Methodology
ASK QUESTIONS READ BOOKS RIDE THE BUS OBSESS WRITE BUY PAPER FORGET EVERYTHING.
My approach to image-making is mutable, much like the experience of the body. Engaging in a drawing-centered practice permits immediacy in its process, and flexibility in both material and method. Even work produced in the first year of this program exercised exactitude and care in the planning and execution stages. More recently I have found myself less invested in these characteristics becoming increasingly attracted to more fluid and amorphous approaches. Additionally, I have incorporated watercolour for its viscosity and looseness, allowing more abstract, less rigid expressions of my subject matter which pen or pencil markings at times resist.
Often, the subject of my work finds its origins in literature and philosophical theory. The abject[1] has long held my interest, in theory and through my creative practice, and has infiltrated the way in which I approach image-making. The visceral appeal of abjection and the formlessness, alongside the thematic appearance of the body within my practice, stimulates a physical reaction which I feel compelled to investigate. Abject theory informs an artistic and material practice involving the body and has affected an engagement with expressing the body.
When lacking clarity or creative vision, I turn to other artists’ practices, finding influence in the works of Wangechi Mutu, Hans Bellmer, and Berlinde Bruyckere, to name a few. I troll online art blog feeds and create what might be described as ‘mash-up’ image searches (ie: expanded + body, Rorschach + embodiment), drawing from disparate sources to find potential connections and new investigative avenues. There is a fascination in uncovering further means of expression which provoke discomfort, awkwardness, and excitement. Images to which I am consistently drawn are those which both repel and inspire. The body affects repulsion and arousal, being at once familiar and strange, and is the subject through which I access my current embodied knowledge, and further engage in shifting corporeal awareness.
Within the thesis project, I have two separate yet complimentary projects, each with a different methodological approach. Under the Skin, to be discussed in Chapters 3.1 and 3.2 of this paper, engages primarily with the subject of embodiment and developed out of a need to create work in the studio via practice-based research; the instinctual or emotional mode of production in the studio allowed me to explore corporeality through process, materials and the subject of bodily representation.
Beyond the Skin (Chapter 4) differs from Under the Skin in that it is informed by an equally pleasurable research-based practice, considering scholarly articles, interviews and scientific studies and allowing these findings to determine the direction of the project. Because of the dense textual nature of this process, Beyond the Skin has a greater presence in this paper. Research has strongly influenced the course of this project; however as I immerse myself in the studio, the sensibilities of the Under the Skin have also begun to persuade the direction of its dissemination. The reciprocal nature of working across two distinct studio projects has had a significant affect on how research informs, leads and often delays making.
The immediacy and tactility of drawing as a practice often provides distance from technological production. This is not to say, however, that drawing cannot involve technology and other forms of production. Through various lines of questioning and production I have grappled with the question of technology as it appears in my practice. Drawing’s process has progressed to involve other mediums and disciplines through the investigation of line and mark-making. My continuing fascination in the drawing medium lies in its direct relationship to the body: the physical connection of the drawn line to the hand of the artist; the variety of tools and technologies available for mark-making; the proximity of the body to the finished work.
[1] In this instance, the reference to ‘abjection’ relates to The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva. Integral to the relationship of the body to the ‘other’, abjection is described by Kristeva as that which disturbs order, existing on the border of an individual’s limitations of being. In psychoanalysis, the abject is inherent in the discussion of the self’s desire for meaning, and the exclusion of the other as a means of survival. The foundation of a critical discourse of the body, identity formation and the ‘other’, the abject enters into the theoretical discussion of becoming, through the recognition of the self by means of rejecting that which threatens to expose the human body as fallible.
