A Place Opens: An Exploration of Touch

Abstract

In this PhD project, A Place Opens: An Exploration of Touch, palimpsest emerges as the organising principle of the creative works and exegesis that together constitute the thesis. As a method of (apparently infinite) layering, palimpsest is inclusive, able to contain fragments or traces from past and present; suggest future vectors; disrupt established or habituated representational techniques and communicative strategies, and introduce new strategies; render familiar spaces in ‘new’ ways; produce singularities. My work explores the potentials of palimpsests, as felt surfaces, to become eroticised sites that evoke the memory of touch and the movements of desire back and forth between layers. The focus of the research is on notions of productive desire and desire as transformative. This focus is developed in my practice through an exploration of touch. The aim is for the work to open out the matter of desire, so that new questions might arise that can lead to new engagements and reflections. The research makes a contribution to the problematics of bodies and embodiment in relation to object, Art and representation, as well as bringing the embodied practice of installation into proximity with feminist discourses concerning the need for a more subtle and positive understanding of feminine desire and female subjectivity. I draw on recent feminist thinking (e.g. Elizabeth Grosz, Elspeth Probyn, Moira Gatens and Laura Marks) and engage closely with aspects of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, especially in relation to process, to how rhizomatics, making multiplicities and notions of becoming can inform my practice. Using mixed-media – including painting, photography, altered objects, installation and video – to produce sensual and embodied spatial explorations, I have sought ways to evoke the sense of touch, inviting an intimate, tactile visuality, approached through the movements of productive desire. Techniques and concepts of palimpsest, folds, openings, light, shadows and the interrogation of materiality, play a significant part in my project’s investigation of how touch – the sensing and desiring body – and embodied encounters can be deployed in visual media.

Body processes, such as breathing, whispering, touching, opening, folding and fluidity are therefore invoked among techniques that create slippage between bodies,and between bodies and objects in spaces, as well as to generate embodied knowledge – thinking in and through the sensory body. My work also exploits haptic modes of looking which set the conditions making possible the sensation or experience of an erotics of visuality, which in turn can produce feelings of embodied engagement. In order to dis-organise conventional modes of experiencing bodies and objects, I make use of a range of making-strange strategies and processes – to make the familiar strange in order to make it more familiar, more intimate again. These strategies involve the alterability of bodies and objects through touch.

My work, therefore might be said to invite an intimate way of looking closely at/into something, always attending not only to surface but to what the surface contains, occludes or permits access to. An image that evokes such looking, invites closeness, intimacy and an inter-subjective exchange. How the works produce embodied encounters that engage with an erotics of looking is more readily understood through thinking about desire and how desire functions productively in relations between bodies, objects and spaces.