Postulating the Personal in Abstract Art through Poetry: The Development and Implementation of an Abstract Ekphrasis

Abstract

Considering ekphrasis as poetry written in response to an existing work of art, my thesis, “Postulating the Personal in Abstract Art Through Poetry”, engages intimately with referent works such that my analysis and composition of poetry articulate an ‘abstract ekphrasis’. Both visual art and poetry are considered as equivalent artefacts through a Practice as Research paradigm that emphasises the importance of process. As the development and implementation of this ‘abstract ekphrasis’, my thesis demonstrates ekphrasis that is dynamic and contemporary: subsuming influence and creating itself as its own object whilst remaining discernibly linked to a work of art. My thesis is divided into three chapters to present three variations of contemporary ekphrasis. Each chapter includes an essay and a series of poems. Chapter One includes the essay “Ekphrasis as Event” and the accompanying creative work “Walking-along-with”. Chapter Two includes the essay “A Meandering Line” and the accompanying creative work “Meandering”. Chapter Three includes the essay “Twombly, Translatio and Contemporary Indirect-Ekphrasis” and the accompanying creative work “Footsteps: Poems to the Sea after Cy Twombly”. This structure reflects how, through a performative research approach, the creative and the critical-exegetical works developed concurrently and are mutually dependent. Both are essential expressions of the new knowledge that has been formed over the duration of my creative research project. The three essays each combine an analysis of existing literature with exegesis to contextualise the creative work that accompanies the critical-exegetical writing in that chapter. The creative works in each chapter act as the substantiation and justification for the theory that is developed in the essay. Theoretically, the first chapter engages with a direct form of ekphrastic writing, where the poem and the work of art are simultaneously read and viewed by the audience. For this reason, artworks that are pivotal to the writing contained in Chapter One are reproduced within this chapter. Because Chapter Two and Chapter Three explore less direct forms of ekphrastic writing (being in the gallery space or in the space of an artist’s influences) there are no referent images for the creative work. In this indirect mode, the poems create themselves as their own objects. The poems in each chapter are arranged sequentially to trace local origins that extend outwards. The first two chapters contain poetry that is site-specific to local galleries in Adelaide before similar proximity-based methods are applied to works of art contained in interstate and overseas galleries. The third chapter follows a journey from Rome to Gaeta in the footsteps of American gestural-abstract painter Cy Twombly. Each poem is the expression of an abstract ekphrasis that reinterprets the status of reference within ekphrasis. The abstract ekphrastic poetry presented in my thesis incorporates intertextuality and intimacy to replace the traditional representational-descriptive practices of ekphrastic writing. Poetry emerges that reflects affect and scholarship, as the outcome of a creative process that demonstrates attention to and engagement with works of art in a physical space.