Displacement, repair, and the painted collage : a studio‑based investigation of the precarity of home
Creators: name: Chew, Joanna
Publisher: name: University of Tasmania
Year: 2024

description: This research project draws on personal experiences of home, both as a place of safety and nurture, and of fear and alienation, to explore themes of displacement and potentiality for repair, using the painted collage as a key studio-led research methodology.<br>Responding to theories of displacement and homelessness as intrinsic conditions of contemporary modernity, the unfixed home is reconsidered as a site of liberation or potential, with home becoming something practiced or carried, continually reassessed and reformed. This project explores new ways to visually interpret the notion of home as a space marked by precarity - often fractured or fragile; but also, as a deeply felt need and possible site of return. The research investigates distinct modes of painting and installation that can be used to articulate the experience of the precarious home as a site of both loss, and potentiality for repair. <br>The final works are based on collage studies; this approach draws on an understanding of collage as embodying displacement and an absent origin and is supported by the writings of Rosalind Krauss and Rona Cran, and seen in the photomontages of John Stezaker. The translation of these collages into larger paintings functions as a way to stitch the broken parts of the collage together, fusing them through the materiality of the painted surface. This rehoming of the parts within the frame of the canvas, demonstrates this modality of painting as a signifier of care and value, locating the project more broadly within theories of care. <br>Although the imagery chosen for the collages is intended to be a poetic and universal response to the research themes, rather than being directly personal, this project can be traced back to a work I made over ten years ago that drew from imagery connected with my grandparents and the physical removal of their home. It also coincided with relocating to Hobart with my daughter, and later my son, as a necessary move away from an unsettling and unstable home. Just as the works seek to articulate a recognition of loss and unhomeliness, they also express forms of repair and mending in response to a journey that encapsulated both a sense of existential homelessness and a desire to find a way to dwell. <br>This research project develops an approach to painting that emphasises incompletion and the provisional, seeing in these modes a connection to uncertainty as something both strange and raw but also as holding potential within the unknown or absent. The theoretical exploration of the provisional is framed by the theories of Raphael Rubenstein, Francois Jullien, and Timothy Walsh, and is contextualised by the paintings of Karin Mamma Andersson and Dexter Dalwood. <br>Alongside the enquiry into collage as a marker of displacement and loss, and painting as a medium that fuses and articulates a repair, the project also considers expanded forms of painting and ways of displaying work that signify the temporary, makeshift, and nomadic. This has been achieved through suspended unstretched canvases and the piecing together of materials associated with displacement and moving that references patchwork and domestic forms of mending. Together these methodologies have been used to address the following questions:<br><i>If traditional collage is a process of extraction and displacement, how might the representation of collage in paint offer new ways of imagining and imaging repair and homely re-location?</i> <i>How might painterly processes and forms of expanded painting be used to address ideas of the precarious ‘home’ as a site of displacement and instability and potentiality for repair? </i><i>How might a playful approach to picturing an unfixed home respond to new thinking of home as something that, although no longer fixed, offers a new set of possibilities? </i>The aim in answering these questions was not only to reflect on my own awareness of the precarity of home and an adaptive impulse toward repair but also to open a space for empathetic engagement with a universal condition. The project achieves this by contributing a creative response to phenomenological thinking on existential homelessness, the crisis of displacement, and loss of connection to place in contemporary modernity.