Transformative making and narrative : a visual exploration of objects and place through the archive

This practice-based research project focuses on memory, materiality and place as told through the archive, connecting with past lives and practices to contemplate and speak to our construction of self and place in the present. It has grown out of a body of work produced between 2016-2021 with a consistent focus on how the archive can be interpreted, reframed and contextualised poetically through the jewellery/art object to make sense of my own experiences of loss and displacement.

The previously exhibited work is in response to three distinct collections: the Markree collection held at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; a butterfly collection donated by Professor Peter Tyler to the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; and my own private archive, consisting of a disparate group of objects/debris collected from a beach near my current home in Tasmania.

The exegesis draws upon the theoretical writings of Gaston Bachelard, particularly The Poetics of Space and Jeff Malpas’, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography; and the literary writings of Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse); Orhan Pamuk (The Museum of Innocence); Kate Grenville (The Secret River) and Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes, Letters to Camondo) who collectively explore the interstices between fact and fiction.

To contextualise my studio research, I have looked to key art installations in which there is an intersection between the autobiographical and the archive, focusing on Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum, Ilya Kabakov’s The Garbage Man (The Man who Never Threw anything Away) and Edmund de Waal’s Lettres à Camondo. While the strategies used by these artists differ, their work reflects a common concern for the archive, narrative and reimagining the past in ways that allow for new readings.

All three of my above-mentioned exhibitions have presented guides and pathways to transformative making which comes from the study of narrative, objects, place and the archive which is central to my ongoing research. In my examination submission, this work is revisited and extended to further expand my research into how we use objects of the past to cast light on our own situation in the present.

This research offers new ways of thinking about objects/jewellery through the crafting of an archive practice which engages memoir and making as an act to speak to, and of, the stories of others.