Surface encounter is an experimental practice with an emphasis on open-ended and material–led processes. This PhD has been an opportunity to explore and grow an emerging and experimental practice involved with surfaces through painting, photography, intervention, installation, and teaching.
In this PhD, surface is approached in relation to repetitive activities in observation and attentiveness, as a composite of spontaneous, fragmentary, and intermittent situations that engage in a multiplicity of processes related to framing, inciting, extracting, arrangement and re–presentation. Through these techniques, the practice of surface has unfolded as one entangled in various durations, materialities, sites, occurrences and becomings.
Throughout the PhD, the focus on research being conducted through practice as experimentation brought an emphasis to the how of practice in relation to how to practice surface? This has framed and guided the research–practice throughout the duration of the PhD and has led to the production of a conceptual framework that values surface as a situation for the surfacing of potentialities, where emergence of conditions, durational and material forces, ephemeralities and energies are in materialisation.
The PhD has enabled a focus on surface as an everyday practice through daily actions in observation and documentation. Together with a series of exhibitions and interventions which engaged the practice of surface in diverse contexts, from digital platforms to physical sites, to grow the practice of surface as an enduring practice in continual making engaged through activating surfaces, attentiveness, materialities, energies, forces, sensation, and encounters.
Surfaces are situated in a dynamic and changing flow of forces; this continual change is, in a sense, inevitable. Celebrating this as a mode of practice that draws attention to surfaces and their potentiality – through various mediums, materialities, energies − gives value to surfaces and surfacing as a critical spatial practice.
The contribution of the PhD, through interior design education, research, and practice − is to bring a new valuing of surface as a practising of surfacing. Through attentiveness to how surfaces are situated in the world − as material, spatial, temporal situations − and where ongoing iterative experimentation is foregrounded and valued as vital to the particular forms of encounters produced, Surface encounter is a provocation for experiencing and perceiving materiality and temporality in the world.