My writing has varied from academic investigations in the space of digital humanities, where sociology meets social media to personal interest pieces of lived experience.
Personal Interest Pieces
My medium articles have been used as a platform to address mental health and encourage vulnerable dialogue. Especially having lost a father to suicide, I am deeply invested in this cause and lifting the veil to discourage others from ever enduring the same experience.
“Flying home I recall meditating that my father and I were both moving through the clouds — he vertically on his ascent to heaven, and I horizontally from Spring in Copenhagen to Autumn in Sydney. Whilst we were on concurrent journeys, we were travelling to different destinations… I was looking for his soul.”
“Without visible modalities of warfare reverberating through the sea, land and sky — it feels both strange and surreal, alien and abstract — that we have retreated inside. Social distancing feels paradoxical and counter intuitive when in crisis. Primed by our herd mentality, humans have always clung together. We have left the architecture and infrastructure of the urban environment devoid and barren. A ghostly silence arrests these previously populated centres and precincts — yet there are no radioactive traces that have historically justified their neglect.”
“This is a painting of how I imagine that dawn Of a day that changed our lives forever
Maybe if I had painted it yesterday, or tomorrow, it would have looked different.
For this reason maybe I never want to definitively know what the actual sunset looked like. Rendering the imagined as important.
This sits in a space that is a folding of imagination, A wrapping of wonder into spiritual kaleidoscopes that I find comforting.”
Academic Writing
From Cloud Gate to the Cloud (2014) – This Honours thesis (awarded First Class Honours) investigates the way in which the geotagging mechanism of Instagram creates a virtual tourist destination. This new realm of public cyberspace reflects a series of themes within contemporary visual culture, identity politics, digital humanities and design studies. As a mirrored object, The multifaceted and reflective qualities of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (the case study for the thesis) intrinsically encourage image-making production and in this way, as a reflective object it simultaneously offered a myriad of reflections about the society and culture it reflects.
“We live in a moment of indefatigable image production and consumption, developing an unprecedented photographic compendium archiving our existence and “exposing the gymnastics of the human soul” (Sobiezek 1999, p.290). The prolific creation of these images and their unbounded circulation within cyberspace (now accessible to an unparalleled potential audience) has dissolved the exclusivity of physical travel as the only way of seeing the world…. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the phenomenon of representations of Cloud Gate through Instagram, shedding insights into the contemporary human experience and the interplay between the forces of identity, tourism, art and technology that operate within it.”
The data for this research comprised of Instagram media artefacts. Here the metadata together with the compositional structures informed taxonomic development.
Turmoil on Canvas: Painting Van Gogh with Hamlet (2009)
For my Graduating HSC English Extension Major work I composed a fictionalised narrative of Van Gogh’s life. The inclusion of epigraphs from Hamlet allows Van Gogh (like Hamlet) to be understood through the lens of a spiralling creative genius.The characters’ perspectives were layered in a fashion analogous to Van Gogh’s signature hallmark of impasto. Therefore the language construction mirrored Van Gogh’s painting style through creating a series of ‘word paintings’.
This piece was awarded Band 6 (90% or greater) by the NSW Board of Deputies.
Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Mirrored Years’ (2009)
This essay surveyed Kusama’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. It was awarded first place by Art and Australia in a national competition. The prize included an internship at the publication.
