Shannon Forrester
Embodying the Reparative Turn: Generating Agency and an Exit Through Painting Practice
Summary
Instrumental to the socio-political fabric of western culture, hegemonic systems of racism, misogyny, and homophobia produce a multitude of inequities activated through circulation of identity-based currency. These anti-humane systems infect most life spheres including: psychological, emotional, ecological, educational, and economic, eroding agency while propagating trauma. This practice-led thesis examines the potential of diffracting (Barad: 2017) Sedgwick’s (2003) concept of reparative reading practice (influenced by Klein: 1925), material aliveness, encounter, and onto-epistemology (Barad: 2003; Frost and Coole: 2010; Golding: 2018), art’s potential to create social agency (hooks: 95; see also Best; 2016; Mercer: 99; Laing: 2017; and Jones: 12), and identity studies (Butler: 99; Halberstam and Nyong’o: 2018; Geerts and van der Tuin: 2013; Barad: 2015 and Muñoz: 2009) through embodied painting, colour studies (Chirimuuta:2015; Gage:1999; Albers: 1963), Monster Theory (Weinstock: 2020), and curatorial practices (Reilly: 2018; Green: 2018). The practices which are the focus of this research are ones in painting, curation, and a type of activist pedagogy which incorporate a reparative turn in their pursuit to generate agency through a psychic/visceral reaching towards an exit (Foucault: 84) from the dynamics of exclusion.
Since the civil rights movements in the US started to gain major traction (March on Washington: 1963; Stonewall riot: 1969; ERA marches: 1972), fields of identity studies in North America have engaged in expansive analysis of these hegemonic systems through critical paranoid-based reading approaches often focused on exposing methods and aims of oppression. Sedgwick proposed that a critical reparative-based approach offers promising, productive, and undiscovered potential to generate repair as well as produce movement toward an exit from identity-based bias by reaching for pleasure rather than avoiding shame while also assimilating the violence and trauma that permeates these systems (Sedgwick: 2003; and Best: 2016). This thesis takes up Sedgewick’s call to further research in critical-reparative approaches, then moves it further along by positioning painting and embodied practices, instead of reading, as the focus of inquiry hereby moving research beyond language into material, performative, and encounter generated realms. A reparative turn in practice offers a constructive action, a re-making-inventing of an empowered-self narrative, an undertaking of a kind of surgery on wounds inflicted by systemic oppression, producing a hopeful exit from othering’s shadows in the context of a creative imaginary engaged with the many possible new existence(s) repair might produce.
Additional info
The practices embedded in this research include painting, curation, writing, and a type of activist pedagogy each of which have the potential to incorporate a reparative turn in their pursuit to generate agency through a psychic/visceral reaching towards an exit from dynamics of exclusion. That the research was led by interdisciplinary practice was critical as it enables the research to access a multivalence and richness not available to work which only incorporates language based methods. Working in painting practice provided a material article with which I could demonstrate immaterial processes of cultural production, materially. It also created a platform from which I was able to research through a diffractive methodology which also incorporated interdisciplinary humanities including colour philosophy, feminist, queer, cultural, and visual studies as well as monster theory.
Begin
Shannon Forrester, Begin, 6 ft h x 45 in w, oil on canvas, 2018
Begin
There was no light, dirt (another being) covered the small human figure, a bestowal from Patriarchy’s Workshop to function as a public broadcast of her shame, her name, her meaning made embodied, that which is a marker of her abject caste. Built on in layers with every unfolding year, though she was only about seven, the coating was material, aural, visceral, and seemingly all powerful, though she could not even see it. A droning, relentless transmission of psychic and physical excruciation, It enveloped with mercenary mastery. It’s thick-heavy volume weighed upon every flicker of her material and immaterial being. As a captive of Patriarchy’s Workshop, she was conscripted to carry it as her outermost layer, her most prominent identifier, this embodied dirt-other had travelled with her during every moment of her life so far.
To spite constructed appearance, It was not actually of her but on her, a permeable layer fiction-being-signifier forged with all the ill intent the Workshop could construct. The immensity of shame, of droning transmissions, began eroding her spirit from the moment she began to be conscious of the socio-political. That was when it came home to roost, commencing its parasitical dance of nightmares on her frame. The process began years before the layers weighing her down were so thick. It is constitutively productive in its complex and ingenious character. It was a spark born from darkness that allowed her story to be told, as The Workshop’s corrosive agent was meant to silence her, render her forever without light. The Workshop didn’t understand the power of no-light, as within it, the little captive could drift through the immense field of her mind and there she found truth, escape, seeds, and matches.
Painting From The Other Side
Painting from the Other Side is the curatorial project section of this dissertation. It continues research on the potential of the reparative turn in painting, aesthetics, narrative, and curation to subvert, evade, and exit from dynamics of exclusion linked to homophobia, misogyny, and racism. It considers how systemic cultural agents propagating exclusion deploy inequity to obstruct human flourishing, then explores how they are subverted through diverse reparative practices in painting through specific case studies analysing work by nine different contemporary painters.
Painting From The Other Side 2019 installation image
Painting From The Other Side included the following research participant artists
- Kate Bickmore
- Elise Broadway
- Andrea Christodoulides
- Lydia Pettit
- Leon Pozniakow
- Jhonatan Pulido
- Olivia Sterling
- Osaretin Ugiagbe
