Jeorja Duffy

contextual review

keywords (ongoing)

A collection of keywords sourced from readings, audio, documentaries and conversations.

keyword mapping

Great discussion with Jenna this afternoon. Template that can be transferred to spaces, tackling space politically with my forms presenting bodies. Body to body to body. As a method to keep track of keywords necessary to my project I opted to map it out on my studio wall. After diagraming, I have found this method supports the pace of my thinking and making. Keywords such as materialism, simultaneously, and embodiment have been prevalent in contexts in my current research. By creating my geographical boundary, I have found it helps generate new varieties of research questions and frameworks. A quick legend…

artist research: Pip Culbert – Fragile Skeletons

English artist Pip Culbert practised with textile objects, deconstructing the forms to the seams. Culbert recontextualised the objects into line drawings with a minimalist thought: less is more. Her work left for the encounter of the space between the lines, allowing audiences to formulate their perception of the object.  Culbert’s practice is excellent in context to my investigation into textile clothing and deconstructing to the seams in the exploration of fibrous bodies and connections. Her forms become skeletons of the textile object, providing agency to the relationship between the body and textile/fibres. For my project, I can relate Culbert’s engagement…

artist research: Louise Bourgeois – Transferring Emotions

Louise Bourgeois was a French-American sculptor known for her large-scale sculptures and installation art. She focused on her experiences of domesticity and the family, exploring her emotions that transferred into sculptures. Her practice was honest and raw, and she often became a storyteller by being truthful to her emotive experience, the embodiment of her experiences. “The purpose of the pieces is to express the emotions. My emotions are inappropriate for my size. My emotions are my demons.” Bourgeois reads emotions through their intensity, her sculptures as an output of her life and childhood frustrations.  The documentary short film, A Prisoner of…

artist research: Chiharu Shiota – Presence of Absence

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese artist focused on contexts of craft, installation and presence. The memory of space and the body influence her practice, exploring the themes of life, death, and the soul through her vast installations. From a painter to a performance artist, Shiota researched her position as a travelling artist, reflecting on her experience of losing touch with her home country, Japan. She explored the displacement of the human body to the environment. Shiota’s installations expand space, immersing the audience in a duration of encounters and acknowledging memories belonging to the site.  Her use of string and colour…

artist research: Anni Albers – Listening

Anni Albers was a German textile artist who crafted with weaving. As an art educator, Albers’ was knowledgeable about textile processes and methods. Anni explored the history of the process as a weaver in understanding recurring motifs pictorially and weaving techniques. Her methodology reflects nature; Alber speaks to nature as a mystery. Alber’s practice has a heavy presence of mystery, an ongoing investigation of weaving. “Consciousness is necessary to order, an order that should not be instantly readable. Mystery is what draws us to art.”(17:45) The process leads to art, and it is essential to understand the pattern of the making…

artist research: Gego – The Lines of a Life

Gego was a German-Venezualan artist with a studied background in architecture. Her work investigated lines and points of connection drawn towards constellations. She often visited the beach and observed the stars, intrigued by the human experience of drawing and reading in lines. Gego’s work reflected these experiences when creating her forms. With her architectural background, she found the potential to play with an artist’s practice. She started experimenting with technique and colour through watercolour painting of figurative forms towards geometric forms. Gego worked with grids, a common form used amongst the artists I have established relations to my project, Asawa,…

artist research: Eva Hesse – Expanded Expansion

The pioneering sculptor Eva Hesse worked with Minimalism while in its male-dominated period. Her work experimented with materials and tested the potential of industrial elements, such as rubber, metal, latex, and rope. She was a crucial figure in the formation of Post-modernism, assisting in the soft sculptural approach by experimenting with the abilities and qualities of materials. Her work, Expanded Expansion, is an expansive wall piece of latex draped like a curtain. Hesse had no concern for the lifespan of her work; through using latex, she was aware that the material would not hold the same physical properties as the original throughout…

artist research: Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa was a Japanese-American artist whose practice indulged in mark-making and treating drawing as a tool of perception. Asawa’s making was influenced by patterns of nature, often spending time viewing nature as an activation for her drawings. Her practice involved meticulous experimentation, considering mathematics, design, and architecture through in-depth research on the transfer between 2D and 3D. With this ongoing study, Asawa created her visual language that collapsed visceral and intellectual, making intricate forms of mathematical thinking to form fetal, bodily forms.  To consider the treatment of the visual language of my project, the forms in my work, adriftjustjeansmoremlouvre, sit relaxed…

artist research: Sheila Hicks – Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column

Sheila Hicks is a textile artist working with many craft methods from around the world to inform her exploration of form, colour, and structure. Hicks combines traditional, cultural textile making and weaving, establishing an expanded geographical boundary. Her interview with MoMa shares her story and fascination with textiles and fibres about her work, Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column, exhibited in MoMa in 2019. Her use of the word breathing in her work Blue Letter drew my initial interest. The endearment gives life to her textiles in acknowledging the properties present in the material that work together to create the structure, the gestalt. Hicks refers…

artist research: Yoko Ono – Cut Piece

Yoko Ono’s, Cut Piece was a performance in which Yoko sat on a stage and invited the audience to cut away her clothes. This work explores the collapsing of the neutral relationship between art and the audience. Yoko references the female body figure as a neutral subject in art. Together, Yoko’s performance highlights the reciprocal exchange between audience and art and the importance of being aware of the exchange in preserving the perception of the art experience. This work is relevant to my project towards the figure of the female body. Reflecting on my project, I use materials with feminine…

informal geography

Reflection In reflection of this exercise I need to think of expansion and contraction as binary relations and how this can be collapsed in relation to feminist phenomenology.

research: Anne Keefe – “Affective Encounter”

This text is the derived introduction of Anne Keefe’s essay, featured in Signs, a journal exploring women’s studies, published in the Winter 2015 edition. Keefe’s text, Introduction: The Affective Encounter, introduces the essays that explore the political possibilities of the arts. These topics concern phenomenology, affect studies and the senses.  This text introduces the notion of the affective encounter, which refers to the opposite of the aesthetic encounter. Keefe describes this as a new approach to the encounter that considers perception and sensation. Affective encounter rejects the binary logic of Cartesian dualism, the notion of mind and body as two kinds of foundations.…

hīkoi and kōrero

reflection I had a great kōrero with Rebecca about our projects and catching up with our progress from the first week. Rebecca and I were already familiar with each other’s projects/practice, so it was great to be paired up with her today. It was eye-opening to verbalise my project; I almost found it difficult having so much information in my head and translating it into existence. But what I can take from our chat was the notion of entering; there is a present relationship between immersion and body. I have understood installations to use the action of entering; however, we…

artist research: Brenda Miller and Post-Minimalism

The text I have derived for today is Cynthia Fowler’s text, Brenda Miller and Post-Minimalist Art featured in the Women’s Art Journal. It is focused on artist Brenda Miller and her relationship to help foster post-minimalism. Fowler explores predominantly female artists in the 1960s, when female artists struggled to break through in the male-dominated field. She looks at the female approach to minimalism, its industrial aesthetic and how female artists have introduced fibre and craft to provide post-minimalism art. I relate this to my project in the method of making; it contextualises my practice within feminist art and post-minimalism. There…

annotations workshop

Translation An experience, I recall would be my bedroom wall. I had a keepsake, a hoarder drawn to the potential of mundane items. My first receipt, a drawing, a found object from the side of the road, they each held their own memory. Capturing moments in time, housing a museum of my youth. As I aged the interest for this practice declined, seeking a blank canvas. I removed the the items, leaving marks of tape, peeled painting, smudged blu-tac traced along the wall, stuck in duration. Now I look at the patched wall reflecting on the objects, what else might…

research: Elena Fell – “Duration, Temporality, Self Prospects for the Future of Bergonism”

This text engages with the philosophy of Henri Bergson, engaging in a new way of thinking about duration and memory. Bergson believed time to be essential to real things, just as much as material or size. He called this real-time ‘duration’, meaning everything existed as duration. In Chapter 3, Body, Soul and the World in Matter and Memory, Fell explores Bergon’s notion of the physical experience with duration, whether embodied or felt. I was intrigued by the discussion of consciousness’s relation to intuition. Fell introduces consciousness as a product of reality as a constant motion, “I am assured of the…

artist research: Robert Morris – “Notes on Sculpture”

Robert Morris, a sculptor and writer, is widely regarded as one of the central theorists of Minimalism. His contributions have been significant in the growth of performance, land, and installation art, enhancing our understanding of temporality and ephemerality. [1] Notes on Sculpture is a four-part essay in the book Minimal art: a critical anthology by Gregory Battcock. Morris’ text delves into the viewer’s perception, context, and implications when experiencing Minimalist Sculpture. The text is a method for exploring sculptural engagement from a minimalist positioning. It confronts how scale, presentation space, and viewer placement impact the individual experience of sculptural forms.…

ripple map

Ripple Map Diagram, 2024 Translation Sculpture, installation, temporary, material-activation, textile, materiality, labour, craft, expansion, contraction, deconstruction, space, site-invention-activation, support, structures, white-cube, gallery context, making, texture, activity, play, craft, domestic, sculpture, time-based, manipulation, perception, participant observation, material-activation, material language, linear experimentation, intuition. There are many keywords prominent in my practice. However I struggled to define which were non-negotiable as the words are all interlinked with one another.