Author Identifier
Date of Award
2026
Keywords
culture–nature, visual arts, Australia––China, slow making, more–than–human
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
School
School of Arts and Humanities
First Supervisor
Nicola Kaye 
0000-0003-2432-2584
Second Supervisor
Clive Barstow 0000-0003-2539-9989
Third Supervisor
Debra Dudek 0000-0003-2882-8830
Abstract
This practice–led doctoral research locates my visual arts practice within a collaborative culture nature entanglement that has developed through visual arts methods, exhibitions, conferences, and publication and is underpinned by a sustained examination of the relevant historical, cultural, and theoretical positions that augment and inform the studio work. The research has been enacted in Western Australia and in China, through residencies, field trips, and across multiple working spaces such as studios, site–specific spaces, and residential gardens.
My arts practice has expanded from printmaking into hybrid immersive material processes, that has generated a relational model of practice through experiential site–based encounters. Through my embodied engagement in the locality of Porongurup Range—Borongor up, Noongar Boodjar, and the traditional lands of the Menang Peoples in the Great Southern region of Western Australia—the research cultivates a model of practice, that for me, reaffirms nature as a co–constitutive presence. I have engaged in site–responsive material exchanges with landscape, attuning to the interdependencies shared across human and more–than human worlds, underpinned by relational ontologies in contemporary thought (Haraway, 2016; Ingold, 2021; Jullien 2018; Tsing, 2015).
My immersion in historical Chinese gardens has informed this approach by offering ways in which human experience in landscape is brought into dialogue through spatial, perceptual, and philosophical perspectives (Fung. S, 2003; Zhao & Zhang, 2024). Within the research, I approach cultural difference through dialogic relations with others in transformative generative encounters of active negotiation (Appiah & Bhabha, 2018). I view the experiences across historic and traditional forms of Chinese gardens and Western Australian landscape environments, as sensorial and relational encounters that produce shifting perspectives through which material, spatial and embodied conditions of the work emerge.
The research culminates in an experiential installation, See the Mountain 见山 — Shifting perspectives, exhibiting a diverse range of works from cloth, dye, frottage, and print, from the site specific investigations through ethical, human and non–human collaborations and approaches to visual art making. The practice–led research contributes to the contemporary visual arts field and provides key methodological insights into using cross–cultural approaches through site–specific contexts.
Access Note
Access to this thesis is embargoed until 10th April 2028
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Recommended Citation
Allerding, A. (2026). See the Mountain 见山 山–Shifting Perspectives: An exhibition and Expanding visual arts practice through site–responsive encounters across Chinese garden traditions and Western Australian landscapes: An exegesis. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/6gsy-7805