Aesthetic Fixation: 2014 QUT Fine Art Visual Art Graduate Show

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

T.S. Eliot said, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”.

The idea suggests anxiety is an inherently important part of creativity - that it underpins, motivates and influences the creative process. And this is true for Katie Porter, a recent Fine Arts Visual Arts graduate.

“I’m making work which is about being anxious and being anxious about the creation of art,” she says.

“But then I think that it’s quite funny and I guess I hate the word ‘nice’, but I like the idea of making work which is just a sad lump of clay when you are trying to make art which is about the fact that you are sad about making a work out of a lump of clay.”

In addition to clay, Katie’s sculptural work uses found objects - rocks, chairs, post-it notes. The materials can’t be overworked - they are set in their form already or almost immediately. It negates the process of neurotically obsessing over work; in a sense, perfectionism.

“Part of that anxiety behind making art is that sitting down and making something which is going to be so serious and it’s going to be displayed in a gallery.

“And that’s part of the reason I like doing these works, which on the one hand have this immediacy to them, but on the other hand they are just kind of funny to look at.”

Like many artists, it's all about how important the ‘process’ is. For Katie, her process developed from adapting a two-dimensional works to a three-dimensional form, then back again.

“So even like with the post-it work, with having a poem that I had written and then turning that into a zine, which was on gridded paper and then taking that idea of the grid and the the letters spaced out on the grid and putting that back onto the wall, which is kind of a 3D form.”

It’s the culmination of three years’ study. And in that time the emerging artists have developed their skills, processes and aesthetic.

“A lot of people who are really good at drawing now in third year are doing completely abstract sound works and things like that, which I think is really interesting,” says Katie.

For now the anxiety of study is over. But the anxiety of creativity endures.