Thesis Abstract:

This practice-led thesis expands the notion of Memento-Mori (remember you have to die) in painting. Initiated by specific paintings by Nicolas Poussin, it moves the notion away from representing objects signifying a sequential concept of time, and towards an alternative way to indicate the notion that asks us to look back on a memory to something which will happen to us in the future. It proposes that memento-mori, not being in possession of a singular recognised expression, can be alternatively expressed in painting as an image of multiplicities which makes use of painting’s relationship with time.

Resulting out of this expansion is a transformation of Gilles Deleuze’s critical linguistic stutter (via a clinical stutter) into a painterly mode of stuttering-thinking and visual-stuttering. This mode of thinking and painting has created a theoretical and practical way to beckon connections, alternative spaces and raise backgrounds and the overlooked to the surface. In turn, I have employed this mode of painting to rationalise a counterintuitive use of the painted grid to connect and disrupt – qualities allied to this project’s expanded notion of memento-mori.

Instilling the painted grid with generative and pluralistic qualities usually associated with the digital and the matrix (by (re-) claiming the digital for the analogue grid), I propose an expanded notion of memento-mori in painting can be alternatively expressed through a painting’s unseen in-between using the painted grid to unground and disrupt the holed-through space of a painting’s surface. This ‘ungrounding’, I propose, pivots on the relationship between Deleuzoguattarian concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space, and Alois Riegl’s concepts of the haptic and the optic.

In addition, informed by ideas set out by Jacques Lacan and Natalie Loveless, I develop the idea that an expanded notion of memento-mori could be thought of as a creational research tool to drive a painting practice. Or, in other words, this PhD practice-led research project has applied the notion of memento-mori to explore and stretch the possibilities of painting.