Interior-painting: composing resonant interior conditions with/in the flow of worldly forces
Creators: name: Scott, Rosamund
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330108
subject: Interior design

description: This creative practice research explores the connections and resonances between interior and painting, bringing these together through practice, named in this research as interior-painting. interior-painting is a practice of composing interior conditions through the actions and techniques of painting (both painting with watercolour on paper and painting with/in constructed surfaces such as walls), where composing involves the production of interior conditions, i.e., intensified zones, produced in relation with an outside.

This research aims to open up interior-painting beyond representation, to explore its actions, techniques, materials, and productions. Exploring interior-painting beyond representation is a provocation to disrupt habits of looking and thinking, to foreground practice and productions, and to actively make relations with/in environments through painting. Through this approach the research explores how interior painting operates beyond what is apparently known and fixed through representation, working simultaneously in the midst of dynamic worldly forces, and with dynamic forces, working with/in this flow to compose interior conditions.

The practice of painting holds significance in the context of interior design: in the practice of painting walls and other constructed surfaces; in the nineteenth-century trend of studying “interiors” in watercolour; and in the use of watercolour in early interior design education as a tool to study interiors, replicate styles and render proposed interior designs. When watercolour is taught in contemporary interior design education, it is usually under the banner of either “Communication” or “Representation.” This research questions these terms in how they position painting as a re-presentation and transferral of information, and limit understanding of how the practice, and what is produced (i.e., paintings or interior conditions) continue to be active with/in the world. 

The primary mode of research has been practice research – research through practice – across a range of interior-painting projects and an ongoing watercolour interior-painting practice. The research began by experimenting with watercolour painting, and expanded to painting constructed surfaces using diverse media, such as commercial wall paint, light and water. Through this work notions of composition, care, colour, forces, and resonance emerged as critical threads, and found affinity in the writings of philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze on framing and sensation in art.

This interior-painting research contributes new knowledge to a community of practice of techniques and practices of drawing, image production and visualisation in interior design education, by offering interior-painting as a new practice, and a new orientation for painting in interior design and therefore contributes to a community of emerging interior design practitioners. Interior design is a practice that operates with/in the constant flow of change and movement, of complex, diverse and dynamic worldly forces such as light, movement, wind, and temperature. interior-painting offers techniques for intervening and composing with/in forces, through actions of selecting and arrangement of materials and matter that are open to flux, change and chance.