[Documentation for M.F.A. degree]

M.F.A. Proposal, Joanna Flynn, March 1988. My interest is in narratives. This has developed over the last two or three years, from a way of constructing pictures to a wish to focus on narrative as the content as well as the vehicle. I intend an exploration of the idea of personal and private narrative, juxtaposed with public narrative, eg. as these narratives are intended to be a unified assemblage of disparate parts, both textual and pictorial; using personal poems, firsthand anecdotes, my own fiction and quotes from other personal sources, also private photographs, drawings and jokes, and on the public side; documents, archival material relating to legislative and judicial decisions made by community councils in Australia and England, used sparingly. The narratives shall then, be both written and illustrated. I shall employ the services of a ghost hero, a sort of hold-all animus who becomes the itinerant master of ceremonies or the eternal victim, the artist as a young manimus if you like. (Why? Because every good narrative needs a hero and I don't have the shoulders for it). My role as an artist is evocative. At the minute I intend my influences for these pictures to be, the photo-print collages from the 60's and early 70's of Robert Rauschenberg;,his pictures of America, the 'Stoned Moon' series. Also, the powerful Mayakovsky exhibition that toured Australia last year which showed the process of deification (of the artist), through the use of photographs and biographical material, and as well, the writings of Richard Brautigan, the sixties pop poet of San Francisco. The works of these two artists were terribly evocative of the time in which they were manufactured but are sufficiently successful as works of art, not to have simply become period pieces.