PROPOSAL MA CAP 708
Overview
My art practice explores and expands the notions of body and language, moving away from a singular central position into a ‘becoming with’ plurality of direct and immediate relationships, perspectives and voices. My aim, through art making, is to birth viscerally charged expressions of belonging and healing.
Through performative-encounter-rituals I find ways to enter the horizontal entanglements of nature, as nature, opening a possibility of re-membering the more-than-human nature of the human itself. Discovering, hopefully, our own vital connection to all that is and our emergent capacity to transform alongside our many other-than-human siblings.
This will be a practice-led inquiry into ‘The Messy Realms and Continuity of Things’: our deep interconnectedness with wild spaces and diverse bodies. I am interested in ‘Self-hood’ and soul as both an intimate experience and as a multiplicity of agencies, force-fields and atmospheres. That we exist in relationship - the world around us is a collaborative dance of molecular multi-dimensionality, animated by difference and sameness, life and death. What is required is a slowing down and a porous way of being that continuously attunes to what is unfolding, here, now. This body of work is an important process of humbling and bowing down to a larger body of matter and consciousness, and an attempt to restore my /our (human) relationship to animal, plant, mineral, the elements (fire, water, earth, air), and to the unfathomable nothingness (the ‘Raw Potentiality of All’).
Methodologies
Woven into this inquiry are phenomenological methodologies of performance and somatic / shamanic practices that place instinct, sensation, intuition and direct experience at the centre of my work. I will investigate ‘The Messy Realms’, through collaboration with human and other-than-human co-creators, returning to specific sites and materials to deepen relationships. I will employ ‘technologies of friendship’: curiosity, attunement, response-ibility, respectfulness, play, a ‘yes-saying’, ‘slowness of time’ and a ‘staying-with’ – finding ways to approach and harness a raw wild energy (Golding 2019). Physicality and materiality will be the launch pad to further investigate theoretical ideas, the critical framework includes feminist, queer, animist and indigenous cosmologies.
Methods
I will use embodied practices of performance – ritual – encounter with natural materials and specific locations to articulate an inter-subjective field of relations. I will explore voice and language from different ‘Other-ed’ bodies by spending time with them, by returning and letting go. By using shamanic tools of ritual, ceremony, and incantation I hope to open sacred space and healing potentials, and to invite others into a performative space I create. I intend to find new ways to document and capture the ‘live-ness’ of these happenings through performative writing, gesture, voice and film. Questions of what the body is and can be, healing, rest/listening and action/responding, will inform the evolution of my work.
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