Research Interests - Cian Quayle

Photographic artworks and writing investigate time, place and memory related to everyday lived experience. Ongoing projects deal with archival strategies of collecting where the medium of photography operates as a vehicle, which transports objects, people and places. Artist travel and journeys has been the focus for artworks, which deal with specific locations and places. Found objects and materials are appropriated both physically and photographically and reconstituted as installation artworks. Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope has been utilised as a structure through which to articulate a metaphorical journey in space and time, where a return to place is mediated by distance. Distance and proximity to place, and distance and proximity to the medium of photography are critical for an investigation of the materiality of the photographic image at a point of obsolescence.
The Aesthetics of Distance was the working title of a PhD thesis (Inventory for a Reverse Journey – Photographic Image and Found Object 2005), which investigates the precedents of artist travel from the perspective of voluntary or involuntary forms of exile. A series of six case studies analyses the work of artists in America who turned to photography as a form of spatial mapping: Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler and Bas jan Ader. Conversely the investigation crosses to Europe to examine the exile status of artists using found objects and materials: Jimmie Durham, Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters. Contemporary examples of artist travel as a strategy are differentiated in the thesis where travel is not the stated intention but a latent affectation.  The impact of the transition and a subsequent transformation of materials and objects between one place and another is examined across different forms of image production and narrative, which includes literature, cinema and music.  These interests include the writing of Alain Robbe Grillet, Albert Camus, Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver. The films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Stanley Kubrick have been the focus of recent artworks where an individual is involved in an elliptical journey only to be returned to a place of departure but has subsequently undergone a psychological transformation. The post-punk legacy of the 1970’s is synonymous with the landscape of the city and has been a critical point of reference.
A Fine Art background bears evidence of previous works across a range of other media, which includes significant bodies of work in painting, sculpture and printmaking.
 

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Vernacular forms of Photography and the Materiality of the Photographic image
1970’s Photoconceptual Practices
Contemporary Fine Art practice, the archive and installation art
Time, place and memory
Cinema
Colour as a Medium in Fine Art, Design & Cinema

Image, Music, Text: Intertextual approaches to practice-based research, which encompasses experiential, literary, psychoanalytic, sociological and semiotic methodologies as a mediological construct.