materialising the voice to speak from the liminal: a conversation about carelessness
2023This PhD research emerges from a conceptual and autobiographical artistic practice, which is being deployed to uncover an affective sense of the very particular, often suppressed and therefore rarely heard voice – that of someone who was raised in care. Using the methodologies of autotheory and affect theory I aim to contribute new insights to discourses on care.
The research is led by two questions: how is writing as artistic practice giving form to certain kinds of silencing, specifically in relation to carelessness, and how might these utterances from a person who grew up in state care change wider social and academic debates on care? I am interested in the role making plays in writing and emotional articulation and how my investigations might push and blur the boundaries of practice and theory to employ both to speak on my behalf.
The research foregrounds what Tim Ingold (2013) describes as ‘thinking through making’. I am investigating the point at which writing and material engagement coalesce to give new perspectives on putting pen to paper. I am paying attention to the materiality of writing, the meaning of the words, what the writing gesture transmits and transfers – what is being absorbed by or dissolving into the paper as I work and how I can manipulate these unseen traces to dissect my inquiry. The materiality of writing extends to recorded readings of the written word and voice notes to self and others.
I am privileging fault lines and weak spots as essential components – fragility, fracture, instability, dissolve, impermanence, residue, risk, mess, breaks. This presupposes vulnerability, unpredictability and temporality in the form the artworks take, and what Elena Ferrante (2017) calls ‘frantumaglia’ with regards to the form the thesis writing takes. These phyiscal attributes are being studied in direct relationship with the precarious, oscillating, internal-versus-external negotiation provoked by the liminal state driving this project – unbelonging.
Key words: care, writing, inbetween, silence, material
Copyright © Maria Amidu, 2023