Ms Kirsten Hudson
Kirsten is a PhD student whose work explores, identifies and theorises the understandings of feminine artifice in relation to the construction of female sexual and social identity within Australia's body politic. Her research analyses the difference between the construction of social performance, the narrative and visual 'textualisation' of female representation and how representations persist in spite of changes being made to social performance. She then destabilises these categories of representation and construction using carnival and carnivalesque language and spectacle as tactics for intervention and resistance within an Australian landscape.
To Glance Sideways
This paper examines the traditional viewing practices within the fashion and art industries and investigates the carnivalesque as an interventionist tactic to challenge and disrupt the controlled economics of imagery exchange within these industries. Drawing upon Dick Hebdidge's politics of style and popular culture as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's exploration of carnivalesque potential, this paper proposes a performative and collaborative art practice that fuses fashion with other more generally accepted art forms and introduces this hybrid practice to the unstable elements of popular culture and the everyday. This interventionist strategy aims to undermine conventional art viewing practices through the shifting of contexts, while cheekily subverting the assumed relationship between spectator and performer, and thus begins to break down the elitist boundaries often associated with the fashion and art industries, allowing a wider audience to interact and participate.
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