Ornamenting the body: Creative practice exploring the relationship of body politic and space
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Other Title
Authors
Hochstein, Gina
Author ORCID Profiles (clickable)
Degree
Grantor
Date
2024-08
Supervisors
Type
Journal Article
Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (Māori subject headings)
Keyword
Titirangi (Auckland, N.Z.)
Auckland (N.Z.)
Aotearoa
New Zealand
body politics
jewellery
domestic architecture
spaces
modernism
history
Auckland (N.Z.)
Aotearoa
New Zealand
body politics
jewellery
domestic architecture
spaces
modernism
history
ANZSRC Field of Research Code (2020)
Citation
Hochstein, G. (2024). Ornamenting the body: Creative practice exploring the relationship of body politic and space. Scope_Art + Design, 27 | August, 51-57. https://doi.org/10.34074/scop.1027020
Abstract
In this essay, I set out to explore the multiple facets connecting the politics of space to the politics of bodies. Objects surround our bodies, sized to varying scales. We wear and display them. They are all crafted and designed, yet we fail to acknowledge the political significance of our engagement with them. The political dimension is evident in the design process. Regardless of an object’s scale – even architecture can be viewed as a form of object – its design is typically tailored to a single standardised body.
Scale is a constraint for both jewellery and architecture. Both are designed and bound by spatial context, and the body is the inherent factor to which scale relates, including consideration of how the body moves within space. Small and monumental spaces alike use the human form as a reference point.
This paper explores the ways that scale shifts and adapts in relation to the emotional realm by examining the utilitarian and societal functions of objects and imagining and reproducing pieces that are made visually.
I analyse pieces of my creative practice that explore the spatial practices that emerged across the span from craft to building, developing what can be called a ‘body politic,’ one that uniquely welds landscape concerns with corporeal expressive repertoires that test and afford modes of belonging and identity in complex ways. My creative practice research investigates the complex intersection of craft practices and architecture in the context of a consolidating émigré community that made its home in Titirangi, Aotearoa New Zealand, in the 1950s.
Publisher
Otago Polytechnic Press
Permanent link
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.34074/scop.1027020
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Copyright notice
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International