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The right of Candice Boyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment Act 2000.

© Candice Boyd, 2015

This work is made publicly available on a not-for-profit basis.The poems may be shared or re-worked under Creative Commons Licence 3.0

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in Publication entry

Boyd, Candice Pamela, 1970-, author. Title: Forces, flows, and vital materialisms : a poetry anthology / Candice P. Boyd. ISBN: 9780646945828 (paperback) Subjects: Poetry. Dewey Number: A821.4

Forces, Flows, and Vital Materialisms in Therapeutic Art Making

A Poetry Anthology by Candice P. BoydISBN 978-0-646-94582-8

,!7IA6E6-jefici!

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Introduction by Jessica L. Wilkinson, Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at RMIT University, Australia and founding editor of Rabbit, a journal of nonfiction poetry Candice Boyd’s anthology of poetic work explores the potential of poetry to ‘make sense’ of

her entwined encounters of and with therapeutic art-making and geographical fieldwork.

Introduced by an articulate examination of poetry as an innovative research methodology and

an engagement with contemporary theoretical and philosophical concepts, and followed by a

thoughtful exegesis, the poems in Forces, Flows and Vital Materialisms can be appreciated as a

contribution to research that resists ‘closed’ modes of academic inquiry and reasoning, and

instead attempts to embody and enliven fieldwork experiences.

It is not Boyd’s aim to represent or explicate these experiences in a creative mode. Rather, she

appreciates her diverse research encounters—from observing an artist practicing ‘slow

painting,’ to participating in a creative dance group; from travelling with Artist as Family (a

family-based collective focused on providing an ‘antidote to disposable culture’, to use their

own terms), to partaking in a ‘drain art’ project—as catalysts for a generative poetics. That is, in

adopting a non-representational poetic style, along with an attentiveness to sound, space and

frisson, these poems seek to reveal rather than explain her encounters.

Boyd opens a literary space for conceptualising ‘everyday acts of art making’ whereby complex

ideas are not to be processed and understood by the reader, but experienced, performed and

invigorated. This work actively speaks to current conceptions of being and becoming, as

espoused by new materialism and process-oriented ontologies. It is living poetry.

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Representation does matter, but it’s not all that matters. And getting some grip on the world, to

know how to go on, to write to others, perhaps as pleas for help in trying to work out how to go

on. But if there are so many words, then in writing, even if not directly in life, innovating with

our expressive mediums to create new worlds is a healthy part of it, so experiment.

J-D Dewsbury, 2014, p151

A call for cultural geographers to experiment with different ways of re-presencing their work

has gained momentum in recent years (see Delyser & Hawkins, 2014; Lorimer & Parr, 2014;

Vannini, 2015). This climate of experimentation has seen a number of cultural geographers

openly promote their interests in, and engagements with, the creative arts: some have

explicitly developed practices in response to longer-standing geographical interests (e.g.,

Cresswell, 2013/2014; Gallagher, 2014; Gorman-Murray, 2014; Wylie, with Webster, 2014),

while others have more established art practices that inform, and are informed by, their

geographical work (e.g., Crouch, 2010; de Leeuw, 2012; Zebracki, n.d.).

In this collection, I explore the potential of poetry and creative writing to animate accounts of

geographical fieldwork via an intellectual engagement with the ideas and tenets of non-

representational theory. I begin by outlining the history of ‘poetry as method’ in the social

sciences and then acknowledge poetry’s status within phenomenology. From there, I consider

what a post-structuralist account of geographical fieldwork might entail, drawing upon

Deleuzian philosophy. A poetic account of research on the non-representational geographies

of therapeutic art making is then introduced, followed by an exegesis which makes secondary

references to the theory on which the poetry is based.

⁂

Prendegast (2009) estimates that the use of poetry in qualitative inquiry stretches back to the

early 1980s. Examples can be found in psychology, sociology, anthropology, nursing, social

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work, education, women’s studies and geography. Originally conceptualised as

autobiographical or autoethnographic, poetry as research now takes several forms. It may

assume the voice of the researcher, but it may also assume the voice of the participant (as in

poetic transcription or found poetry). In other cases, such as mine, the researcher adopts a

more spatial or diffuse voice, which may incorporate object-oriented perspectives (Harman,

2012). Either way, the goal of poetry as method is to ‘… synthesise experience in a direct and

affective way’ (Prendegast, 2009, pxxii). Research poetry ‘… creates or makes the world in

words’ (Leggo, 2008, p166). As Shidmehr (2009) explains,

Poetic inquiry is the activity of ethically responding to an act or utterance which

is still anticipating a response. Inquiring poetically, thus, the researcher/poet

responds to that act/utterance in order to consummate or finalise it. It is

important to note that she is responding to a past act/utterance as if it was

happening now, as if she was actively participating in the act and in its

consummation in the present moment (p101).

DeLyser (2010) asserts that writing is a way of thinking—a way of not only re-presenting but

also creating geographical experiences (see also Dewsbury, Harrison, Rose, & Wylie, 2002).

In ‘writing up’ human geographical research, we are not finding out so much as we are making

sense (Crang, 2010). This can come into conflict with more dominant forms of writing in

academia, which tend toward clear and straightforward prose (Lorimer, 2015; Mitchell, 2006;

Sullivan, 2012). Poetic inquiry, in contrast, embraces subjectivity. It is ‘involved knowing’

rather than objective knowledge. Participating in ‘involved knowing’ is to experience it

personally, from within, and in relation to others (Franke, 2011). To re-present that knowing

in poetic form is to give it affective charge. In poetic inquiry, the researcher is engaged in a

critical act of resistance to dominant forms of academic discourse whilst still working in

effective, interdisciplinary ways between the social sciences and the creative arts.

Good research poems are rooted in the sensual, have emotional poignancy, show a range of

nuanced meanings, evoke empathic responses, and display an open spirit of imagination

(Faulkner, 2009). What makes ‘good poetry’, however, is a qualified judgment. A ‘good poet’

is one who actively writes poetry, has studied poetry, has participated in poetry readings, and

has published their poems (Faulkner, 2009; Piirto, 2009). Piirto (2009) laments that those

who engage in poetic inquiry rarely meet these criteria. Others take a more liberal view.

Faulkner (2009) interviewed 11 established poets to gain their views on what constitutes a

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good poem. First and foremost, these poets agreed that poetry must have a psychological and

emotional effect: as one poet described ‘… a good poem starts at your stomach and moves to

your head’ (p46). Other qualities of a good poem are authenticity, narrative connectedness,

and engagement. As another poet suggested ‘... “in a really good poem by a really good poet”,

we will go along with whatever the poet does in the poem’ (p56). Flux, imagination, mystery

and the ineffable were other elements of a good poem for these poets—an audience should

sense layers of meaning and want to return to the poem again and again. A good poem is not a

confessional or an outlet for feeling but something that gets close to the imaginary reality of its

subject, allowing the reader to make their own connections. Finally, poetry is a craft as much

as it is an art form. Practice and refinement are key.

Unlike poets, poet-researchers must attend to quality in multiple domains—poetry as craft and

poetry as research. As Faulkner (2009) argues being ‘true’ to fieldwork accounts may mean

sacrificing exposition or poetic imagination. In turn, poetic truth cannot be just an extraction

from fieldwork experiences or interview transcripts. There must be a fidelity to poetic craft. In

putting forward poetic criteria for evaluating research poetry, Faulkner (2009) draws on the

principles of Ars Poetica (the ‘art of poetry’), arguing that there is an ethical responsibility for

poet-researchers to articulate what their poetry means to them. In the first of these criteria,

Faulkner (2009) argues for an artistic concentration of effort to be apparent in poetic inquiry—

the idea of vigour rather than rigour. Second, she argues that research poetry should embody

experience. The reader should feel with, rather than read about the research. The third

criterion is discovery/surprise. By this she means that research poetry should teach something

surprising about the human condition. Fourth, the point of view should be ‘conditional’ whilst

presenting ‘narrative truth’—it should feel like the poem is presenting a true account. Finally,

the poem should transform by providing new insights, perspectives, or provocations. As

Gosetti-Ferencei (2012) states: ‘[p]oetry can, in unique ways, express more than can be said in

words; it can go beyond the capacity of its own medium, it can signal the transcendence as well

as the limits of language itself’ (p208). This capacity for responding to performative acts in

affectively intense ways is what makes poetry a ‘realized ideal’ in terms of non-representational

methodology (Lorimer, 2015).

For poetry to be research it must also be philosophy, although one may argue that all poetry is

philosophy. As Nuzzo (2015) states: ‘there is some peculiar form or indeed figure—Gestalt—of

thinking occurring in the creative act of poetry in a fundamental and constitutive way’ (p44).

Heidegger (1971), in particular, placed significance on poetry as a unique mode of revealing

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truth and the meaning of Being. In this way, Heidegger saw poetry as ‘a becoming and

happening of truth’—it calls what it names into presence (or nearness), ‘makes a space for …

spaciousness’ and ‘lets the earth be an earth’ (emphasis in the original; Heidegger, 1971, pp44-

45). By truth, however, Heidegger does not mean propositions but rather what is revealed of

Being in the poem. For Heidegger, the earth is naturally self-concealing, and it is art that self-

discloses it. Therefore, poetry and philosophical thinking are essentially the same act. Both

work in the realm of ‘authentic’ language, transforming the invisible into the visible in a kind of

‘mirror play’. The poet does not devise the character of the poem; it is allotted to her

(Heidegger, 2000). Poetry generates and opens up a sense of being in the world, specific to

that poem and its reader (Gosetti-Ferencei, 2012).

Where for Heidegger poetry reveals the essence of Being, for Deleuze and Guattari (1994)

poetry is sensation. Accordingly, we should not ask what a poem means but ‘what does it do’?

How does the poem function in connection with other things, what intensities does it transmit,

what multiplicities or ‘lines of flight’ does it generate? As Clay (2010) argues, while all poetry

is composed of sensation, contemporary innovative poetry does this the most clearly in

challenging the reader to approach the poem in an experimental way—withholding

expectations that the poem will represent something. Instead the reader’s understanding of

the poem is a becoming that is ‘viscerally real’. Beyond representation, ‘poetry is itself a real

part of the world (‘true’ because ‘real’) with its own forces and effects’ (Clay, 2010, p13).

From a Deleuzian viewpoint, therefore, a poem does not ultimately mean or represent

something, it is ‘a material thing that demands to be encountered on its own terms’ (emphasis

in the original; Clay, 2010, p34).

A Deleuzian conceptualisation of poetry emphasizes its non-representational nature,

reconfiguring it as praxis. With the poem as praxis, each individual reading of a poem is also

praxis. The poem remains autonomous while it is the reader who actively senses, actualizing

the poem through the performance of reading or listening. In this way, a poem is ‘… an

unfolding movement of a block of sensations in conjunction with a reader who is also, for the

time of the performance, the actualisation of the poem (Clay, 2010, pp62-63). Thus, the

‘poetic subject’ is in effect a superject (after Whitehead) emerging from the landscape of the

poem, which subsumes poet and reader. The subjectivity of a poem is not invested in a person

but in the poem itself. The reader ‘passes through’ the landscape of the poem. In ‘passing

through’, the reader embodies the poem for the duration of the performance. As

As Clay (2010) explains, ‘… a body both takes its place in a landscape that is produced by the

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poem and yet has that landscape sensationally inscribed within it’ (p132). To be focussed on

meaning as a reader is to distance oneself from the priority of sensation and the way in which

the poem becomes active because of its sensations. Furthermore, sensations create interstices

or ‘spacings’ between lines and words so that the reader also ‘becomes’.

As Rancière (2009) argues, emancipation as a spectator comes when we challenge the

dichotomy of viewing and acting, to understand that viewing itself is also an action. In effect,

the spectator refashions an artistic performance as an active interpreter. As he suggests,

[Performance] … is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge of inspiration to

the spectator. It is the third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is

owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform

transmission, any identity of cause and effect (Rancière, 2009, p15).

Therefore, the notion that reasoning requires distance is anathema to research poetry. The

emphasis is on encounter, not recognition, as the ‘basic premise of aesthetic experience’

(Latter, 2012, p2).

⁂

The anthology of poems to follow is informed by a critical engagement with process-oriented

ontologies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Guattari, 1995; Malabou, 2008; Whitehead, 1978),

post-phenomenology and non-representational theory within geography (Ash and Simpson,

2014; Dewsbury, 2003; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2008) as well as speculative pragmatism

and new materialisms in the creative arts (Bennett, 2010; Bolt, 2013; Grosz, 2009; Manning,

2009). However, in asking the question ‘what makes art making therapeutic’? I was not

interested in art therapy as a medicalised practice but in everyday acts of art making—

expressive dance, gardening, painting, drawing, sewing, knitting—and their geographies.

To briefly summarise these engagements, I sought out other practitioners over the course of

five years for whom art practice was a source of personal therapy—by this; I mean that they

each perceived that their art practice was therapeutic. The first was established artist Amanda

Robins whose painting and drawing is deeply meditative and deliberately soft and gentle in

contrast to my own, which is ‘fevered’ and ‘frenetic’. Amanda refers to her practice as slow art

(Robins, 2009; Robins, n.d). The second was Swagata Bapat, a friend and colleague, for

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whom 5rhythmsTM dance is a solitary practice. My work with Swagata led me to take part in

5rhythmsTM dance classes with Meredith Davies and David Juriansz as a member of a large

group of between 70 and 100 people, each week for a year (see Davies & Juriansz, n.d).

Although taking part in the same practice as McCormack (2002) and informed by similar

theories, I claim a different focus—the relationship of the dancer to the ground.

A year later I approached Artist as Family, a collective whose work she describes as

permapoesis (or poetic permaculture, Jones, n.d). I travelled with Artist as Family to Sydney to

help conduct maintenance on an aesthetically- and functionally-designed food forest, fulfilled

on commission from Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the same year, I

encountered three practitioners of drain art (graffiti and urban play in underground storm

water drains). I spent the remainder of that year exploring drain tunnels, making graffiti and

performing small acts of resistance with them. In the final year I met Lucy Sparrow, a fibre

artist who ‘sews her soul’. Lucy’s work is deeply personal, challenges stigma, and offers child-

like and comforting experiences to her patrons. In contrast, her work provides a critical

commentary on the harshness of modern life (Sparrow, 2015). After making a small

contribution to one of her pieces, I joined up to the 5000 poppies effort in Australia—a nation-

wide project that involved sewing, crocheting or knitting poppy-like objects in commemoration

of the centenary of the ANZAC (Berry & Knight, n.d). On invitation, I took this project, along

with miscellaneous felting materials, to A General Assembly of Interested Parties (see GAIP,

n.d) and spent a day making things out of felt—in relation to other artists and in the company of

random members of the visiting public.

The 23 poems that follow were borne out of these research encounters. They do not attempt

to speak of them, about them or to them (in retrospect). They generate thought from them,

out of them, and because of them. They stand, as Heidegger (1971) suggests, as a unique

mode of disclosure—a way of revealing the therapeutic-ness of art making. In pursuing this

intention, I first adopted a style consistent with a non-representational approach; that is, an

open, sensuous disposition and attentiveness to ‘spacings’ in the fieldwork (see Dewsbury,

2010). This lends itself to so-called free verse, which although free of rhyme and meter is not

free of design (Oliver, 1994). Alliteration, assonance, mutes and silences, accents and stresses,

and the release of energy along the line are all employed as poetic devices (Oliver, 1998). The

use of parataxis (the juxtaposition of phrases without subordinating conjunctions; Hill, 2008)

also assisted in creating a certain ambiance by disconnecting voice, to some degree, from what

the voice is saying. Oliver (1998) notes that a feature of verse that is free from metrical design

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is the tendency to adopt a more regular meter as it reaches the ending—this is particularly

discernable in my poetry on listening. In addition, several of the poems have a distinct

topography—a feature of visual (or concrete) poems. In visual poetry, the poem has a pictorial

as well as a verbal aspect (Bohn, 2011). This style of poetry has a tradition in continental

Europe and Latin America but has become a prominent feature of postmodern poetics (Smith,

2005). Ultimately, however, the poems embrace the spirit of playfulness, discovery, and failure

that typifies experimental writing and the neo-avante-garde (Hughes, 2011; Korg, 1995;

Sullivan, 2012). A Silverberg (2006) describes, they are ‘process-oriented transcription[s] of

the moment’ (p42).

There is a tension between the sonic and the semantic in all poetry—it begs to be heard

(Dancer, 2009). Poets and readers alike appreciate this, hence the popularity of the ‘poetry

reading’. Dancer (2009) argues that in everyday life we are ‘… immersed in an acoustic

environment that entrains our bodies towards certain rhythms’ (p31). The soundscapes of our

industrialised world are becoming increasingly drone-like, monotone, and flattened. While we

can close our eyes to shut off unwanted visual stimuli, those of us who can hear do so

continuously, even when sleeping or unconscious. Poetry and music arrest the droning of our

everyday soundscapes, punctuating them with sonic complexity (Priest, 2013; Voegelin, 2014).

In research poetry, rhythm in its many forms and styles, can carry the listener away from a

‘thinking headspace’ to an embodied experience of lived meaning (Dancer, 2009; Dufrenne,

1987).

In recording a poetry reading to accompany the research poetry, I produced a series of digital

drones, modulating their frequency throughout. Reznikoff (2008) notes that sounds

resonating between C1 (32.7032 Hz) and G3 (195.998 Hz) evoke emotional and spiritual

responses in audiences. In my reading, the drones are intended to serve as backdrop that

accentuates the lilting melody of the poems. They are, however, also designed to create and

hold a space for listening, sensing, and experiencing the work.

I invite you now to view, read, listen, and encounter …

⁂

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Please read and listen at the same time, using headphones, to experience the intended effect. The

reading is available at this URL: https://soundcloud.com/dr-candice-boyd/visual-poetry-reading !

bloat, push

!

smear, coat

!A fine, elastic brush wisps over canvas.

Palette in hand

She swirls through half-mixed paint,

Coating the end of the delicate brush

with tiny blobs of colour;

Her slow, meditative strokes are enchanting.

Her body dances with a stationary partner

as she steps forward to paint, steps back to

look,

steps forward again to paint some more

!

A blank canvas on the ground

Palette knife, tub of impasto medium;

Pour.

Medium leaves container in thick drips,

Landing on primed surface;

Splat.

Putting palette knife to canvas,

Spread this viscous substance—

Push it, pull it

Mould and disperse it.

Each stroke of the knife orchestrates

something new

!

t h e k n i f e t a k e s o n t h e p a i n t and swallows

! softness !

i

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hands in buckets of torn up newspaper a child’s hands, my hands

together we squeeze, squelch, rip and massage our hands touch as we grab fists full of sodden, mushy, mulch and

gently place it at the base of a tree, protecting life.

The garden is a work of art not made of pigment and paint, celluloid or sound.

The earth is the canvas. The plants are the materials. The artist is more than one.

The art is community.

ii

Her feet thump on the

black, slate floor with

such force that they

almost penetrate the

ground. Expressive,

exuberant, and violent

movements force an

encounter with the earth

that vibrates up through

her legs and into her

body’s core. The harder

she thumps, the more

vibration she generates.

Aggressive, agonising, and

obsessive pounding

makes her feet throb and

her skin water. I join as

feeling participant,

witnessing and affected.

We collectively ache.

!

Emerging from a

waterfall, the two of us

stumble into a dark,

cavernous space

occupied by the

relentless roaring of

storm water. Finding

feet, we stand astride a

concrete pipe

desperately balancing

buckets, torches, paint

cans and drip markers

between not enough

hands. Content that I

will not slip; he takes off

abruptly with a selection

of markers, producing

melodic sounds with

vocal chords that the

drain repeats.

!

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iii

the$sound$of$the$music$from$the$first$time$rings$$onto$the$black$concrete$floor$$$$$$$$$$$music$is$important$$$$$$$$$frightened$rabbit,$i$wish$i$was$in$glasgow$$$$ $ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$three$pots$$$$one$for$black$$$one$for$white$$$$and$one$for$this$strange$colour$called$payne’s$grey$$$$ $ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$gel$medium$$impasto$$$it$needs$to$be$thick$$$$$$the$click$click$of$the$camera$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$the$typewriter$$$mixing$paints$in$pots$is$$$painful$$$$$$$$$$joints$$$$$$$$$$muscles$$$$$$$$$$$$cold$$$$$$$$$$three$pots$$thick$$white$$$$$grey$black$$$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ !$$!$$$$"$$"$$$$grey$$grey$$grey$$$grey$$$grey$$$sing$sing$$grey$$grey$$$ $ tis$paying$homage$to$my$academic$depression$this$pain$$painting$my$resentment$and$regret$$$$ $ $ $ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$say$no$more$$its$$time$cant$paint$the$greys$any$more$than$scott$can$sing$them$$$ $ no$one$can$hear$$ $ $ sick$sick$$$in$my$guts$$$$$$$$$$$$$no$luck$$$when$in$doubt.....$borrow$$$ $ THE$NAIL$$placed$the$first$time$$$ $ $ connect$the$nail$$$first$time$to$this$$time$$$stretch$$slop$$$$$$$$$white$$$shiny$white$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$retarded$$$move$$jump$$$stretch$$and$$strain$$this$hurts$$$but$stretches$$$me$$$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$shit$$so$$much$$$black$$

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false start " " there is no beginning only rupture red black a rope dog toy razor blades and diamantes a canvas the rope is already tied, holding onto a squishy ball—I want the rope, not the ball the canvas is wide, the rope is small—too small for a human head too small for her head too small for her beautiful head I lay it painfully and reverently in the middle of the canvas and spray spray spray it black deep, thick black until the rope is saturated with pigment thick, deep black and pungent smell fills my living brain with something close to intoxication but not close enough I sip wine Tips of fingers black now …. The colour and the smell is penetrating with one hand the rope is peeled away revealing the negative, a foul state, the tragedy the canvas is wide and the can is still full …. I spray pst pst pst pst pst pst pst pst pst thick bits and thin bits light and dark grey I taste wine this can of cheap, industrial red is alive, this canvas is lying down fresh country breeze hits it sharply as I raise it to a worn out blackboard stand which is now my easel this cheap industrial red stinks of life and death and the synthesis of neither ripped open I watch it as it falls …. Drips, pours runs, and slips across the light and the dark as though skin has split and blood is trickling out

iv

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there is not sound it flows it was not that beautiful for her … life ripped out of starved lungs I sip wine and watch as lines of red becomes points of punctuation, lines of life lost it is thick it is so very thick where is the spatter? I flick just a bit red black is everything in this moment but it is not thick enough go hunting and dig deep in the musty shed for oils red & black a worn out brush becomes the perfect tool the tube is still I smile weakly as it yields lid off it oozes out and when the brush meets ooze it is soft I keep squeezing keep turning the brush until it is more than coated thick blobs stick out as though suspended brush to canvas evokes something that is at once visceral and hedonistic 0 as the brush circles around in my hands, it is still not thick enough more ooze is taken roughly and without respect applied in a movement orchestrated as a shout this is horror the horror of life taken by one’s own hand grief stirs now provides a fascicle of power to which I cling a cry, an exclamation oh my god, She’s dead dead because suffering is endured and not celebrated The second dead is red

in celebration in memoriam mon coeur

v

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there i

s a world (above); diggin dirt; planting life; giving it water; sharing the yield

there is

a world (below);spraying paint; risking life; giving it voice;sharing the scared

Talking,

eating, laughter above ... horripilating scream ...

All goes silent. Laughter below

vi

Traf-!c screams, storm

water blares, !ngers reach out to touch the earth, caress it

and feed it with water or paint. I need you earth, water, drain, garden. Where is he? I’ve something to show him. See how it moves, how it spreads,

how it settles ... I did that. It did it to me. We did it together.

Made something.

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Red head at 650 W … blasting out light. Rigid, ripe, ruddy, rustic light … sweltering, scratching, and weary … bringing up dust and grounding the dance. Woozy, wooden, workable. Efficacious, elastic, enthusiastic, exhausted. Light on the way up, heavy on the way down. Nauseating, necessary, needless, needy, nervous, nimble. Keen, kind, keyed-up … until the globe has blown. Super 8 wisps and whisks through the air. CLICKETY, CLACK. Mindless, minor, miscreant, misty. Strewn on its side, recording the movement of feet seeking anchorage that is deeper than the earth. Verdant, versed. To draw the dance is to be perplexed by m

ovement, to feel the earth

move with your feet, to join with another, to punch out the feeling.

Put it on paper with chalk or a paintbrush, forcing the materials to

trace out a faint portrayal of an unspoken lust. It is sex between feet and ground, between earth and hum

an. Dare you try to represent

something so passionate?

Speaking cat, making magpie, getting green

vii

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Anticipation burns. But not brightly. It builds like a smouldering heap of debris meant for nothing. That’s not what we’ll do tonight. We’ll take petrol. Pour it into stinking storm water and drop a match. Feel it suck the air from our lungs as it traverses our private space with more venom than we could ever hope for. Cave Clan we are. Trying to make the cave conform to us and rejoicing in it when it briefly does.

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viii

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circle fl ow swing sway m

uscles

ache

arms

fl oat eye

s meet tœ s scrape calves hurt feet pound rhythm changes fi nd the beat in hips waists bo

ttoms necks heart beats skin sweats step back avoid a collision w

rap around feel the heat change of pace danc

e the edgepant puffed stitch body odour jerk jerky jerk eyes closed jump thump raise hand high hug briefl y sweetl

y smile cl

ose eyes whoop crytribal s

cream moan shake head with vigou

r hair on face thirsty tired for more stillne

ss knees grounded body tall

reach fall touched by someone always more than one no

one …

fl oat to fl ow hammer pound the

ground slide burn spin blister fade refrain abstain yes

felt strong weak ache lost slip

fi nd dripping fi ve peace pain tog

ether whomever wait d

izzy wipe sink lift beat a cur

ly mou

stache

smoothness joyous inside to outside mate mate matey it’s time …

ix

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! As a child, thread. Wool, needles. Cardboard. Fabric.

//FIBRE // Man

made, woman’s work. In circles it goes. Slowly, gradually by folding weaving and wefting. Consider its growth. Then cast off. Feel

the f

elt

ness. Felt to the to

uch

.

Him, her, me, her, h

im ,her,

me - a child, a man - take /// F E L T

///. Select colours, make rough, ragged sti

cthces

. Leave a space. Take some À lling and move it from pillow to new. Finish the fold.. Click, clack the needles fold together in a click, and a cl ack. This co

uld go

on for

ever but one moment after the oth

er

it grows. Im

agine that. Two

needles, wool, desire- producing softness. Man-made À bre becoming woman by becoming something other than ..

. more than human.

x

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! ! !

there isn’t anything to know if you just

pick up a brush and paint listen

to the sounds of the world and move step back look listen see and then do

it again - move with the brush feel the movement underneath as you press against the surface and breathe. Dip the brush in the paint again and press, move, watch-listen, breathe, and start again ... it’s not so hard. What’s hard is the feeling, holding it at bay, staying with the process as an event before it moves you and takes you s o m e w h e r e . P u s h i n g thoughts aside while !ngers connect to brushes, knees connect to the ground, paint sticks to

canvas. Music thumps in your

ears and knocks at your chest, helping you to

ignore the burning feeling in your shoulder, and your knees going numb against the concrete "oor. You keep pressing, moulding, smoothing, dispersing, until something appears from nowhere, makes itself known to you, like a dance partner who joins you on the "oor when you thought you were dancing alone.

xi

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Index of Poems

1. Slow Art ..................................................................................................................... i

2. The Palette Knife ....................................................................................................... i

3. Impasto ...................................................................................................................... i

4. Our Hands ................................................................................................................. ii

5. Her Feet ..................................................................................................................... ii

6. The Drain ................................................................................................................... ii

7. Payne’s Grey .............................................................................................................. iii

8. Grief Stricken ............................................................................................................. iv-v

9. Transformed .............................................................................................................. vi

10. Ludic .......................................................................................................................... vi

11. A Living Assemblage .................................................................................................. vi

12. There is a World ........................................................................................................ vi

13. Bringing up Dust ........................................................................................................ vii

14. Perplexed ................................................................................................................... vii

15. Speaking Cat .............................................................................................................. vii

16. Staying High ............................................................................................................... viii

17. Reykjavík .................................................................................................................... viii

18. Float to Flow .............................................................................................................. ix

19. Touched by Someone ................................................................................................. ix

20. Fibre ........................................................................................................................... x

21. Finish the Fold ........................................................................................................... x

22. Becoming ................................................................................................................... x

23. Paint Sticks to Canvas ................................................................................................ xi

⁂

What follows is an exegesis. Aside from its meaning in theology, the creative arts use the term

exegesis (e.g., Barrett, 2010) to describe the process of ‘making sense’ of practice-led research

and making that knowledge available to academic audiences. Exegesis differs from thesis in

that it is not the writing that constitutes the research but the practice itself. To write (and to

read) an exegesis, one must hold in mind that the creative work is the research and the writing

seeks only to transmit and contextualise the knowledge gains.

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As Lorimer (2015) argues, a non-representational style of writing is estranged from

ethnography: ‘[i]t is a heightened awareness, for seeing and feeling … an attunement to the

shape-shifting quality of sense and the properties of distributed agencies’ (emphasis added;

p186). In the same vein, the following collection of ‘simple description’ is not the kind of

exegesis one might expect get from a studio-based artist. In maintaining a focus on space, self-

as-researcher is not always situated at the centre of the account. The primary focus—as the title

of the anthology suggests—is on the materialities and immaterialities of practices as they

assemble and disperse, spatially and temporally. In this respect and for the purposes of this

account, I prefer the term spatial exegesis to better reflect what this approach to writing is

trying to do.

To aid in the organisation of the exegesis, each poem has been assigned a number and a short

title reflecting its content (see the Index of Poems). Numbering goes from left to right and

from top to bottom on each page. Non-linear poems are numbered according to the order in

which they were read. Although the anthology is designed to be heard in its entirety, the

writing considers each poem individually, grouping them according to the page number or

theme. For this reason it may be helpful to re-read them along the way. At the end of each

section, I incorporate references to the theory that informed the work.

1 :: 2 :: 3

The first three poems in the anthology—Slow Art, The Palette Knife, and Impasto—explore the

therapeutic-ness of painting by contrasting two very different approaches. In Slow Art, we get

the sense of the practice’s gentle, rhythmic nature. Swirling and wisping a brush across a

canvas, the artist frequently steps back from the painting to consider the effect of her delicate

brushstrokes before stepping forward again to paint some more. The practice is a kind of

flowing, hypnotic ‘dance’ between artist and canvas—meditative and enchanting to watch.

Artist and canvas are equal partners. The canvas is taller and wider, helping to blur the

boundary between body and canvas; the movement of her arms mirrors the flowing lines of the

artwork. Strokes of satin paint are tenderly applied to the surface then smoothed over through

repetitive mark marking. Over time, the artist enters into a steady flow of actions, deliberate

yet immersive. The painting seems to float in space. The amorphous and emergent qualities of

the work visually induce this, but the artist’s flowing movements also create a quiet openness.

Absence is more powerful than presence—the absence of noise, the absence of tension, the

absence of clear intention. Intensity is highly controlled and allowed to unfold smoothly. Each

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tiny brush stroke leaves an intricate trace of a trance-like engagement between body and artistic

form (Robins, 2009).

In contrast to the ‘smear and coat’ of slow art is the ‘bloat’ and ‘push’ of a much more

aggressive form of painting. ‘The knife takes on the paint and swallows’ is indicative of an

approach that has little regard for the quantities of medium used. It is all about creating

‘thickness’. Rather than standing, the artist lays the canvas on the floor and pours unmeasured

quantities of paint from above. Using a palette knife, she pushes, pulls, and disperses the

medium until something starts to emerge from the messiness. The action is not one of gentle

smoothing. The knife cuts into and across the thick medium in a rough, repetitive motion—not

blending but overlapping the colour. The paint’s viscosity allows it to resist this rough

treatment and to hold its shape with each new cut. In a short space of time something different

emerges from what is a violent process of orchestration. The painting has become the tension

that was once held in movement.

As Bolt (2010) describes, this is ‘working hot’—when the painter produces something ‘real’ by

bringing it forth through the liveliness of the materials. Rather than a thoughtful, deliberate or

considered process, the artist embraces affective intensity—forcing it to strengthen as it is put to

work in the service of a creative act. The artwork is a dynamic object and the artist is the

‘passageway’ that destroys itself in the process of creation (Bolt, 2010). It is ‘the bleed’, as

Massumi (2002) calls it: where body meets image. ‘The body collapses into an intensity that

increases in pitch the longer it lasts’ (Massumi, 2002, p56). The artist in Impasto occupies a

space of ‘utter receptivity’ exposing herself to the pure relationality of process. This is a space

of passion, or as Grosz (2009) puts it: ‘… something excessive, unpredictable, lowly, and

animal’ (p81).

4 :: 5 :: 6

Our Hands, Her Feet, and The Drain arise from an engagement with poetic permaculture,

dance, and drain art—with each poem emphasising the relation between the human and non-

human partners in the making. In Our Hands, the ‘we’—a child and ‘me’—is engaged in the

activity of making a wet mulch out of torn up newspaper that can be used around the base of

plants that make up a community ‘food forest’. Touch as a sensation works in several ways—

our hands touch, we touch the newspaper, the water touches us, and we touch a tree. The

garden is a work of art, and the earth is a living canvas. We are protecting that life, so that the

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community that collects food from it can continue to do so. Through the act of making mulch

and laying it at the base of a tree, we are joining that community of living things—the garden as

canvas and the art of bringing people together.

In Her Feet, the relationship of the dancer to the ground is invoked. The dancer is dancing the

rhythm of ‘chaos’ as part of a solitary 5rhythmsTM practice. Rather than a movement that takes

dancer and ground in a horizontal vector, the artist is thumping the ground in forceful vertical

movements that send vibrations up through her feet and into her body. Manning (2009) calls

this ‘grounding’ in that the ground moves with the dancer and cannot be separated out from

the dance. Propelled by tribal music, the dancer cannot pound hard enough. It is painful to

observe, because it is only once she reaches a point of exhaustion that she is willing to slow her

pace.

The Drain highlights the unique sonics of the drain environment. Storm water, painting

materials, and human voices combine to speak into a ‘dark, cavernous space’. These sounds

merge and then repeat back on themselves, reverberating against the sides of the tunnel and

travelling its length before disappearing—during which time another mixture of sounds is on its

way. The human element in this scenario is a man and a woman who physically co-operate

with the demands of transporting graffiti-making materials into the drain. It is a ‘balancing

act’. As the floor of the drain is not flat, the best way for them to find secure footing is by

standing astride the drain with one foot on either side of the flowing storm water. It is the man

who makes sure that the woman is secure before heading off with his own selection of

markers. He will paint something further down the drain. The woman, while working on her

own piece, can still hear him because he sings as he walks, the sounds of which repeat back to

her as she works.

Whitehead’s (1978) notion of presentational immediacy and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of

fielding figure in these three poems. For Whitehead, perception in the mode of causal efficacy

is distant and rational. In the mode of presentational immediacy, however, we find ourselves

as being present in another entity or ‘in a buzzing world amid a democracy of fellow creatures’,

objects, and things (p50). For Merleau-Ponty (1962), subjectivity is a pre-reflexive experience

of being part of a sensory field. As such, experience is always situated. In terms of the dancer

and the ground, noise and the drain, hands and the garden, we experience the capacity of the

body to act in the world, or as Russon (1994) describes ‘[when] I touch the world … the world

touches me’.

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7 :: 8

The two poems to follow—Payne’s Grey and Grief Stricken—reflect events of therapeutic art

making like that depicted in the earlier poem Impasto. The focus of these poems, however, is

the way in which emotions can ‘join in’ as generative forces in the making. Payne’s Grey refers

to a prospective painting conducted as a piece of practice-based research whereas Grief

Stricken is a retrospective reflection on a painting produced in a state of profound grief. In

Payne’s Grey, emotions circulate alongside music, painting materials, recording instruments,

and thought to form an assemblage—emotions and thought act as matter lending force to the

creative act. In Payne’s Grey the emotions of sadness, resentment, and regret undergo a

visceral transformation over the course of the event, borne out by the materiality of the

encounter (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008). Insight into this process is possible

despite the subject being somewhat disguised.

In contrast, the poem Grief Stricken is resolutely emotional and human in that there is clearly

an ‘I’ who suffers because ‘she’ is dead. It deals with a complex, jumble of themes—grief as an

emotion, the method of a loved one’s suicide, memorialising of the dead, eulogizing of a life,

and intensities of a practice which seeks to depict a tragedy. Alongside the immaterialities of

the emotional experience are multiple relations between the human and non-human elements

of the art making. The poem gestures towards the ‘semi-planned’ nature of the art-making

event: materials are gathered together that were ‘ready-to-hand’ —a dog toy which was held

together with rope, a canvas, and a can of spray paint. Yet she describes their inadequacy to

express the full extent of her horror. As the poem progresses, however, a relation with the

materials emerges which sees them perform in ways that offer her comfort.

In her book titled Empathic Vision, Bennett (2005) asserts that the art of trauma is only ever a

deposit of primary experience which can never be reduced or represented in its entirety. For

her, trauma-related art is not communicative but transactive: ‘it often touches us, but it does

not necessarily communicate the “secret” of personal experience’ (p7). Drawing on the work

of Deleuze (2009) in Proust and Signs, she enrols the concept of the ‘encountered sign’—one

that is felt rather than recognised through cognition. Emotion is an affective trigger that

involuntarily engages us—forcing us to think—and leaving a material impression through our

senses. The process of spectatorship then becomes one of empathic unsettlement, something

which Payne’s Grey does mildly where Grief Stricken does so intensely. This happens not by

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way of subjective identification so much as by ‘taking place’ through a participation in the

affective flows that are generated by them.

9 :: 10 :: 11 :: 12

Transformed, Ludic, A Living Assemblage, and There is a World are four poems that deal with

the sociality of poetic permaculture or drain art practice (or both) and the ways in which these

practices allow assemblages of matter and meaning to coalesce. In the first—Transformed—the

sonic atmospheres and haptic natures of these two practices are compared. Traffic screams

alongside the group-based effort of reviving a food forest in a built-up, urban area. Storm

water blares in underground drain tunnels, multiplied by echoes. Fingers reach out and touch

the non-human partners—the drain, the garden—transforming and being transformed in

moments of connection. The transformation is experienced as human joy, which the ‘I’ of the

poem seeks to share with another person. This poem is also visual in that it is in the circular

shape of a storm water pipe.

Ludic, one of the shorter poems in the anthology, refers to a singular research encounter. As

‘we’ explore where a series of drain tunnels might lead, ‘we’ come across an opening to the

outside. Although ‘we’ are unable to see out, ‘we’ can hear the sounds of alfresco dining on

the street above. One of ‘us’ spontaneously screams as loud as she can. The scream silences

the crowd of diners for about two seconds until the entire group of us below burst into

laughter. Although brief, this poem highlights two complimentary aspects of drain art—urban

play and sense of belonging. Drain artists take breaks from painting to engage in all sorts of

‘free play’ including fire setting, drain singing, and urban exploration. These social acts make

drain art more exciting and more convivial than simply painting side-by-side in an exclusive

location. There is a strong sense in these acts of ‘us’ and ‘them’—the ‘us’ below ground and the

‘them’ above ground. Small acts of public disturbance help to reinforce this.

A Living Assemblage highlights a sense of belonging to something more-than human. Drawing

on the Deleuzian notion of the assemblage, this poem presents the garden as a site of

productive difference (Deleuze, 1994). It is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative—a

desiring-production which is not necessarily anthropocentric. The poem also presents the

concept of multiplicity—although composed of several dimensions, this multiplicity is not

divisible (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994).

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Finally, There is a World takes these two practices and juxtaposes them, visually and poetically.

Poetic permaculture enhances life whereas drain art risks it. Drain art vandalizes the

environment while poetic permaculture cultivates it. Poetic permaculture works towards

sustainability and sharing, while drain art is the selfish pursuit of fleeting ‘togetherness’.

Despite these contrasting goals and motivations, however, both practices are experienced as

therapeutic.

13 :: 14 :: 15

Rather than a set of fieldwork experiences, the next three poems—Bringing Up Dust, Perplexed,

and Speaking Cat—refer to some of my studio- or home-based research experiences. The first

was an attempt to dance the ‘chaos’ rhythm alone, in my house, under lights (a ‘red head’) and

with a Super 8 camera on the ground filming my feet. I had already captured some Super 8

footage of Swagata’s solo dance, but I wanted to personally experience the feeling of

‘grounding’ that she had seemed so intent on producing in our sessions together. In one of my

first attempts to engage in a therapeutic art practice other than painting, I struggled to later

articulate that experience. Hence, the poem is punctuated by a hopeless grasping for

adjectives that might adequately describe something that is ultimately non-representational.

I later developed different technologies for responding to research material that did not rely on

‘finding the right words’. Perplexed refers to my attempts at abstract drawings and paintings of

the 5rhythmsTM. I did a series of five chalk drawings after listening back to audio recordings of

Swagata’s feet moving against a cardboard floor. The other was a series of five, watercolour

paintings of my own experiences of dancing the rhythms. Responding from memory or sound,

and with a full palette of colours at my disposal, I was struck by the vibrant and sensual nature

of these works.

The final poem in this group—Speaking Cat—is based on a series of human-nonhuman

interactions that took place before the commencement of fieldwork. I had been immersed in

theory and continental philosophy at the time, grappling with their complex yet inspiring

notions. Geographical conceptualisations of affect were foreign to me, and so, as many new

learners do, I looked for real life examples that might aid in my understanding. In taking up

part-time employment I had many more hours at home than usual, spent in the company of

household pets. Slowly, over the course of my reading, I noticed that my cat frequently used

his ‘voice’ to communicate affectively with me. If I then varied my voice in affective response

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to him, we could have ‘affective conversations’. The same happened when I took to feeding a

small flock of magpies in the back yard. After producing a food forest at home with my own

family, I had a similar sense of affective communication with the plants that were providing us

with a yield. All of these encounters, through a process of experience and experiment, helped

me to understand the spatialising of affect (McCormack, 2014).

Guattari’s (1994), in his solo work titled Chaosmosis, encouraged a turn to asignifying

semiotics and the actual material scene of encounter (see O’Sullivan, 2010). My post-fieldwork

efforts involved working within an aesthetic paradigm in ways that Guattari explicitly

promoted. Working with art produces finite assemblages that reveal the infinite to us—‘in a

specifically different and singular manner to the typical assemblages that surround us on a day-

to-day basis’ (O’Sullivan, 2010, p259). Experiments in rhythm and movement, abstract

drawing and painting, and creative human-nonhuman encounters are all examples of this way

of working.

16 :: 17

Returning once again to poetic accounts of geographical fieldwork, Staying High and Reykjavìk

refer specifically to risky or illegal activity. As mentioned earlier, drain artists frequently take

breaks from painting to engage in a host of parallel activities which capitalise on the drain’s

architecture. In Staying High, the affective atmosphere created by the setting of fires in storm

water drains is described. The activity involves pouring petrol into the stream of storm water

and then dropping a lit match into it. The fire markedly transforms the space in taking it from

almost complete darkness to extreme brightness, from a cold and damp place to an

instantaneously warm one. Perhaps more dramatically, the fire very briefly uses up all the

available oxygen, depriving human occupants of air. The drain artists, feeling triumphant and

heroic, celebrate this transformation by cheering and congratulating one another.

Reykjavìk is a reference to a sticker-bombing occasion in that city. I had had stickers made

prior to travelling to Iceland for the Nordic Geographers’ Meeting from a photograph I had

taken of a piece of drain art produced during the fieldwork. Over the course of an evening—

and in perpetual daylight—I placed these stickers on street signs and lamp posts all over the

city. Fellow geographers noticed some of these the next day. It was primarily a micro-political

gesture to bring drain art ‘to light’ but also a way of re-enacting or re-creating the affective

intensity that public graffiti generates in the artist.

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Lighting fires and spreading stickers. Becoming intense, becoming animal. As Köppel-Yang

(2009) puts it, the body is an interface between self and the power structures that ‘domesticate’

us: ‘… desire and subversive potential coagulate into undeniable traces’ (p14). Creative acts

participate in the ‘real’, beyond representation. The body is a reservoir of creative potential.

Becoming animal is becoming ‘other-than’, radical or ‘different from the mob’. This potential

to differentiate is at the heart of graffiti art practice.

18 :: 19

Float to Flow and Touched by Someone are two interlocking poems that convey the rhythm,

movement, affect, and sensations of 5rhythmsTM dance. They take the form of visual poetry,

each tracing an outline of the way in which a single dancer might negotiate a path around the

dance floor over the course of a two-hour session. The first locates the dance in the body—as a

personal journey through the rhythms, acknowledging only a couple of encounters with others

along the way (‘a curly moustache’; ‘mate, mate, matey’). From flowing to the rough, jerky

movements of the staccato rhythm, to the vigorous movements of chaos through to the joyous

relief of the lyrical rhythm, the poem ends in anticipation of stillness—the fifth and final rhythm

of a traditional 5rhythmsTM wave.

The second poem—Touched by Someone—focuses on the chaos rhythm, its affective intensities,

and the relation between multiple dancers throughout this phase of the dance. Chaos is the

crescendo of a 5rhythmsTM wave. It is the rhythm that takes the most effort to dance. The

music used to accompany it is electronic drum and bass—a fast, dynamic genre of music with a

primal, tribal-like energy. The poem takes us through the transition from staccato to chaos:

the ‘gateway’ to staccato is in the hips whereas the ‘gateway’ to chaos is the head (Roth, 1998).

While an experienced practitioner of 5rhythmsTM therapy may have a cognitive understanding

of these principles, many do not and yet appear to access these gateways through a kind of

innate body knowledge. The affective atmosphere of the chaos rhythm is pure intensity but

also a ‘letting go’ of tension. Dancers build up a sweat during this stage; frequently collide with

one another physically and emotionally—connecting with a gaze or a smile. Others can be so

wrapped up in the dance that they move with eyes closed, moaning or crying out when the

music reaches its peak. (I am intruiged by how often it is men who gather together to dance in

this way). It is not unusual for dancers to collapse to the ground at the end of the chaos

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rhythm from exhaustion or for a fellow dancer to put their arms around another person who is

unknown to them.

Manning (2009) argues that movement makes space-time rather than displacing it. For her,

space-times are not entered into but created. Displacement is the closing off of potential as a

movement is completed whereas incipience or preacceleration is the creative potential held in

movement before it takes place. Dancing the 5rhythmsTM as a group is an experiment in

transversality. Moving bodies set up encounters without foreclosing the potential to create

others. Individuals become sensing bodies in motion, replacing the subject with superject,

becoming expressly vital. In simpatico, McCormack (2003, 2014) describes the spaces of

affect that emerge from 5rhythmsTM practice as therapeutic space—space that arises through the

enactment of a practice aimed at transforming thinking, feeling, and relating but which involves

a pre-cognitive, more-than personal dimension which cannot be registered by a conscious,

reflexive mind.

20 :: 21 :: 22

Fibre, Finish the Fold, and Becoming also take the form of a continuous visual poem. The first

focuses on the haptics of knitting—the slow and gradual way in which the knitting comes

together and the knitter experiences its growth. Finish the Fold re-enacts an event of public art,

involving the making of ‘things’ out of fibre (i.e., felt) alongside a general assembly of arts

practitioners (GAIP, n.d.). The last poem—Becoming—returns to the practice of knitting and its

transformative potential. The knitter is transformed in the midst of a creative act. The knitting

manifests ontically as well as in relation to the knitter. As a triplet, the poem visually creates

‘the look’ of stitching on the page.

Paterson, Dodge, and MacKian (2012) argue that the geographies of touch are often

misunderstood due, in part, to a tendency of researchers to treat the senses reductively. For

them, touch is a modality which lies at the interface between the interiority of an embodied

subject and the exteriority of the world. Touch can be intensely personal and private—

therapeutic or threatening and disruptive. The features of objects—their hardness, texture,

temperature, vibration—combined with the technicity of the hand gives rise to a kind of

praesentia or a subjectivity that emerges through encounter between body and environment

(see Dixon & Straughan, 2010). Thus, knitting and felting constitute a form of tactile play—a

therapeutic practice that is at once relational and environmental.

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23

In bringing the anthology to a close, Paint Sticks to Canvas takes up two concepts that are at

the heart of the research—Manning’s (2009) speculative pragmatism and Massumi’s (2002)

incorporeal materialism. The poem speaks to speculative pragmatism by highlighting the lack

of ontological distinction between subject and object in events of therapeutic art making. The

therapeutic practice of painting is a ‘technology of lived abstraction’ that allows for pragmatic

‘points of departure’ throughout the doing: thinking and becoming are, however, held in

movement. As Massumi (2002) asserts, continuity of movement is at a level of reality that is

not measurable or divisible—it is intensive rather than extensive (after Bergson). ‘Things’ are

merely accidents of becoming.

⁂

As an anthology, these poems speak of the forces, flows, and vital materialisms in therapeutic

art making by departing from two important ethnographic principles—reflexivity and

positionality. In departing from reflexivity, the poems attempt to sit in an affective register for

as long as possible in order to maintain a level of fidelity to the non-representational. This

means attempting to re-create the sensations, affects, and pre-cognitive aspects of research

encounters through a style of writing that emphasises the spatiality of practice rather than its

sociality or its politics. A critical reader could easily pick up on several examples of slippage

from this aim; however, the use of free verse as a medium greatly assists in taking this account

of fieldwork from the reporting of fieldwork ‘findings’ towards a ‘making sense’ of fieldwork

experiences and encounters.

In terms of positionality, I am there—in the poems and in the exegesis—but it is not just me. It

is also the drain, the child, the fibre, the water, body odour, the cat, and the tree. In order to

produce a non-representational geography of therapeutic art making, I have attempted to

relegate the self to the role of actor and/or actant. As Thrift (2008a) suggests, human subjects

are geographically-constituted and have distributed agency. Contra to the notion of

positionality in ethnography, non-representational theory ‘trades’ in modes of perception that

are not individualised or subject-based. The outcomes of joint action cannot be fully

anticipated by the individual entities it involves (Thrift, 2008b). Encounter takes place at the

surface of things, and it is at this level that space is transmuted into context. Non-

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representational methodologies embrace these concepts by re-creating research encounters

rather than representing them.

In closing, it comes down to the question of ‘why so’ (see Dewsbury, 2010)—or, what purpose

does this poetry serve? Has it been to discover whether it really is possible to ‘enact the

affective force of the performance event again’? Is it to cut into the ‘dogmatic image of what

counts as thought’? Is it to destabilise the ‘know-and-tell’ politics of much sociological

methodology? Or is it simply a different way of playing the academic game? For me, it is what

we learn about an area of concern by withholding critique and embracing experience—by

doing, alone or alongside, rather than just asking for a story. When it comes to my area of

concern, the answer is not definitive, but perhaps when we ‘lose’ ourselves in the activity of art

making we experience a becoming which is wholly bound up in the chaotic potential of the

world in which we are entangled—and that this is liberating.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to those artists whose practices, along with my own, feature in this work;

they are (in no particular order) Swagata Bapat; Amanda Robins; Martin, Natasha, and Ads;

Lucy Sparrow; Meredith Davies and David Juriansz; Teamo Henderson; Artist as Family

(Zero, Meg, Patrick, Woody, and Zephyr); Ren Walters, Chun Liang Liu, Elnaz Sheshgelani,

and A General Assembly of Interested Parties.

References

Ash, J., & Simpson, P. (2014). Geography and post-phenomenology. Progress in Human Geography.

DOI: 10.1177/0309132514544806.

Barrett, E. (2010). The exegesis as meme. In E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds). Practice as research:

approaches to creative arts enquiry. London: I.B. Tauris.

Bennett, J. (2005). Empathic vision: affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Berry, L., & Knight, M. (n.d). Authors. Available at URL: https://5000poppies.wordpress.com/

Bohn, W. (2011). Reading visual poetry. Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Bolt, B. (2013). Introduction. In E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds). Carnal knowledge: towards a ‘new

materialism’ through the arts. London: I.B. Tauris.

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About the Author

Candice Boyd is an artist-geographer and writer with a background in clinical psychology. Her

interests include the geographies of mental health, cultures of sense and movement,

therapeutic spaces, and contemporary museum geographies. Her art practice focuses on the

production of affective knowledges via painting, sculpture, video, performance, and

soundscape. In addition to a teaching and research career in rural adolescent mental health,

she has authored and published a novel for young adults. At the time of completing this

anthology she was in the final weeks of completing a second PhD in cultural geography and the

creative arts at the University of Melbourne and an Honorary Senior Fellow in its School of

Geography.

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The right of Candice Boyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment Act 2000.

© Candice Boyd, 2015

This work is made publicly available on a not-for-profit basis.The poems may be shared or re-worked under Creative Commons Licence 3.0

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in Publication entry

Boyd, Candice Pamela, 1970-, author. Title: Forces, flows, and vital materialisms : a poetry anthology / Candice P. Boyd. ISBN: 9780646945828 (paperback) Subjects: Poetry. Dewey Number: A821.4

Forces, Flows, and Vital Materialisms in Therapeutic Art Making

A Poetry Anthology by Candice P. BoydISBN 978-0-646-94582-8

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forces, flows, and vital materialisms in therapeutic art making

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