Giles Alexander

Website: www.gilesalexander.net

Email: giles.alexander@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Emma Robertson, Oliver Bown

Keywords: Painting, Late medieval devotional aesthetics, Music Evoked Autobiographical Memories

Giles Alexander’s practice-led research sits at the intersection of late medieval devotional aesthetics and Music Evoked Autobiographical Memories (MEAMs) and investigates how music shapes personal and collective memory by drawing on cognitive psychology, media archaeology, autobiographical narrative and historically informed painting. Centred on the fast-evolving field of MEAMs, the project explores how music collapses past and present, producing forms of temporal organisation that are non-linear, affect-driven, and resistant to dominant, clock-based understandings of time. These insights are brought into dialogue with late medieval devotional aesthetics, whose gold-grounds created luminous, timeless spaces intended to hold spiritual presence. Just as trecento altarpieces functioned as thresholds between earthly and divine realms, MEAMs operate as affective thresholds, collapsing temporal distance and allowing individuals to re-experience moments with unusual vividness and emotional depth. By reactivating these forgotten painterly technologies and their architectural formats with musical narratives, the research creates contemporary devotional forms - objects that illuminate how sound, memory, and the spiritual can unite in the present.

Over the past two decades Giles practice has critically reimagined the traditions of oil painting, integrating contemporary technologies and narratives to explore shifting perceptions of space and time. These pictorial explorations have been recognised in Australia and internationally by award winning cultural commentators. His work has been the subject of essays by John McDonald, Alison Kubler, Kate Bryan and Dr Michael Hill amongst others and has been featured in publications such as Artist Profile, Vault and Sky at Night magazine as well as TV documentaries. Giles has presented numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia and overseas including at Art Basel Miami, The Fine Art Society, London, at Sydney Contemporary and with Louis. K Meisel in New York. Additionally, Giles’s work has been included in curated exhibitions at regional galleries in Australia, museums in the U.S as well as being selected as a finalist in various prizes including the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman at AGNSW. Giles has an MFA in Painting from the National Art School, where he has taught as a sessional academic in painting and drawing. He was awarded a five-year painting scholarship at Bishop’s Stortford College in the UK and completed his undergraduate studies in painting at Central St Martins (London).