Impact7

Dr Maryanne Coutts

Country

AUS

Affliliation

National Art School, Sydney, Australia

Biography

Maryanne Coutts is the Subject Leader in Drawing at the National Art School in Sydney. Her Ph.D., which was completed in 1999 at the University of Ballarat explored the possibilities of painting in relation to narrative and fiction. She has exhibited extensively throughout Australia, having held a Survey show at Ballarat Fine Art Gallery in 2008 called Maryanne Coutts: Telling Tales and, in October 2009, a solo show at Australian Galleries, Melbourne. In 2012 she will exhibit at Australian Galleries in Sydney and as part of the Linden Innovators program in Melbourne. The prizes she has won include the Blake Prize, (joint 1982), and the Portia Geach Memorial Award (2007).

Consistently interested in drawing as a vehicle for discovering things that are immediate and transitory, her work is increasingly an exploration of the relationship between drawing and time. This plays out as she develops her loves of watercolour, gouache and animation.

Paper title

Non-sequitur: The Accidental Narrative

Abstract

In considering relationships between imagery and actuality, this paper explores poetic possibilities which emerge as the trace of actuality passes through generations of reproduction. Emerging from a project based in newspaper imagery, it looks at repetition, moderation and juxtaposition as central to the ways that the mass print media infiltrate the temporal experience of contemporary life. The ever-present reproduction punctuates lived experience and measures the passage of a day, engaging us intimately with unexpected intersections between space and time.
The potential for the space / time that emerges between different generations of an image, the accidental meanings generated by context, or the lack of it, and the contextual interactions between frames of moving imagery all enable imaginative intrusions of narrative. The writings of Mieke Bal, Walter Benjamin and Michel Bakhtin are used to consider these relationships and the gaps and expectations that they imply. Specific spatio-temporal qualities of visual reiterations and juxtapositions are explored in the light of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope.
I discuss this in relation to my current animation project which reworks printed reproductions of photographs. In this generation of reproduction I build a fluid 'stream of consciousness' by spatially and temporally linking diverse events.

Date

Session

Speaking

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Chairing sessions

Friday 30 September, 1:30pm | Thursday 29 September, 11:00am