Wednesday 25 April 2012

Maternal Aesthetics is not pictures of mothers and children.

The methodology which was used in the research is critically considered here in order to gain a better understanding of maternal aesthetics. In other words, the system of thoughts and actions which comprises methods as part of a practice-led fine art research is being revisited with the aim to ‘give birth’ and to name Maternal Aesthetics.
ima as a research method is used in my current artworks, thus, forms a continuity and a 'bridge' between the research and the next stage.
Self and Other III
The persona ima engages with questions of invisibility. In particular, ima’s  actions come as a response to the invisible aspect in the daily maternal experience, mostly of domestic and caring activities. As a method, it is informed by Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ writings as a form of intuition which is invisible, but always accessible. The story ‘The Doll in her Pocket: Vasalisa the Wise’ is used to discuss female intuition. The doll was given to the child by her mother on her death-bed, as a protection.

Pinkola Estes writes:
‘The doll is the symbolic homunculi, little life. It is the symbol of what lies buried in humans that is numinous. It is a small and glowing facsimile of the original self. Superficially, it is just a doll. But inversely, it represents a little piece of soul that carries all the knowledge of the larger soul-self. In the doll is the voice, in diminutive, of old La Que Sabe, The One Who Knows. […] it is our helper which is not seeable, per se, but which is always accessible.’[1]


[1] Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Rider, London, 1998, p. 85.

Friday 6 April 2012

Self and Other II

The ethnolinguist Richard Bauman articulated performance as the following:

‘All performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action. Normally this comparison is made by an observer of the action – the theatre public, the school teacher, the scientist – but the double consciousness, not the external observation, is what is most central [...] Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self.’[1]

The performative act is based on doubleness: the self  invented an other - ima. Within the self there are two entities. This doubleness allows a comparison, as well as a conceptualisation of difference. As soon as ‘I’ becomes ‘we’ there is already an observer who is also an audience. This audience functions as a witness and thus recognises and validates actions performed by the self.


[1] Marvin Carlson, ‘What Is Performance’ in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds.), The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, 2nd Edition, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, pp. 149-150. Carlson refers to the definition of performance, articulated by the ethnolinguist Richard Bauman in the International Encyclopaedia of Communications.