The climbing body: verticality and the gallery

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Copyright: van Uden, Ellyse
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Abstract
Embodied knowledge amassed through the act of climbing has the potential to generate alternate ways of understanding vertical planes. Verticality in the gallery refers to flat, blank walls that are traditionally disembodied, decontextualised and used for modes of display contributing to a conventional stature that ensures its institutional power. My practice, which comprises sculptural installations and drawings, interrogates the relationship between the vertical and the climbing body to extend notions of understanding verticality with the potential for ‘bodily’, proximal engagement in an operable zone. My practice is informed by my experience as a climber, which over years of training has produced embodied knowledge of movement that allows me to make sculptural works that interrogate verticality as they ‘climb’ the institutional wall. Verticality has been embodied and operated with in the works of contemporary artists such as Trisha Brown and Matthew Barney. As Brown promotes illusory spatial experiences that extend possibilities of inhabiting the vertical, Barney disrupts the gallery’s conventional way of understanding the vertical. This is extended in the work of Gideonsson/Londré (Lisa Gideonsson and Gustaf Londré) as they test the limits of human verticality and examine the significance of flatness to our understanding of the vertical. Climbing enters the gallery environment in the works of Erin Coates and Dan Shipsides as they engage with bodies that climb and constructions or drawings of climbs. Considering the translation of three-dimensional movement into two-dimensional forms in my drawings, I examine a history of dance notation to establish its diagrammatic and artistic applications. Distinguished from the pedagogic, interactive and representational works of Coates and Shipsides, my practice further abstracts the climbing body to explore verticality as a proximal, liminal zone. The project results in a body of artworks that creatively and critically exercise my embodied knowledge to reveal the speculative and diagrammatic ways of seeing and sensing verticality, disrupting the authoritative status of the gallery wall.
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Author(s)
van Uden, Ellyse
Supervisor(s)
Gregory, Tim
Haley, Rochelle
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Publication Year
2019
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Thesis
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
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