Design and Art Australia Online

Thomas Loveday, artist, academic and architect, was born in South Australia in 1956. In 1986 he completed a degree in Architecture at the then South Australian Institute of Technology (now University of South Australia) before being awarded a Master of Visual Art (2001) and a PhD (2006) from Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), University of Sydney. From 1981 to 1992, Loveday worked for a number of architectural firms – Brown and Falconer, Hannaford, Nelson and Dawson, 2HM – before setting up his own practice for a couple years in 1993. He lectured in architecture and interior design at the University of South Australia from 1987 to 1993, before moving to Sydney in 1994 to teach interior design at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). While working for ten years at UTS, Loveday was also a short term sessional teacher in drawing at SCA (1998). In 2003 he took up a senior lecturing position in Interior Architecture at the University of New South Wales.

Loveday was born into a family closely associated with 1950s European émigré artists through whom the young boy was introduced to modern art, theatre, philosophy and literature. His parents’ professional involvement in architecture, design and art also impacted on Loveday’s interests in mathematics, art and architecture. Upon leaving school, Loveday was unable to combine studies in all three fields of interest and felt constrained to focus on maths and architecture only.

It was not until 1988 that Loveday furthered his hitherto private art practice by participating in a group exhibition of painting and photography at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Loveday considers the festival as the starting point of his art practice, for not only did he sell his first artwork, but he started to think about the very public display of works in exhibitions. Loveday then made contributions to seasonal drawing exhibitions for the Royal South Australian Society of the Arts (1993 and 1994), before moving to Sydney.

Throughout the rest of the 1990s, Loveday fostered his art practice by exhibiting regularly at the Albion Street Gallery and various other galleries in Sydney. At the same time he continued working in architecture related positions while undertaking formal education in the arts.

Loveday describes himself as a conceptual artist whose mediums are oil and acrylic paintings, installations, and drawings. In his paper The Critical Prosthesis (2002), Loveday compares conceptual art to a “self mutilating body” which cuts off its aesthetic limb and replaces it with an artificial prosthetic. He suggests that conceptual art requires the re-injection of emotion to counter the aloofness or indifference of some contemporary conceptual art that “relies heavily on theoretical texts for access to its intensity of meaning”. Critical theory, he feels, has taken on the role of prosthesis for contemporary conceptual art.

Often the theoretical premise behind his work is developed in parallel with his writings on conceptual art. For example, Infrathin: Advice for Aliens (2007) consisted of fifty-two acrylic abstract paintings and a book. The name of each painting is drawn from history, art, philosophy, geography, politics and popular culture and the book is addressed to “those who are alienated” about the world. The book also introduced the Duchampian concept of 'Infrathin’ as fundamental to alienation because, according to Loveday, the concept explores the idea of permeability between ideas, images and words. The resulting merged meanings may be perceived by the audience as “humorous and counter-intuitive, deliberately superficial, or in some cases, downright offensive, while at the same time, self-effacing.” Upon viewing this artwork Loveday expects “the first thing would be a smile, then perhaps a little laughter, and then the thought comes”.

Infrathin was included in the exhibition “Tactile Imagination”, curated by Loveday on behalf of his colleagues from the Faculty of Built Environment (FBE) at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Paddington. Both his work and the project as a whole co-examined creativity and visual research.

Another theoretically informed artwork, Between Desire and Necessity (2008), was shown in a curated exhibition “Ambiguousity” in At The Vanishing Point gallery. Using acrylic paint, coloured pencil, plastic models and hardware, the artwork explored notions of the ambiguity of artists’ statements in contemporary art by lampooning, parodying or critiquing the very idea of an artist’s statement.

At the time of writing, Loveday considered his most important work as The Planets (2006), a series of eight large scale oil paintings submitted for his doctoral thesis, which together argued for an account of painting as a “philosophy of sensation”, with key ideas taken from philosophy, painting and architectural practice. He is a member of AAANZ (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand), AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art), and Viscopy.

Writers:

De Lorenzo, Catherine Note: Catherine De Lorenzo is an art historian and Senior Lecturer, FBE, UNSW
Tran, Chris Note: Chris Tran is an Architectural Studies student at the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed