This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.
Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends to be transformed into a bounded space which is located next to [and] in-between other bounded spaces, like a piece of a jigsaw’ (2009). This bounded space as a mechanism of transference is examined in my own visual arts practice as a response to and reflection of the collaboration.
Author Biography
Professor Clive Barstow is Executive Dean of Arts & Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Honorary Professor of Art at the University of Shanghai Science & Technology China, Honorary Professor of Design at Guangdong Baiyun University Guangzhou China, and global faculty member of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey USA.
Clive is a practicing artist and writer. His exhibition profile includes forty years of international exhibitions, artist residencies and publications in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. His work is held in a number of collections, including the Musse National d'Art Modern Pompidou Centre Paris and the British Council USA. Clive is Vice President of the Australian Council of Deans & Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA), the peak body in Australia for Art & Design Higher Education. Clive is also Director of the Open Bite Australia Print Workshop, which encourages the development of printmaking within a number of local indigenous communities.
His recent exhibitions include “Tomorrow is History” at the Turner Galleries Perth WA, “Giving Yesterday A Tomorrow” at the Hu Jiang Gallery Shanghai China, “Cultural Pruning” at the Meou Art Gallery M52 Art District Shanghai and recent publications include “Encountering the Third Space: a study of identity and hybridity through trans cultural artistic practice in Australia and China” Oxford University UK. In 2005 Clive was awarded the distinguished teaching award by the Australian Council for University Art & Design Schools, Australia’s peak body for creative arts teaching and research for his contribution to art and design education in Australia.
Barstow, C.
(2018).
Imaginative Geographies: Visualising the Poetics of History and Space.
Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, 8(1).
Retrieved from
https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol8/iss1/4
