Abstract
This dissertation explores the concept of “maximalism” as a framework for a creative practice rooted in an expansive approach to material, process, and interdisciplinary influences. I relate how an encounter with maximalism through the twin lenses of heavy metal and drone music led me to reframe my understanding of the term from its use as an aesthetic label—broadly applied to works characterized by their relative “excess.” While most often applied as an aesthetic label to completed works characterized by their relative “excess,” I instead locate maximalism in “excessive” approaches to compositional parameters and processes of making employed in the creation of art and music.
Chapter 1 introduces “maximalism” as it is conventionally understood across artistic disciplines, explores its relationship to minimalism, and traces the development of my thinking around maximalism in the context of material and process. In Chapters 2-4, I explore how this reframing of maximalism applies to my own creative practice through discussion of four recent works: Collapse, Fracture, Kraken, and Relic. These pieces weave together a wide range of material and interdisciplinary influences, including visual arts practices, literary maximalism, thalassophobia, heaviness, theories of scale, and astronomy. Through a mixture of technical description and analysis, theoretical framing, and autoethnographic reflection, I present these pieces within the broader context of an “aspirationally” maximalist artmaking practice.
