A link to YNG's research: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165505/1.hasCoversheetVersion/Final_version_of_Doctorate_with_appendices_April_29.pdf

Here  is a link to Yonat Nitzan-Green's book: http://www.bod.com/index.php?id=3435&objk_id=407999

The Israeli artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger develops a theory of the matrix. This theory considers the womb, as well as other prenatal processes. It does not oppose Freud’s Oedipus model, but rather complements it. In her theory, Ettinger suggests a new conception for subjectivity and its relation to the other, which creates a connection between aesthetic and ethic.

Regarding trauma, aesthetic and ethic Ettinger writes:

‘In art today we are moving from phantasy to trauma. Contemporary aesthetics is moving from the phallic structure to the matrixial sphere. We are carrying, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, enormous traumatic weight, and aesthetic wit(h)nessing in art brings it to culture’s surface. […] The beautiful as accessed via artworks in our era […] carries new possibilities for affective apprehending and produces new artistic effects where aesthetics converges with ethics […] The aesthetic is trauma’s transformed affectability in wit(h)nessing in/by art, beyond time and in different sites and spaces, yet it has ethical and even therapeutic consequences. The new healing potential offered by the idea of wit(h)nessing is ethical, yet profoundly aesthetic, or transferred by aesthetic means.’[1]

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[1] Brian Massumi (ed.), Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 2006, pp. 147-8.

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]

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

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.

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[1] Marvin Carlson, ‘What Is Performance’ in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds.), The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, 2^nd 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.

http://in2drawing.blogspot.co.uk/