The Role of Neural Forms in Creativity: Through Painting and Printmaking

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of Creative Arts and English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.

This thesis has been shaped and informed by my research on the role that neural forms playin creativity. Neural forms have been researched and documented in a scientific way for a long time. In archaeology and anthropology David Lewis-Williams has been instrumental in interpreting these in rock art images, while Rhoda Kellogg’s research has focused on their presence in children’s art. Their research proposes that neural forms are simple everyday shapes including circles, dots, chevrons, parallel lines, intersections, and amoeba shapes that predate language and occur across cultures. According to these analyses, neural forms are the building blocks of human visual communications, including art. This thesis explores neural forms in several contexts in order to understand how they operate so as to unlock their potential for contemporary creative practice. The thesis includes two case studies of types of African art which offer convincing evidence of early instances of neural images. I focus on these case studies on account of their art historical and archaeological significance, but also because of my personal encounter with those cultures. In San rock art, marks that denote early human attempts to enter and become part of images are discernible, while in Mbuti bark cloths, the constituent parts of chanting and polyphonic rhythms find equivalences in visual forms. The way that neural forms find expression in these two art traditions has been significant in developing insight into how neural forms might operate in contemporary practice. The importance of neural forms for creativity has not been substantially documented or researched from the perspective of contemporary creative practice. This thesis proposes that neural forms offer an innovative way to understand the process and meaning making of abstract painting. A focus on neural forms allows an exploration of abstract mark-making outside of more established art historical narratives, with the potential for new insights and ways of working. In particular, I argue that neural forms have the potential to be self-generating: approaching abstract painting from this perspective allows the process to be less an orchestrated activity informed by the art-historically determined language of abstraction, and more a collaboration with independent creative agencies: that is, the power of each neural form to generate meaning.