RE EMPOWERING DISEMPOWERED WOMEN: EMBODYING THE (IM)MATERIALITY AND PROCESSING OF PAPIER-MÂCHÉ MEDIUM AS A TOOL OF RESISTANCE AND HOPE
Summary
RE EMPOWERING DISEMPOWERED WOMEN: EMBODYING THE (IM)MATERIALITY AND PROCESSING OF PAPIER-MÂCHÉ MEDIUM AS A TOOL OF RESISTANCE AND HOPE Folashade Elizabeth Olukoya
‘Beneath the skin, within the confines of the broken body, the heart cries, beats, breaks, bleeds, aches.., but who sees? Who cares?…’ (disempowered women’s trauma).
As an exploration of artistic practice related to female experience from the perspective of a British African woman artist, and specifically the processing of trauma that results from domestic violence enacted against women, this project exists in a very broad field not only of theoretical discourse, but also of artistic practice.
Literature engagement aids in narrowing down the particular focal points of this research, and specifically defines the field in which this research situates and stays in constant dialogue within the research project carried out at every delicate stage of its development. This aids in mapping out my own contribution to the field, identifying the gap into which I insert my practice and in which I aim to continue to explore via the research questions I am exploring for ‘hopeful’ answers.
The focus of my research centres on three distinct sections: Mastication; Materials-materiality; and Narratives-Storytelling. These three important sections though with necessary overlaps are lenses through which I engage with my work and practice. Due to the interlinked quality of my practice, I categorise the three separate sections as necessary overlaps between the theories and concepts of ‘knowing’. The concepts of Narrative and storytelling becomes a way of thinking through certain gestures in order to come to meaning in processing disempowered women’s trauma.
Embodying and anatomising trauma, is situated in the spectrum of disempowered women's stories of traumatic experiences. Rooted in this, is my focus on processing ideas of 're-empowerment' through the language of material culture, specifically through the sensory exploration of papier-mâché. My exploration into visible abject body in relation to its surfaces, (Kiki Smith, Isaak 1995), is harnessed to my intention to reveal the invisible, in the form of the ‘heart inside the body, an organ we associate with emotion. I use the tactility of my material to search for a method of understanding and articulating a new language imbued with other meanings.
Additional info
From a feminine perspective, Judith Butler has emphasised that material has been cryptically feminised (Materiality, 2015). In my analysis of the historical metamorphoses of papier-mâché from its biological roots from tree-wood pulp, 1 look into the ways that materials find parallels with the female body to develop ways in which to be complicit with them in an act of recuperation.
The violence of its processes involved in macerating pulp which underpins my process, is cryptically feminised as a way to embody a form that is structurally broken, battered and distorted.
My artistic practice evolves from storytelling, retelling the narratives of trauma recounted to me. As such, my practice is a form of playback, where papier-mâché is deployed as a language of understanding via processing narratives of trauma from my memory catalogues.
The predominance of plain and newspapers in my material process enables me to connect with storytelling and the voice. The incorporation of broken texts into my work and the bleeding of ink in macerated paper, stains my work grey. This blending of texts and of meaning explores a currently uncharted territory of language to create new ways of understanding the experience of trauma deep beneath the skin.
RE EMPOWERING DISEMPOWERED WOMEN: EMBODYING THE (IM)MATERIALITY AND PROCESSING OF PAPIER-MÂCHÉ MEDIUM AS A TOOL OF RESISTANCE AND HOPE
Agony Beneath the skin
‘Beneath the skin, within the confines of the broken body, the heart cries, beats, breaks, bleeds, aches.., but who sees? Who cares?’
