Placemaking through Dasein: Painting Tropical Space

This paper looks at the role of art in understanding place as a construct of the imagination, reactions to the real and lived experience. The making of a place by the activities and actions within place constitute over time notions of what things are, what they mean and how meaning is constructed from symbolism and kinaesthesia. Placemaking establishes the meaning of a spatial context by symbolic gestures, objects and experiences. Dasein internalises inherent meaning from being in space where; “Dasein is thoroughly temporal,” and, “self and world are a unity” (Guignon, 2006, p. 134). These things together formulate the temporal frontier of culture as a transient space of activity and evolution. The tropics as a framework were explored in my research through artists painting the wet tropics of North Queensland