This blog critically interrogates the use of pigment white in eighteenth-century European painting, situating it as a foundational aesthetic device for the construction of white ideology – an ideology that continues to permeate visual culture and institutional behaviour and aesthetics today.
I aim to dismantle the symbolic economy that sustains such ideological formations. This includes a direct challenge to the connotations that elevate the white female subject as an emblem of virtue, beauty, passivity, submissive and fixity. Through an alternative to positivist modes of knowledge production (performance art), I hope to dismantle what is fixed and instead of seeking an alternative fixed image or language to leave it dismantled, plural, and disappearing.
© Emma Starkey 2016 – 2026. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
Subject matter matters
23rd June 26
I make disappearing work because of my subject matter.
I make work that institutions cannot own, because ownership is used as a vehicle for whiteness’s value system. I challenge it, dismantle it and then let it disappear, only existing in the minds of the viewer. And even then, it slips continuously. Ownership is the mechanism through which they extract, refine, neutralise, and at times weaponise the lived experience of working‑class and researcher‑artists.
Black Feminist Scholars
13 June 26
Patricia Hill Collins
In Black Feminist Thought (1990), Collins argues that Black women developed distinctive epistemological traditions grounded in dialogue, ethics of care, lived experience, and collective accountability, but these traditions were routinely excluded from what counted as legitimate knowledge.
Barbara Christian
Her famous essay The Race for Theory (1987) Christian argued that academic theory was increasingly associated with highly abstract European discourse while Black intellectual traditions were dismissed despite being deeply theoretical.
bell hooks
hooks repeatedly argued that marginalised communities generate theory through lived struggle and collective practice, even when academia refuses to recognise it as such.
Audre Lorde
Lorde’s work challenged dominant epistemologies and emphasised knowledge emerging from embodied experience, relation, and difference rather than detached abstraction.
Rupturing Object White
09 June 26
I have been developing this work for over a decade, so to scoop it up and make sense of what I do, and hopefully help other neurodivergent people and artists who also agree that art is, in fact, embedded research. And an ethical practice that can be informative for supervision, critiques, and institutions in general.
Gazes'
09 June 26
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Aesthetic distance – Western aesthetic philosophy frames “disinterested contemplation” as a mode of viewing that brackets everyday affect and involvement. Eye‑tracking studies show that this produces a distinct perceptual mode, slower and more scanning-based.
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Gaze theory – The gaze is culturally and politically conditioned; it can assert power, regulate bodies, and create hierarchies between observer and observed. A distancing gaze participates in this by stabilising the viewer as the one who sees without being touched.
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Lacanian and Foucauldian traditions – Lacan’s gaze implicates the subject in structures of desire and lack; Foucault’s gaze disciplines through surveillance. This can happen in any institution where the a “subject” starts to show autonomy. Both involve forms of distancing: the subject is constituted by being seen, or regulated by an unseen observer.
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Scopic regimes – Visuality is learned and culturally structured; distancing is one such regime, privileging neutrality, objectivity, and mastery.
Rupturing Object White and Dancing with….
08 June 26
My project Rupturing Object White, and my model Dancing‑with, explores how the arts can open up possibilities of knowledge rather than colonially serve a singular, fixed way of knowing. These works insist that knowledge is not something delivered intact, but something that emerges through movement, relation, encounter, and the unruly behaviour of materials.
Yet the same beautiful expression that can open possibility can also become a mediator of authority, power, status — an insidious, divisive control mechanism. It really does depend on the artist: their intentions, their ethics, and the deeper mindset they bring into the work. An artist’s biases, inheritances, and blind spots surface whether they want them to or not. Art does not hide much. It exposes the architectures of thought and power that shape the maker.
This is why the arts are never neutral. Once performance art becomes material, we cannot ignore the properties of that material. If a work depicting working-class life is produced with an expensive camera and professional photographer, a contradiction emerges. The audience senses it instinctively; they feel the dissonance between surface and subject. Materials can reproduce the colonial fantasy of singular knowledge ('high end' in this example), or they can rupture it. My work chooses rupture through materials, gestures, economies of production, and encounters that refuse containment and resist stabilising into mastery.
Polytheism and My Epistemological Framework
07 June 26
Polytheism offers a way of understanding the world that begins with plurality rather than singularity as seen in monotheism. Instead of one central authority, one truth, or one stable point of reference, polytheistic traditions recognise a world made up of many forces, each with its own agency, temperament, and domain. Nothing is total. Nothing is final. Knowledge sits in the tensions between these forces, not above them. This sits closely with how I understand knowledge: not as a fixed object to be captured, but as something that forms through relation, movement, and encounter.
In polytheistic cosmologies, gods, spirits, ancestors, and landforms hold partial and situated knowledges. No single figure sees everything. This decentralised structure pushes against the positivist idea that a neutral observer can stand outside the world and extract meaning from it (Comte, 1853; Durkheim, 1895). Polytheism assumes the opposite: that all knowing is entangled, that every perspective is shaped by its position. This aligns with my insistence that human beings are always‑in‑motion — never static, never fully knowable, never reducible to an object of study. Mutual understanding is therefore always incomplete. But rather than treating this incompleteness as a problem to be solved, it can be understood as the very condition that makes original thought possible. Each person hears, senses, and processes the world through differing ears — shaped by their histories, bodies, and lived experiences — and it is precisely this difference that generates new ways of thinking.
Polytheistic traditions also treat knowledge as embodied and lived, not abstract. It is carried through ritual, gesture, seasonal rhythms, craft, and story. It is not something you look at from a distance; it is something you participate in. This challenges the phallocentric and rationalistic models critiqued by Irigaray (1985) and Harding (1986), which elevate detached observation and suppress the relational, the sensuous, and the fluid. Polytheism refuses that split. It keeps the body in the frame.
What matters most for my framework is how polytheism handles difference. In these systems, difference is not a problem to be solved or a deviation to be corrected. People and ideas contradict one another and themselves. They clash, overlap, ignore, and disrupt one another. They coexist without needing to merge into a single coherent logic. This offers a conceptual grounding for my argument that difference is not an obstacle to understanding but a condition of it. Knowledge emerges through the friction of encounter, not through the smoothing out of complexity.
Polytheism, then, is not simply a religious category. It is an epistemic orientation that recognises the world as multiple, relational, and in motion. It resists the extractive, observational, and hierarchical models that dominate Western knowledge production. It supports a way of working — and a way of being-with — that honours partiality, co‑presence, and the ongoing negotiation of meaning.