The monotype as a distinctive form: A practice-led investigation into how the monotype can deliver affect

Abstract

This practice-led research project investigates the monotype as a distinctive form, and one which has been hitherto somewhat under-regarded and given relatively little theoretical analysis or interpretive attention from the perspective of the studio practitioner. This research leads me to investigate distinctive formal, material and perceptual qualities of the monotype process, which are conducive to metaphoric associations appropriate to my themes of memory, space and time, through the generation of affect.

Both the monotype and affect are realised in in-between spaces. The monotype emerges from exchanges that take place between iterations of drawings, painting and printing, and the images that result are influenced and transformed by these exchanges. Throughout the project I explore and analyse resonances between the qualities of the monotype and the characteristics of the concepts of phenomenology and affect.

My research is informed by the writings of: Antonio Damasio and Siri Hustvedt on affect, phenomenology and memory; Brian Massumi on affect; Henri Lefebvre on space, time and rhythm; Tim Ingold on linear interconnectedness; John Berger on drawing and process; François Jullien on the Chinese tradition; the philosophy of Elizabeth Grosz, and Thomas Middlemost on the monotype in Australia.

In creating several series of monotypes involving expressive and intuitive gestural imagery, and qualities of luminosity and rhythm resonant with my lived experience, I have been influenced by artists past and present. These include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, John Constable, Paul Cezanne, Sidney Nolan, Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Ken Whisson, Elisabeth Cummings, and Chinese ink and brush painters. I reflect on the qualities of immersiveness, between-ness, tactility, spontaneity and the intuitive expression of personal experience, as qualities intrinsic to the monotype, and essential to my project’s aim for the delivery of affect. I further explore the relations of composition to pictorial space, of figure to ground, distinctive to the monotype.

The accompanying exegesis charts the course of my discoveries with the affectively engaging monotype as I create expressions of my lived experiences through the themes of familial relations, our relations to place and to our natural environments, and to the life of the studio. While I began with a sense of these themes as leading my project, the monotype process became, in a sense, the true subject matter of my research. While I absorbed and filtered my own bodily experiences of the world, my engagement with the monotype process became a significantly transformative one, an exploration of multiple states though the various iterations of an image, and a process of imbuing images with metaphysical resonance.