Traces of Departure and Arrival

Dr. Lyndall Adams
2012 Conference

This paper traces the consequences of dislocation for studio arts-practice. I recently found myself in Perth, far from my home of 20 years and with directional vertigo, looking east to my old life and west to the Indian Ocean. In order to make sense of this move I used the studio to resolve/recollect/ trace my sense of movement, change, loss and vertigo. The multiple departures and arrivals on this journey are articulated as catalysts to studio production. We rarely speak about the spaces between such departures and arrivals and the effects those spaces have on the lived body. The space between in this instance was a road trip from the East to the West Coast of Australia. Traces of those departures and arrivals – (that always being between destinations) while evading the dichotomy of here or there and metaphors of inside and outside informed the studio processes entered into. The studio can be understood in this context as an instrument of phenomenological subjectivity in the world because our embodiment is premised on the mutually constituted agency of the self/other, or self in/of the world. The resultant bodies of work are described not as objects but as artefacts of arts-practice-led-research; as locaters of embodied knowledge; as traces of the performance of making. Through studio practice, an active material conversation occurs between ideas, the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of the studio, bodies and images.

Download Full text PDF (2.55 MB)

About the author

Lyndall Adams is a Perth based contemporary artist working in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Born in Rylestone in 1958, Lyndall received a BA (hon 1st) in 1997, an MA (Visual Arts) in 1999 and a PhD (Philosophy) in 2008 from Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW where she lectured in the School of Arts for a decade. Lyndall is a practice-led researcher interested in complex narrative structures role in positioning visual images of the body. The artist draws influences from the interface between post-structuralist and feminist thinking. Her arts-practice articulates the female body, the lived body that is determined and specific though paradoxically in a state of flux, defined and redefined by changing practices and discourses. Lyndall has participated in solo, collaborative and group exhibitions within Australia and internationally since 1995 and is represented by Elements Art Gallery in Dalkeith, WA.