Output details

Sitting/walking/practice: reflections on a woman's creative process

This portfolio includes an online journal article (http://www.genderforum.org/issues/gender-and-performance/sitting-walking-practice/ (issue 31, 2010) and video/photographic exhibition (video extracts: http://vimeo.com/user2213042). The aim was to develop a methodology for practice as research based on an embodiment that confuses binary mind body distinctions. The practical research is grounded in and emerges from depth psychologist C. G. Jung’s ‘active imagination’ (Chodorow, 1997; Jung, 1958), neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s ‘somatic markers’ (2000) and psychologist Eugene Gendlin’s person-centred approach to the ‘felt sense’ (1978). This methodology is primarily phenomenological and involved practical experiments with a method or approach developed to deepen and expand conscious awareness or expanded consciousness that could be said to emerge from a somatic awareness.

The research explored what happens when we pay attention to the felt sense, fringe sensation and how might these move from direct experiences of being in the world into artistic artefacts. The method involves the practice of Authentic Movement to generate a particular internal state where body and mind merge into bodymind and from this experience to attempt to move into the written word, into image or movement that might contain some dynamic and affect of the original experience. From this place of enhanced bodily and cognitive awareness, the research explored ways in which we might translate this experience into a variety of artefacts (written, video, photographic). The outcomes in this portfolio reflect these artistic experiments with two videos, a series of photographs and an article which explores the felt sense of the experience as written word. The research and attendant iterations evolved over a period of three years (2009-12).

The research was supported by the Choreographic Lab and the University of Northampton. Exhibitions and presentations in New York, Plymouth, Derby, Leamington Spa, Northampton, London