The Master of Fine Art research has been driven by a desire to locate myself as an artist, and my artwork, not simply in the context of art history, but with respect to art as a unique human practice. My psychological sense of the primacy of art, driven by events surrounding the death of my mother, led to the desire to locate my practice in this epistemological context in order to understand it more profoundly. This desire was primed by my investigation of Surrealism, where I discovered

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... s between my artwork and life experiences, and those of Surrealist, André Masson. The exploration of art as a unique human practice takes prehistoric art as its departure point. This leads to the examination of a number of important evolutionary developments of the Homo genus, including the development of our hominid ancestors' symbolic capabilities in the form of spoken language. Relationships are established between biology, culture, language, consciousness and thought, to support the discussion of the first external symbolic system - visual art, and its universal features. This discussion concludes by asserting that a teleological explanation best accounts for the phenomenon of art. Such an explanation is then discussed with particular reference to neuroscientist Terrance Deacon's theory that art is a reflection of our desire to generate and experience emergent emotional states (Deacon 2006). A sculpture produced during the candidature is discussed in the contexts of mathematics as an external symbolic system and the universal features of art. Correlations are drawn between my aesthetic experience of the sculpture's construction geometry and my appreciation of Islamic art. I propose that the geometric parallels are a reflection of the spiritual or ontological dimensions of this research project as a whole, particularly with respect to what it is to be human through art practice.