ekphrastic geographiesAn Exhibition of Artworks Exploring the Nonrepresentational

Geographies of Therapeutic Art-Making

10 December 2013The Basement, Department of Resource Management and

Geography, University of Melbourne

   

   

   Introduction by Dr Kent Wilson (Artist, Writer and Curator) Compulsion and drive are key components of an artist’s character. The fuelling energies that motivate these forces are as varied as the artistic outcomes produced by the great diversity of arts practitioners. One thing is certain – the performative act of art practice is an urgent need for the human species. In the following research produced by Candice Boyd, compulsion and drive are entwined within the nature of the work itself. A furious curiosity is evident in a ceaseless grappling with material translation and a focussed exploration of action and outcome. Delving into the fuelling energies that motivate artistic drives and analysing the transitional modes that carry those energies forward through multiple medium outcomes, Boyd is attentive to motivation, action and material consequence. It is the performative that is at the core of the work undertaken here. It is action that is in play and the expression that follows, often through a resonating field of material translations. The nonrepresentational approach she takes privileges action as the driver of composition, highlighting the performance of relations in contrast to a sole concern with the structure of relations. Ekphrastic Geographies is a testament to the pursuit of fluid understanding. The artworks produced as research are fleeting moments in a chain of important reactions. Painting, poetry, sound, music, moving image, sculpture and digital imagery are deployed in a material echo of performative acts. Ripples resonate through networks of relation, an underlying current across a sea of diverse expressions. A keen critical eye is cast across the materialities of the work, expressed in seriality, repetition and montage. The research is equal parts material forensics and thoughtful analysis. Boyd’s work is imbued with affect, wrought through with a quality best felt with the central nervous system rather than exclusively with the eyes. Practice-led outcomes tend to this consequence, with the residues of the researcher’s attentive participation left leached into the manifestation of the work. In this body of work we feel the artist as producer, as translator, and as researcher – the latter working as emulator of multiple tasks in the pursuit of a singular cause, namely, an evidentiary body of unique knowledge. To this end, Boyd’s success is clearly articulated in the material (and indeed non-material) artistic outcomes of this exhibition.

   

     

   Artist’s Notes by Dr Candice Boyd This exhibition is the creative culmination of a period of academic engagement with the concepts and ideas of nonrepresentational theory. Nonrepresentational theory highlights the failures of representational thinking to comprehend the palpable relevance of ‘thought-in-action’ as the foreground (rather than the background) of our lives. In nonrepresentational research there is a focus on movement, action, and practice – the dynamic way that affect is folded within and between objects, spaces, and things (Lorimer, 2008; Thrift, 2008). It is, at its best, ‘non-subjectivist’, poetic, metaphorical, and descriptive – ‘knowledge without contemplation’ (see Dewsbury, 2003). As a PhD student in cultural geography and the arts, I studied therapeutic art practices from a nonrepresentational perspective. The project encompassed an array of artistic practices including visual art-making, dance movement therapy and urban play. By engaging in a series of practice-based experiments, and through a period of observant participation as an artist-geographer, ekphrasis emerged as my preferred method of responding to the affective qualities of the practices and spaces I encountered in the field. As method, ekphrasis can be broadly understood as a process of translating one art form into another. Krieger (1992) defines ekphrasis as a device to ‘interrupt the temporality of discourse, to freeze it during its indulgence in spatial exploration’. Whereas ekphrasis for the Greeks implied the generation of an image in the mind of the listener (or reader), the term has evolved over the last century to encompass a wider range of art forms including visual and musical ekphrasis – referred to by some scholars as ‘reverse ekphrasis’, whereby sounds or images are used instead of words (Bolter, 2001; Bruhn, 2000; Sager-Eidt, 2008). My aim in exhibiting the creative outcomes of my PhD research is two-fold. The first is to communicate my research findings, which, although they are symbolic in nature, speak to the power of the nonrepresentational. The second is to ‘audience’ the work. The desire to do this comes from a conviction that nonrepresentational, performative and affective forms of knowledge are transmitted and received (see Brennan, 2004)– they only ‘do work’ as knowledge as they are witnessed. I hope that you enjoy this exhibition and are provoked to thought by your affective engagement with the material. I also hope that, by the time you reach the end, you are inspired by the potential that practice-based methods hold for contemporary cultural geography.

   

   

 

   

   

Exhibit 1: ‘Sturm und Drang’ Painting and Photomontage Sturm und Drang, translated from German, means ‘Storm and Drive’ (or ‘Storm and Stress’). The term has been used to describe the cultural turn in German literature and music in the late 17th century that gave free expression to emotion. This painting, which I later entitled ‘Sturm und Drang’, was my first attempt at practice-based research into the nonrepresentational geographies of therapeutic art-making. Whilst ‘working hot’ in the space (Bolt, 2004), I attempted to work primarily through the vitality of the materials to paint an event of therapeutic art-making – the type of event that brings the painter into encounter with the ‘virtual’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) via the psychospatial processes of deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation (O’Sullivan, 2006). I did this so that I might begin to think through the ways in which ethico-aesthetic practices are generative of therapeutic spaces. As such, the painting is a notional ekphrasis as I was ‘painting my research topic’. The photomontage that accompanies the painting comprises over 300 photographs that I took during the production of the painting (meaning that most of the painting was done one-handed!) The montage was created to convey something of the forces, flows and vital materialisms of the event.

   

   

 

   

 

 

   

Exhibit 2: Untitled Ekphrastic Poem Printed on Three Canvases After creating an initial work, I spent a period reflecting on two pieces of therapeutic art I had previously produced under periods of extreme stress. The first was a painting I had made in a state of profound grief over the suicide of a close friend. The process here involved affect and memory as I aspired to ‘ … enact the affective force of the performance event again’ (Phelan, 1997 in Dewsbury, 2009). Through the use of poetic ekphrasis, I attempted to convey the materialities of this form of art practice alongside the pre-cognitive, affective, and incorporeal intensities of the event as it was re-enacted. I deliberately chose to use a typewriter for this. The strength of this particular method was the ability to adopt, and work through, a sensuous disposition by employing ‘registers of expression that acknowledge stuttering’ (Dewsbury, 2009). When the prospect of editing is shelved, there is a sense that something is ‘at stake’ in the performance (Reeves, 2013).

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

   

Exhibit 3: ‘Aftermum, Aftermath’ Painting with Four Schizoanalytic Maps For the second retrospective work, I focussed on a painting I once made after a difficult visit from my mother. The emotions involved were much less clear to me than in the previous painting, and somewhat unconscious as well. For this artistic experiment, I worked with Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of saturated phenomena (MacKinlay, 2010) as well as Félix Guattari’s method of schizoanalysis (Guattari, 1995) to gain a greater understanding of the spatialising of affect in therapeutic artworks. I produced four schizoanalytic maps via abstraction (see McCormack, 2012), in each case applying a ‘filter’ that emphasized particular spatial elements of the painting. The schizoanalytic maps then became a tool for thought so that I might make better sense of the ‘smoothness’ of therapeutic space. This method also helped me to better appreciate the art object in the way that Guattari understood these sorts of paintings as being … ‘like a symphony articulating all the levels of your “self”, simultaneously exploring and inventing it through [your] painting’ (Genosko, 2005).

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

 

   

Exhibit 4: ‘All Your Drains Belong to Us’ Environmental Soundscape and Sticker-Bombed Post

This exhibit is the first of those emanating from my geographical fieldwork in which I observed and/or participated in the therapeutic art-making of others. In this case, I engaged in the practices of graffiti and urban play in drain tunnels of Melbourne, Australia. The exhibit borrows its title from a piece of graffiti inside one of the tunnels. During the several sessions I spent participating in drain exploration and graffiti practice, I made numerous audio recordings. The production of soundscape using these recordings was designed to convey the affective quality of the drain environment, which relies so heavily on sonic experience. The soundscape also helped me think, via Whitehead and post-phenomenologists, about the liminalities of these spaces – particularly the ways in which human subjects prehensively unfold in relation to them (Nancy, 1993). The soundscape can be re-heard here: https://soundcloud.com/dr-candice-boyd/all-your-drains-belong-to-us The second part of this exhibit – a 3 metre sticker-bombed pole set in concrete – is a sculptural attempt to ‘bring the underground over ground’. There was a sense for me in creating this, that every sticker I wrapped around the outside of the cylindrical surface captured a singular memory from the fieldwork. The ‘bomb’ itself is a photograph of a section of graffiti that I made during a drain art session under the ‘tag’ of earth female. This work is part of an on-going project to bring the practice of drain art to light whilst simultaneously making a political gesture towards human geographers who characterize this form of art practice as masculine (Mott & Roberts, 2013).

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

   

Exhibit 5: ‘Sweat Your Prayers’ Ekphrastic Soundscape with Photomontage The works in this exhibit relate to a period of engagement with 5rhythms® dance therapy. The engagement was also an attempt to move beyond visual forms of art-making to think through the ways in which movement, affect and sensation are implicated in therapeutic art forms and open up virtual pathways of becoming (Massumi, 2002; McCormack, 2003). During sessions where a dancer and I worked together, a large piece of cardboard was used as the dance surface so that the sound of the dancer’s movement would be amplified in any audio recordings. The soundscape in this exhibit moves through the five rhythms of this dance practice from flowing to staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. A musical ekphrasis forms an additional layer of the soundscape. I performed the music in response to the affective transmissions of the dancer rather than the rhythmic qualities of the dance. The small photomontage displayed on the desktop serves only as an anchor for the sonic experience. After the exhibition, the soundscape can be accessed here: https://soundcloud.com/dr-candice-boyd/ekphrastic-dance-soundscape

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

   

Exhibit 6: ‘Sound as Ekphrasis’ Short Film This exhibit is a 20-minute video montage of the full range of therapeutic art practices I studied within my PhD. Doel and Clarke (2007) argue that montage is the essential gesture of nonrepresentational styles of thought and action, presenting worlds that are not contemplative but full of eventfulness and the excess of practice. The DVD component of the film is a video montage of therapeutic art practices incorporating Super 8 camera footage, stop frame animation and still photography along with audio recordings, musical ekphrasis and ekphrastic poetry. I created the sonic ekphrases using several musical instruments including cello, flute, drums, guitar and voice. The CD is a distilled version of the ekphrastic sound work. Together they think, sense and present a work of nonrepresentational geography. The film runs for 20 minutes and is not separated by chapter marks. Each moment in the film corresponds to a period of fieldwork including those that have not featured elsewhere in this exhibition. The use of Super 8 cameras to capture video footage was an aesthetic choice to lend affective force to the video. Although it will be difficult to witness the complete video as part of this exhibition, you may obtain a copy or view it here: https://vimeo.com/56185606.

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

   

Exhibit 7: ‘Thickness’ Photographic Light Box The visceral quality of thickness lends itself to the therapeutic-ness of art-making in vital ways (Bennett, 2010). Although it was taken during an event of therapeutic art-making that did not ‘make the cut’ for this exhibition, this back-lit photograph captures this quality well.

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

   

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of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, 488-507. Mott, C., & Roberts, S.M. (2013). Not everyone has (the) balls: Urban exploration and the

persistence of masculinist geography. Antipode, DOI: 10.1111/anti.12033 Nancy, J-L. (1993). The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press. O’Sullivan, S. (2006). Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave. Reeves, K. in T. Dean (2013). FILM. Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Sager-Eidt, L.M. (2008). Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film.

London: Rodopi. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Theory: Space, politics, affect. Abingdon: Routledge.

   

   

 

   

 

 

 

 

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