Multi-dimensional Painting

Abstract

Painting is a multi-dimensional practice, including both four-dimensional and fivedimensional qualities. These dimensions are active through pictorial forces within the ground of a painting—an interface that Antonin Artaud called the subjectile, a conjunction of the words subject and projectile.2 The current embrace of materiality and vitalism within contemporary art practices locally and internationally,3 draws attention to place-based relationships with biological and geological matter that traverse colonial dualities and categorisations of nature and culture.4 Further understanding of multidimensional and more-than-human approaches to painting can be developed through extension of Artaud’s ideas, using the subjectile to consider biological and geological figure/ground dynamics and forces. This article extends Artaud’s ideas by proposing the terms biosubjectile and geosubjectile to consider paintings and their surfaces as both living and inorganic systems. I reflect on my own bio and geo-based artworks, which generate multi-dimensional and polymorphic forms with a view to resisting or complicating both subjective experience and objective judgements of pictorial resolution, craft and aesthetics.