If the purpose of an artist’s PhD, a ‘practice-led PhD’, is to recognize that studio work is its own iconoclastic form of knowledge-production, leading to its own unique insights, then my studio practice serves, in part, to research why it is so hard to talk (or even think) about the text so often visible in contemporary artworks, to give text the aesthetic attention it demands, and to ultimately point to some of the political consequences of our own inattention to the operations of text in culture.

 

This difficulty making sense of text in art is in some ways predictable, given that, as art writer Dave Beech explains, text in art is ‘located at the intersection of contemporary philosophy, contemporary thinking on art and contemporary theories of language’(Selby, 2009, Art and Text, Black Dog, London: 29). Of course Beech’s list is by no means exhaustive; to it I would add, at a minimum, contemporary thinking about design, literature, translation, feminism and post-colonial politics.

 

This paper is essentially my effort to balance theory with practice in the structure of my PhD (making my artwork, writing about the theories of appropriation that underwrite it) and to explain some of my process in coming to terms with the difficulty that text-art presents under the auspices of a practice-led PhD in Visual Arts at the University of Wollongong.