The Affect of Painting as a Physical Space

This Ph.D by Practice narrates five spatial paintings that took place over three years, between 2014 and 2017, across a range of sites and exhibition spaces in the UK. This series of work and written thesis seeks to understand what a new materialist reading could bring to painting’s language once it enters architectural space. Each painting uses fragments of both made and found things, that are closely interrelated with painting’s vernacular: edges; translucency; colour; thickness; proximity; etc. These are theatrically staged with space itself - where architectural space becomes complicit with the work. It is the viewer/reader who makes the work do its work, from within the painting, through being in-action with the works as a physical spatial encounter, examining thematics of visibility and invisibility through the concrete materialization of the structures that govern painting. The thesis argues how the experience of painting as a spatial practice requires new interpretative methods that rely less upon optical and retinal experience in understanding its affect when directly addressing the body and architectonic sensory responses of touch, weight, movement and horizontality. Further, it uses object-narratives to examine the affect of this sphere by giving selected things the capacity for speech, accentuating material behaviours and enabling inanimate things to reflect upon themselves, their histories and the conditions that surround them. Their orality originates from their physical status, fusing linguistic and material relations and thus represents a means of discourses across painting, architecture and language. What I want to claim for this research project is that theatricality, movement, fragmented experience and a strengthened attention to deep materiality enriches the visual, and generates a different type of experience that is pluralistic, inclusionary and participatory, one that brings forth a greater unity between the viewer and the work.