Public Defense Doctoral Thesis: Patricia Domingues

Public defense of her doctoral thesis by Patricia Domingues:

A Fracturing Practice – Mapping Phenomenological and Emergent Encounters with Landscapes, Technologies, Events, Objects and Jewellery.

The starting point of Domingues’s research arises from the handling of materials and from the disciplines of jewellery, craft and stonework. A Fracturing Practice approaches fractures and the process of fracturing in an artistic, geological and technological exploration.

The fracture becomes a metaphor of parts that are simultaneously and equally divisible and indivisible. Exploring the idea that matter, rather than being an inert object, is sensitive, is embedded in live-ness, A Fracturing Practice explores human development as always a response to what is already latent in the materials and in the  environments themselves.

Domingues’s interest is to understand how materials and landscapes are cut, fractured and broken up and how the fragmentation and the reconstruction of the landscape is intimately connected with human skills, techniques and technologies. Between the immense and the detailed, distinct technological and conceptual approaches to material and digital landscapes help Domingues to fragment the work from different perspectives.

Through writings, jewellery, objects and installations, a technological fracture unfolds, in which ancient ideas of skill and craft engage in a dialogue with current technological and digital discourses.

Craft and technology are means of questioning the kaleidoscopic ways humans have of delving into seemingly divided natural and artificial surroundings.

Promotor: Prof. dr. David Huycke
Co-promotor: dr. Nadia Sels