Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts)
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- ItemRe-imagining learning and teaching art: exploring embodied mark-making with foundation phase student teachers at Cape Peninsula University of Technology(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03 ) Meiring, Jacoba Johanna; Costandius, Elmarie; Perold-Bull, Karolien; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Art.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Prescriptive methodologies have become normative in everyday classroom learning and teaching and lead to the need for certain outcomes in Visual Art education that favour teaching how to produce end products over exploration and experimental on with process work. Low levels of exposure to Visual Art by generalist student teachers in the B.Ed. foundation phase (FP) programmes during their own schooling, and the dense Life Skills curriculum in the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) in South Africa, of which the Creative Arts form part, pose challenges for teacher education programmes, and for practising teachers. The central aim of this research was to address these challenges by implementing embodied arts-based experiences for student teachers, thus facilitating a different approach to learning and teaching Visual Art in the FP and contributing to a more socially just education environment. The Covid-19 pandemic necessitated moving the five practical arts-based interventions that were central to this research online. This transition had limitatations, but brought valuable insights into addressing disembodied learning and teaching practices in a virtual classroom setting. The study utilised arts-based research (ABR) to explore alternative approaches to learning and teaching. It challenged traditional human-centred and knowledge-based research methodologies, emphasising the interplay of ethics, ontology and knowledge, and engaging the researcher as integral to the ethical, ontological and epistemological processes of the research. This implied that I had to embrace the uncertainties posed by the pandemic and embody the practical changes I wanted to address through this research. Through mark-making, anarchiving and diffraction, this research disrupted the conventional focus on representative art education embracing interdisciplinary concepts, thus highlighting the interconnections among decolonial, posthuman and new material ideas whilst fostering opportunities for embodied sensory exploration. The findings show that embodied processes and relational techniques like mark-making promote contextualised, subjective learning, addressing the lack of body knowledge in arts-based practice. Capitalising on learners’ and teachers’ subjectvities and inherent creativity through open-ended arts-based processes focused on embodied atunement provided relational awareness and meaningful, embodied connections to new knowledge, addressing the current focus on disembodied learning and teaching. Shifting the focus from the assessment of content, skills or aesthetics in artmaking to developing methodologies for including sensory intelligence as a skill in terms of how student teachers relate to content in full body-mind awareness is a way to address normative prescriptive and disembodied methodologies. It includes cultivating the skills of reading, tracing and acting on embodied knowledge through arts-based processes. Over time, teacher commitment to gradually enable learners/students and themselves to develop embodied and relational atunement could assist in a beter understanding of how the body-mind entangles with human and nonhuman others in learning and teaching new content. The material-force conceptual framework developed from these insights offers arts-based praxis a way to work affirmatively in such atunement to the content-methodology and product-process divide, whilst including learner/student voices in learning and teaching. The philosophies of embodiment, relationality and process ontology should underlie all learning and teaching. Ways to apply the framework across disciplines and integrated with arts-based practice warrant further research.
- ItemReconfiguring motherhood: maternal temporality in the work of four South African visual artists(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Steyn, Christine; Van Robbroeck, Lize ; Viljoen, Stella; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study, I examine the visual reframing of mothering by four South African women artists whose projects conceptualise maternal subjectivity through the bodily and psychological experiences of pregnancy, birth and mothering. The principle thesis of my research is that the selected artists’ engagement with maternal subjectivity can be addressed through an exploration of the maternal body’s ability to disrupt conventional experiences of time. Presenting an alternative discourse of maternal embodiment, the artworks offer ways to consider how rethinking maternity might reformulate our experience and thinking about lived time as that which is dynamic, relational and, at times, conflicting, revealing the intrinsic intra-activity of being.
- ItemCreolised objects: A study of material culture as marker of coloured identity(2023-03 ) Huigen-Conradie, Stephane Edith; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In South Africa, coloured identities have been viewed from essentialist and instrumentalist perspectives. As a ‘group’, people racially categorised as coloured, hold a multiplicity of identities that share histories of enslavement, forced removals and various degrees of enforced reification. In this study, I propose that theoretically and practically, cultural creolisation provides a useful alternative from which to explore the complexities that exist within the life histories of people categorised as coloured. Instead of primarily focusing on peoples’ life histories, this study also considers the material dimensions of coloured identities. The exploration makes a case for creolisation being a flexible conceptual tool that is directly comparable to processes of bricolage - the experimentation with various material and cultural elements, to form assemblages. This is a practice I utilise in my artistic practice where I make use of found materials, that reflect the visual cultures I grew up with in Namibia and South Africa, to form sculptural assemblages. From this (semi)autoethnographic perspective, I position the material nature of the investigated objects as having embedded biographies and agency. I have focused on two fieldwork sites: Rehoboth in Namibia and Stellenbosch, with a focus on Cloetesville and Idas Valley, in South Africa. Both sites have a personal bearing on how I have made sense of my imposed coloured racial signifier. I look at both sites as places that have experienced some form of dislocation and how the people living in these locations have been categorised as coloured at various points in their histories. In particular, I investigated object-centred biographies present in select homes of residents in Rehoboth, Cloetesville and Idas Valley to identify how objects can symbolise identity formation and memory in unstable places. I focused on eight residents’ life stories and home possessions to determine the similarities and differences in their biographies and the material culture represented in their living rooms. The data were compared to determine how residents’ biographies and subsequently their material belongings related to contemporary theories about creolisation and coloured identity formation in a Southern African context. From this qualitative enquiry, I found that residents’ homes were a central object to their sense of belonging, with the sub-themes such as home/land, home ownerships (placement and displacement) and home extensions being identified as key concerns. I found that display cabinets became visual storytelling mechanisms from which residents could arrange and display the intimate and public biographical details of their lives and how this pertains to a larger construction of coloured identities in each localised area. Display cabinets were also identified as symbols of respectability and resistance. From a micro perspective, biographical objects, with the subthemes genealogies, status objects and nostalgic objects, were identified as individualising residents’ life stories and consequently their construction of self. Using a narrative approach assisted in unlocking details concerning the display objects found in these cabinets and an understanding of how display cabinets contributed to a particular material visualisation and visual pattern of each group and individual’s identity formation.
- ItemExploring critical citizenship and decolonisation as a framework for design education in South Africa(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) Botes, Herman; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 2020 the globe is in turmoil. When this study commenced in 2018 the call to action for the citizen designer was premised on the #Feesmustfall campaign and the #Rhodesmustfall student protests, the July 2021 social unrest in South Africa that resulted in unprecedented violence and looting, rampant corruption in public and private sectors in South Africa and growing nationalism seen from BREXIT and the Trump administration in the USA. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic brought even more attention to the role of the citizenry and how citizens can be capacitated to navigate uncertain and difficult times. Within the field of design, the concept of citizen designer is established. It was considered that the notion of educating a ‘citizen designer’ could be further developed in the South African design education context. The study therefore focused on how critical citizenship and decolonisation perspectives can contribute to a design pedagogy framework for citizen designer education in the context of South African universities of technology. Theoretical perspectives from critical citizenship and decolonisation provided the theoretical base for the study. A qualitative research approach was taken that involved case study research methodology. The data in the study was collected from a survey of and interviews with South African design educators as well as interviews with South African design students. From the data, South African citizen designer can be decribed as designers that have a deep understanding of self, ethics and critical thinking; they operate in transdisciplinary settings with a focus on the tangible betterment of sustainable quality of all life through a caring conscience. The study determined that the themes in critical citizenship and decolonisation perspectives that can contribute to design pedagogy for educating a South African citizen designer can be broadly categorised into concepts related to context, African focus, personal development and curriculum development. The category of context determines the relevance and approach to be taken when engaging with the African focus, personal development, and curriculum development categories. The study concludes with a list of suggested themes in these categories that could be considered for implementation by design educators in their specific field working towards the development of a South African citizen designer.
- ItemDecentering the archive: visual fabrications of sonic memories(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-12) Deane, Nicola Frances; Muller, Stephanus; Froneman, Willemien; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual ArtsENGLISH ABSTRACT: Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories navigates various strategies of inverting and subverting the ordered, categorised and confined cultural archive, in this case, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at the University of Stellenbosch. This practice-based doctoral study treats DOMUS as the site for a creative production of decentered reading and writing from archival fragments, while interrogating the role and power of the archive in manipulating time and collective memories by asking the question: How should fragmented or destabilising experiences be remembered given the delinking option from both modernity and post-modernity? My referral to Decolonial theory at the start of this study prompted me to test new possibilities through the “decolonial options” that Walter Mignolo describes as operating “from the margins and beyond the margins of the modern/colonial order. It posits alternatives in relation to the control of the economy (market value), the control of the state (politics of heritage based on economic wealth), and the control of knowledge” (Mignolo & Vázquez, 2013). Since my heritage lies on the side of the coloniser while I grew up within the context of a colonised nation, my position as a South African citizen is divided and complex, hence my attraction to the margins. As an artist who cuts up and rearranges image, text, and sound, my study of an archive can never be strictly scholarly, as in, disciplined and inhibited. Hence, I determined a decolonial option of working with the archive: to re-invest it with an ability to bleed - to traverse the rigid taxonomies and artificial fictional separations between categories that are generally foundational to the archival process of storing (and building on) records of social, cultural and political practices. Sound in the archive, however, carries traces of pulse in rhythm, breath and voice – traces of blood beating – and brings to awareness the vibrations of one's own tympanic membrane. It is the fabric of sound, the pulse of a particular history through sound that stimulates the composition of memories. “Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things” (Edmond Jabès, 1984). The work which is embedded in herri is divided into four passages, these are Surfaces, Invagination, Noise and The Mask. These passages are further infused by my conceptual framing through the terms “dehiscence” and “pentimento”, borrowed from the fields of medicine and painting, indicating the leap across mediums, disciplines and territories of knowledge, towards a mutidimensional understanding of time and space through and beyond the senses.