‘I Have Played The Fool’

Supervisors: Dr Karoline Gritzner and Dr Andrew Filmer

I have exhibited; sculpture, performance, installation, and film work both nationally and internationally. I studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at U.C.L for a BA (Hons) in Sculpture, and an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts. My main interests are in the fields of landscape, time and ecology. Much of my work is informed by a cross disciplinary interest in place, sculpture, performance, politics, drawing, moving image, text and aesthetics.

My PhD, ‘I Have Played The Fool’, is a practice-based exploration of landscape – more accurately, it is a PhD about picturesque landscape and what it means to fissure that landscape and perform whiteness in a set of drawings made by Thomas Rowlandson during a tour of Wales in the summer of 1797. In the thesis, I am not using the term whiteness as an attempt to generate a sense of racial unmarkedness. I have no interest in purging the whiteness from a body, performance or any signifying economy, in a problematic act of aporetic racism. Rather, I use the term whiteness to assign in an aesthetic sense what Jean-Francois Lyotard alternately calls the ‘sublime’ or the ‘inhuman’ and what Maurice Blanchot calls ‘the catastrophe of thought’.