Contemporary applications of Fresco : The narrative of the artist
- Authors: Chappell, Annette
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: Fresco is a vehicle for powerful and enduring forms of cultural storytelling; it references universal narrative themes. The research objective of this project is to achieve a contemporary application of fresco through exploration and transgression of traditional material, pictorial forms and functions. In this transgression, the artist locates a personal narrative, through the immersive methods of autoethnographic inquiry and from the epistemological position of material thinking and production. The contemporary application of fresco is arrived at by interrogating the traditional methods, materials and intentions of fresco as recorded in fifteenth-century Europe and with reference to what other contemporary practitioners in this field have achieved. Materials knowledge and methods gained through on-site material conservation of lime plaster fresco is an impetus to this project and has engendered a focus on re-purposing and re-imagining the media in contemporary and personal expressions. The narrative of the artist is arrived at through materials thinking in fresco methodology, and through an interpretive autoethnographic analysis of a personal archive or studio text consisting of visual and textual material. The studio text is regarded as a unique ethnographic artefact of personal significance. The new term of ‘studio text’ for practice-led research is proposed to differentiate practice-led language and forms from the sociological or positivist terminology of ‘fieldwork notes’ or ‘data’. Autoethnographic methodology is disrupted to incorporate the indwelling practices of material thinking and immersive writing (ekphrasis) and drawing (enstasis). Through the integration of these methodologies, interpretations of the studio text are enacted concurrently with material production. Materials and motifs are selected for personal significance and resonance, and constructed as part or full frescoes. The material outcomes of this integration of methodologies are described as Visual Diaries and publicly exhibited. The documentation of integrated methodology in this project may contribute to emergent thinking in practice-led research.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Indwelling : A story in Fresco
- Authors: Chappell, Annette
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Visual art work
- Full Text: false
- Description: 24th May-3rd June 2017 Annette Chappell’s work is a contemporary exploration and transgression of the material form and function of traditional fresco. Drawing upon onsite experience as a materials conservator of historic fresco she repurposes that knowledge to create contemporary part and full fresco surfaces and to locate her self-story as an artist. Through a process of indwelling in recurrent and resonant imagery, her storylines are enacted through immersive and spontaneous material and pictorial techniques, and captured in the stone layer veil or ‘velo’ of the fresco lime plaster. The choice of dark and light tonal values in her backgrounds are an evocation of mysterious spaces – the inner and outer worlds of human experience where self-story takes place. Annette’s storylines chronicle the shift from her figurative enactments of story to a focus on form-denying settings where those narratives dissolve into the sensation and emotion of contemplative silence. This exhibition constitutes the visual outcomes emerging from a practice-led research project for a Doctoral Award at the Arts Academy, Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University Australia. Image: Annette Chappell, Indwelling: The Zebra Pursues, 2015 (detail), lime plaster, pigment and wax on board, 90 x 60cm. Courtesy the artist