Published September 2025
in UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture (PhD Thesis)
This PhD project focusses on how painting’s surface can be transformed from a pictorial space into a generative site that actively reshapes relations both internal and external to the frame of painting. By positioning the low relief thickness of the painted surface as a dynamic ground in which intensive forces gather and are reconfigured, it provides new ways to understand painting’s embeddedness into architecture.
The thesis is structured around four themes—painting, moulding, casting and framing—which serve as both conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches. Based on several site-responsive case studies from my painting practice, I focus on the processes of recording physical impressions through moulding and casting, not as reproductive but as diagrammatic, painterly activities. In this approach, silicone mould impressions serve as a painterly frame for the recasting and transformation of material fragments into new surface assemblages.
By reassembling material and pictorial fragments at the work’s surface, I examine painting’s capacity to produce a distinct spatial and temporal order in connection with the surfaces of architecture.