Walking the precarious edge : rendering connective moments between people and place in and through paint

Walking the Precarious Edge examines the evocative employment (Stroud 2007) of paint as a means for connecting viewers with experiences of shared human precarity. Through the practice of ‘Witnessing’ (Alt 2017) and process of imaginative speculation (Grimshaw & Ravetz 2005), in and through paint, this investigation ascertains the ways painting can inquire about and contribute to discourse about human relationships in and between place. Putting to work the understanding of a ‘shared human precarity’ (Butler 2015), the painted outcomes use structure and environment to reveal spaces of tension and transition; situating humans as living in and with fundamental instability. Using methods from autoethnographic research (Bochner & Ellis 2016), narratives of personal uncertainty become the explorative centre. Moving outwards from known environments, paint is used to describe metaphoric edge spaces, where lives and disruptive political, social and natural forces meet. This doctoral research investigates the utility of painting practice as means for rendering narratives in and through painterly edges. These narratives are converged to reveal an articulated point of view made legible through ‘edgeness’. Informed by art and literature, the paintings contribute to the ways we understand and make meaning of narrative, image, structure and edge. In and through a range of chromatic and optical techniques, this investigation articulates the aesthetic potential and value of a deeply considered philosophic possibility of edgeness. Through methods of image production, in partnership with metaphoric interpretation, edge is rendered significant in the current climate of a socially conscious art world. In investigating the ways in which the world of images can speak about human experiences, edgeness activated in and through narrative creates an arena of painting, whereby the formal and the ontopoetic speak to one another and reveal new ways of/for seeing. Through these co-operative practices of narrative and painterly investigation, the edge separates and defines limitations, while simultaneously allowing broader experiences of vision, depth and vista to emerge intact. By reading the edge-world of these paintings, a vernacular emerges from correlations made between precarity and human connection, fragmentation and wholeness. Illusory world-building of overlayed edges cultivate space to make meaning of the edge-bound status of humans, where we operate not as single fragments without wider impact, but as bound in and pressed up against one another. The human world is one of shifting edges, tensions and narratives that compose a meaningful, wider collective identity grounded in and connected through precarity. By articulating meaning through edge, this study examines the effect of laying down boundaries and seeing through meeting points to foster understanding and empathy, both pictorially and in social interconnectivity. In reframing precarious experiences in and through edge space where perspectives touch, we can view human precarity as a wider, ever-impacted ‘big picture’. The edge strategies of image production inherent to this investigation model a way in which humans can define and understand one another, in relation to borders and transformations. In this way, I question what constitutes an edge between lives, and posit my/our need to understand the wider impact we illicit in moments where worlds meet, touch and shape one another