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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- Thesis Title
- Infinitude: Investigating the Aesthetics of Complex Patterns through Printmaking
- Author
- David James Nixon
- E-mail
- nixondavid999 AT gmail.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Year
- 2020
- Number of Pages
- 193
- University
- Griffith University
- Thesis Supervisor
- Prof Ross Woodrow
- Supervisor e-mail
- r.woodrow AT griffith.edu.au
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Dr William Platz
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Queensland College of Art / Printmaking
- Copyright Ownership
- David Nixon
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English
- URL where full thesis can be found
- hdl.handle.net/10072/396520
- Keywords
- Aesthetics; pattern; perception; printmaking; relief etchings; linocuts; synaesthesia; geometry; cosmology.
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- This exegetic dissertation is an aesthetic inquiry into works on paper distinguished by their complex, non-mimetic patterns. The research is dominated by relief etchings and linocuts, but includes drawings, monoprints, kinetic sculpture and video, integrating art theory with science and philosophy through a study of geometry. Space and time are examined as complimentary entities. An inquiry into synaesthesia is made comparing music with art. How contemplation and improvisation inform methods of making art and metaphoric inference are elucidated.
Research focuses upon the cosmology of the physicist David Bohm, aiming to include expression as a fundamental aspect of creativity and a regenerative, material world. How materiality is qualified by immanence underpins an examination of perception, mind and matter, in which consciousness is presented as a reflective integration of feeling and thinking. A dialectical examination identifies implications involved in relational dynamics such as change and constancy, form and formlessness, and visual motion and stasis, suggesting that patterned art can serve to conceptually integrate the finite and infinite.