Instantiating ideas of limitless space: thinking through painting

This PhD research project is a theoretical and studio-based investigation concerned with the problem of thinking in pictorial terms about how painting might serve as an instrument to elucidate the otherwise invisible concept of the limitless passage of time in space. By framing painting as a register of processes of thinking through an ongoing experimentation with painting materials, techniques and strategies, this project aims to generate new ways of experientially presenting the un-presentable boundlessness of space through the vehicular medium of painting. Accordingly, this project seeks to demonstrate how the imperceptibly invisible passage of time through space might be contemplated through a series of pictorial ambiguities. In this sense, painting is articulated as a theoretical operator that aims to activate a consciousness of the very invisibility of the limitless passage of time in space. Pictorial strategies for evoking the invisible nature of limitless space are drawn from an historical account and theoretical analysis of strategies used by selected artists and demonstrated through a series of experimental painting techniques. Instantiating ideas of limitless space: Thinking through painting culminates with an exhibition which aims to experientially articulate the incomprehensible enormity of the idea that time passes without end through limitless space. Just as the universe holds time within an open-ended cosmological container, the canvas, by extension, presents the vehicular medium of painting in an open-ended process of transformation. Significantly, painting can only represent a transitive register of fragmentary moments within this limitless process of transformation, and as a consequence, the author’s studio outcomes are displayed in series in order to invite the viewer to contemplate them as a whole. Finally, this studio-based research project is proffered as a significant contribution to framing painting’s ongoing potential for building a pictorial vocabulary for communicating otherwise invisible elements through the visible materiality of painting.