Output details
36 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
Canterbury Christ Church University
Two drawings from the series ‘What Can A Body Be?
Medium: Inkjet Giclée print 1100x775mm framed.
The research in the series of drawings titled ‘What Can a Body Be?’ investigates what representations of the body best articulate relationships with objects? The question draws upon Spinoza’s discussion of the parallelism between mind and body (Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, 1988) and his discussion of the indivisibility of substance. The work also draws on Artaud’s concept of the subjectile, by examining particular subjective difficulties that account for fundamental divisions in the subject’s nature and integrity. This division is held by Freud to emanate from the pregenital period that predates the social, ‘normalised’ subject (Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘The Language of Psychoanalysis’, 1988, p.328). This anarchic stage precedes a later stage of libidinal organisation, in which object relationships develop and cease to have a destructive quality.
The works in ‘What Can a Body Be?’ draw on these ideas to investigate the question of how this ambivalent conceptualisation of the subject might be explored through drawings that challenge the integrity of the human figure. Montage techniques using both found and hand-drawn elements combine to present hybrid figures made from disparate features. The resultant work explores the power that grotesque images can have on the imagination, and how the theory of the subjectile can be effectively elaborated through alternative depictions of the human form.
Since the drawings depict the human form integrated with objects, the relationship between subject and object is literally articulated – thus addressing Spinoza’s notion of unified substance. The works encourage associations between subject and object, and contribute to a long tradition of hybrid depictions of the human form, from Giuseppe Arcimboldo, to Max Ernst and Louise Bourgeois.
The research seeks to generate ways of understanding the concepts of subjectivity and the subjectile through the depiction of a fragmented, but entire, human figure.
