'I loved and hated place': Painting on the edge of a public housing precinct undergoing urban renewal

Abstract

In this creative practice-led research project, I set out to explore how painting and drawing, in combination with ethnographic methods, can contribute to understandings of a contested place. The site of my research is Canberra's public housing precincts as they were undergoing urban renewal. As a long-term Canberra resident, I am driven by a desire to understand these significant changes in my city. During my field research, I often found myself looking in from the outside, which became an uncomfortable position to reconcile. However, as the project developed, I recognised the edge of place as a dynamic zone of engagement and transformation. Consequently, a primary focus of this research became the role of the edge, or liminal zone, in my creative practice.

In this exegesis, I discuss the creative processes used in producing a range of artworks and how I extended my painting practice with found objects, site-specific installations and video. I argue that a reflexive and expanded approach to representational-realist painting provided insights into the complex emotions around the urban renewal project. As the tenants were displaced and the buildings left to deteriorate before being demolished, the meanings of the housing precincts and my relationship to them shifted. These transformations led to parallel transformations in my art practice. I address how I kept returning to painting, searching for new ways to open up the physical and metaphorical frame, in order to engage with place. I argue that integrating a situated and multi-modal painting practice enabled me to recast the ambiguities of the insider-outsider position as productive.