position at RMIT University. 2. Amendments Approval must be sought from the CHEAN to amend any aspect of a project including approved documents. To apply for an amendment please use the ‘Request for Amendment Form’ that is available on the RMIT website. Amendments must not be implemented without first gaining approval from CHEAN. 3. Adverse events You should notify HREC immediately of any serious or unexpected adverse effects on participants or unforeseen events affecting the ethical acceptability of the project. 4. Participant Information and Consent Form (PICF) The PICF and any other material used to recruit and inform participants of the project must include the RMIT university logo. The PICF must contain a complaints clause including the project number. 5. Annual reports Continued approval of this project is dependent on the submission of an annual report. This form can be located online on the human research ethics web page on the RMIT website. 6. Final report A final report must be provided at the conclusion of the project. CHEAN must be notified if the project is discontinued before the expected date of completion. 7. Monitoring Projects may be subject to an audit or any other form of monitoring by HREC at any time. 8. Retention and storage of data The investigator is responsible for the storage and retention of original data pertaining to a project for a minimum period of five years.

In any future correspondence please quote the project number and project title.

On behalf of the DSC College Human Ethics Advisory Network I wish you well in your research.

Suzana Kovacevic Research and Ethics Officer College of Design and Social Context RMIT University Ph: 03 9925 2974 E m ail: [email protected] Website: www.rmit.edu.au/dsc 168

Design and Social Context College Human Ethics Advisory Network (CHEAN) Sub-committee of the RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC)

Notice of Approval

Date: 16 April 2018

Project number: CHEAN A 18710-05/14

Project title: ‘Making Connections: The Sculptural Encounter as a Neurocognitive Experience’

Risk classification: Low R isk

Investigator: Dr Kristen Sharp, Ms Fleur Summers, Dr Jenny Robinson

Approved: From: 16 April 2018 To: 30 November 2018

I am pleased to advise that your extension request has been granted ethics approval by the Design and Social Context College Human Ethics Advisory Network (CHEAN), as a sub-committee of the RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). Ethics approval is extended until 30 November 2018.

Terms of approval:

1. Responsibilities of investigator It is the responsibility of the above investigator/s to ensure that all other investigators and staff on a project are aware of the terms of approval and to ensure that the project is conducted as approved by the CHEAN. Approval is only valid whilst the investigator/s holds a position at RMIT University. 2. Amendments Approval must be sought from the CHEAN to amend any aspect of a project including approved documents. To apply for an amendment please use the ‘Request for Amendment Form’ that is available on the RMIT website. Amendments must not be implemented without first gaining approval from CHEAN. 3. Adverse events You should notify HREC immediately of any serious or unexpected adverse effects on participants or unforeseen events affecting the ethical acceptability of the project. 4. Participant Information Sheet and Consent Form (PISCF) The PISCF and any other material used to recruit and inform participants of the project must include the RMIT university logo. The PISCF must contain a complaints clause. 5. Annual reports Continued approval of this project is dependent on the submission of an annual report. This form can be located online on the human research ethics web page on the RMIT website. 6. Final report A final report must be provided at the conclusion of the project. CHEAN must be notified if the project is discontinued before the expected date of completion. 7. Monitoring Projects may be subject to an audit or any other form of monitoring by HREC at any time. 8. Retention and storage of data The investigator is responsible for the storage and retention of original data pertaining to a project for a minimum period of five years.

Please quote the project number and project title in any future correspondence.

On behalf of the DSC College Human Ethics Advisory Network, I wish you well in your research.

Dr David Blades DSC CHEAN Secretary RMIT University E: [email protected] 169

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