Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

How do you paint the emotions experienced by a parent as they watch a loved child’s risk-taking behaviour? This paper examines the embodied studio process entered into when confronted with such a question. In the studio, we rehearse the world through the body performing the senses (site, touch and memory) and making them visible and tangible This is because our embodiment is premised on the mutually constituted agency of the self/other, or self in/of the world. However, the complexity of emotional responses that are present when a participant spectator is witness to life gone awry are manifold. This series of paintings tells a mother’s story. A story that is personal. A story that is common to many parents. I am not interested in likeness. All works made are subjective however working with images of my child (not someone else’s child) is loaded with an additional somatic and mnemonic burden. Memory and remembering are complicated. Bodily memories of a beloved child—now a young man—are subjective. In the studio. I inhabit the complex space of love, disgust, fear, betrayal, terror, stress, disbelief, and again, and mostly, love. The representations explore the space between self and other while questioning the subject position within that relationship. How do I express this relationship? By bringing artist, narrator and parent into connection I question the relationship between self(ves) and other(s), particularly questions of different embodiments, an intimate process of imaging, the intimate embodiment of the artist.