This practice-led project aims to explore how painting can address nostalgia through a rhizomatic exploration of memory and affect. Instead of defining a static identity for nostalgia, this project explores its potential of creating new ideas and affective movements by making connections with other memories and objects.

By using nostalgia as the subject of painting, the painting can take initiative in directing the nostalgic experience by directly addressing it. In this way, the nostalgic experience is provided with a new direction led by painting’s practical logic which cannot be totally controlled by the painter. This means, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, painting can deterritorialise a nostalgic experience and move it into other territories. The aim of painting is to find what Simon O’Sullivan defines as encounter in which it would be ruptured by the encountered territory first and then achieves new state through reterritorialisation.

Photographs can directly articulate with paint by being incorporated into the painted surface or replacing the canvas. Accordingly, painting nostalgia can be linked with the encounters between the photographer and the subjects, hence, new ideas can be generated. Painting becomes a channel through which nostalgic experiences are separated from the desire to go back to the past and transformed into unpredictable new ideas and affects.

A print copy of this thesis is available in the GSA Library.