Emma Starkey
Artist & Educator
Emma Starkey is a PhD candidate at University of Gloucestershire, whose work positions live art as a radical alternative to positivist modes of knowledge production in art education and education more broadly. Her research argues for non-rehearsed, embodied, relational, and practice-led forms of knowing that resist the neutrality and closure often demanded by institutional frameworks. She is currently developing and sharing this work through conferences, workshops, and educational spaces, where she continues to blur the boundaries between art and pedagogy. Through performance and critical intervention, she explores how live art can unsettle dominant epistemologies and open new possibilities for discoveries, learning, encounter, and transformation for both herself and others. In doing so, she attempts to create a shared, non‑hierarchical space in which knowledge is not delivered from above but emerges relationally, in real time. Starkey develops decolonial, multimodal approaches that nurture difference rather than erase, appropriate, or flatten it into sameness. https://www.live-art.ie/2026/04/14/emma-starkey/
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.
Over time, the blog has become much more than its surface intention—it has grown into a living archive of methodological, pedagogical, political, and embodied thought, continually widening the field it first set out to describe. What began as an inquiry into propeties that maintain whiteness and liquid–vapour–liquid performance methodology has evolved into a relational, iterative record of feminist, anti‑colonial, and working‑class critiques of knowledge production. It documents how my live‑art methodology emerges through ongoing encounters with theory, institutional power, whiteness, gender, and embodied experience. Rather than presenting a fixed method, the blog enacts the fluidity, situarationality, refusal, and plurality that the liquid–vapor–liquid model describes: a practice that shifts state, resists capture, and remains open.
I came to recognise that the properties that sustain whiteness are also reflected in the everyday behaviours of the university institution. Even something as seemingly routine as a supervision meeting can reproduce colonial aesthetics when a supervisor offers directives without dialogue and privileges high-tech equipment as the default mode of practice, without acknowledging the inherent oxymoron of advocating decolonial approaches through exclusionary means. Such behaviours are not merely individual actions but are deeply embedded within institutional systems, educational practices, and the curriculum itself.
This realisation led me to understand that genuinely decolonial practice cannot exist without also addressing pedagogy. A practitioner cannot claim to produce decolonial work while leaving hierarchical teaching structures unexamined. Within my own experience, I occupied a power dynamic in which my voice was effectively silenced. There was no sense of "with"—no collaborative or dialogic relationship—despite the fact that 'with' forms the foundation of my own pedagogical practice. In my teaching, I actively cultivate spaces where students' voices are heard, valued, and nurtured. Recognising the disparity between my educational values and my lived experience as a student compelled me to seek change, not only for myself but for those who follow. As a result, I am developing handbooks that foreground listening, nurture, dialogue, and respect for difference, a conscious practice for supervisors and teachers, an attempt to undo colonial practices and behaviors in education and with the aim of fostering more equitable and genuinely collaborative learning environments.
© 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 doesn't just choose rupture; economics is also embedded in the materials, gestures, production economies, and encounters that refuse containment and resist stabilization into mastery. These works do not require being palatable, discomfort is necessary in decolonial work.
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 (Assmann, 2008; Harvey, 2013).
In polytheistic cosmologies, gods, spirits, ancestors, and landforms hold partial and situated knowledges. (Strathern, 1988; Viveiros de Castro, 2014; Rose, 1996)
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.
References:
Assmann, J. (2008) The Price of Monotheism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Comte, A. (1853) The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Translated by H. Martineau. London: John Chapman.
Durkheim, E. (1895) The Rules of Sociological Method. Paris: Félix Alcan. (English translation: Durkheim, E. (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method. Edited by S. Lukes. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press.)
Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harvey, G. (2013) Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life. Durham: Acumen.
Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by C. Porter and C. Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, D.B. (1996) Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission.
Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014) Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.
Everything is connected through the spine!
07 June 26
Everything is connected through the spine!!
When I wrote my early work, it was under the auspices of a Marxist framework in which the concept of production was a central metaphor (Grosz). This is not a literal claim. Similar to Grosz, for me the body is not a commodity — it is an ongoing process. In Grosz’s use of the Marxist metaphor of “production,” she is not suggesting that the body is a finished product, but rather that it is continuously produced, reconfigured, and transformed through social institutions, discourses, and systems of knowledge. This understanding is later deepened through Foucault’s analysis of power, where the body is not simply acted upon, but actively formed through relations of discipline, regulation, and normalisation.
From this perspective, embodiment is not something one has, but something that is continuously made and unmade through relation. The spine, then, is not a fixed structure of support but a dynamic axis through which experience, posture, affect, and social inscription are constantly negotiated. What appears as stability is in fact an ongoing coordination of forces.
The body is not a product of production, but a site of continuous movement-with systems of power, language, and encounter, relation.
Pedagogical productivity: In teaching and collective practice
07 June 26
Heidegger’s notion of being-with can be read as a beautiful dream, but not a practical one. It presumes that understanding can be met, that copresence naturally yields relational coherence. Yet such a formulation or more so theoretical stance neglects the subjectivities that shape encounter: the differences in background, socio-economic factors, personhood, and lived experience, and the question of whether a bridge to understanding can in fact be made.
This bridge is rendered even more precarious under the current model of observation built by positivist epistemologies (Comte, 1853; Durkheim, 1895), which position the researcher as a detached and supposedly neutral observer extracting meaning from a stable and knowable subject. By operating this way, the subject is treated as an object. However, human beings do not function as objects; they are always in motion. If they are alive, they are ALWAYS-in-motion. The current observational model prohibits the very processing space required for difference to be engaged.
What does this mean? It means knowledge is restricted by older methods that derive from phallocentric and rationalistic domains (Irigaray, 1985; Harding, 1986), which value observation over all else; this leads to projection. Because of the power relations these models depend on, nuanced differences, are often missed, erased or subjected to western superiority “corrections” before they are even published. Or worse coined through theft.
Observation, with its genealogies of empiricism and surveillance, flattens multiplicity into comparison and projection. It fails to register difference and, even when it does, there is a colonial tendency to try and erase it to suit what has been taught in Western education, which is to smooth out texture and difference. Sleekness and sameness are associated with professionalism, although it is this same ‘professionalism’ that suffocates education and limits its imagination.Leaving little room for discomfort, contradiction, or opacity. In contrast, my methodology insists that any practice should celebrate plurality and multiplicity rather than attempt to produce a false sense of coherence or sameness through ‘being-with’. Instead of being-with, I propose dancing-with, as it requires the coordination of all body parts, responsiveness, and sustained reciprocity. It is a form of engagement that is necessarily relational and embodied, rather than observational or abstracted, and it foregrounds movement, vulnerability, and mutual adjustment rather than passive co-presence. By ‘dancing-with’, I do not refer to hierarchical lead/follow models of dance, but to an improvised, co-constitutive practice of movement in which agency is continuously redistributed rather than assigned.
Comte, A. (1853) The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Translated by H. Martineau. London: John Chapman.
Durkheim, É. (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1895.)
Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published 1927.)
Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by G.C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Original work published 1974.)
Extended Reference List:
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Postman, N. (1995) The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Knopf.
Woodson, C.G. (1933) The Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers.
Gatto, J.T. (2002) Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers.
Models of Knowledge Production & Teaching
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon.Roy, R.R.M. (1901) The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy. Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.
Derozio, H.V. (1925) Poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. Calcutta: Oxford University Press.
Kumar, K. (2005) Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Carbajal Carrera, B. (2021) ‘Decolonial epistemologies and the politics of knowledge’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 42(3), pp. 345–360.
Lewis, V. (2019) Decolonising Masculinities in Latin America: Health, Power and Embodiment. London: Routledge
Beyond Extraction: Co-Creation, Participation, and Knowledge Production
07 June 26
Within positivist research frameworks, human experience is frequently mined to produce the appearance of evidence-based knowledge, with the researcher seeking patterns that confirm pre-existing hypotheses or theoretical assumptions. My research takes a different approach. Rather than pursuing confirmation, I embrace the possibility that artistic practice can generate multiple, contingent, and plural interpretations. I do not regard this openness as a methodological weakness; rather, it reflects a relational understanding of knowledge production informed by quantum theory, where meaning emerges through entanglement and interaction rather than through fixed subject–object distinctions. In this sense, participants are not objects to be observed from a distance but active contributors to the unfolding of knowledge itself.
This relational methodology shapes the way I work within conference settings. Rather than positioning myself as a speaker addressing an audience, I take a seat amongst participants and consciously relinquish traditional hierarchies of expertise by developing the work live and collectively within the space. There is a vulnerability in this process that destabilises the binary distinctions between artist and audience, knower and receiver. Knowledge is not transmitted in a one-directional manner but co-produced through encounter, dialogue, and participation. I do not know the outcome in advance; rather, the agency, presence, and relationships of those involved become constitutive of the live artwork itself.
Extractivism is conventionally associated with the large-scale appropriation of natural resources; however, critical scholarship has increasingly demonstrated that its logics extend beyond material extraction to encompass the appropriation of labour, social relations, and knowledge. Walter Rodney’s seminal analysis in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa provides a foundational critique of economic extractivism, illustrating how colonialism systematically transferred wealth and productive capacity from Africa to Europe while simultaneously producing enduring structures of dependency and underdevelopment (Rodney, 1972). Extending this critique, Sumi Madhok interrogates the coloniality of contemporary knowledge production, arguing that extractive relations persist through academic and institutional practices that appropriate subaltern experiences and epistemologies without meaningful reciprocity or epistemic justice (Madhok, 2021). Similarly, Luis F. Angosto Ferrández conceptualises extractivism as a broader social relation embedded within neo-colonial political economies, emphasising how contemporary extraction is sustained through asymmetrical power relations that govern access to territory, resources, and forms of social reproduction (Angosto Ferrández, 2023). Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate that extractivism should not be understood solely as an economic mechanism of resource removal, but rather as a multidimensional structure of domination that organises the unequal circulation of wealth, authority, and knowledge across global hierarchies. In this context, my practice can be understood as an attempt to resist extractive modes of research by privileging reciprocity, co-creation, and relational forms of knowledge production over the extraction of experiences, narratives, or data from participants.
These extractive power relations are not confined to colonial histories, resource economies, or institutional knowledge production; they can also manifest within the university itself. Doctoral research is often framed as a process of mentorship and intellectual development, yet the supervisor–student relationship is inherently shaped by asymmetries of authority, recognition, and institutional power. Within such hierarchies, there is a risk that doctoral students’ intellectual labour, emerging ideas, and creative contributions become vulnerable to forms of epistemic extraction. Critical scholarship on academic labour has highlighted how the boundaries of authorship, ownership, and attribution can become blurred when supervisors, institutions, or more established scholars exercise disproportionate control over the circulation of knowledge. In some cases, students may experience their research being appropriated, insufficiently acknowledged, or redistributed within academic networks without their full consent or participation. While such practices are not universal and often occur through institutional cultures rather than individual malice, they nevertheless reveal how universities can reproduce broader extractive logics in which knowledge becomes a resource to be managed, circulated, and accumulated through unequal relations of power. From this perspective, resisting extractivism requires not only a critique of colonial and capitalist systems but also an examination of how authority, recognition, and intellectual ownership are negotiated within academic institutions themselves.
Rodney, W. (1972) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.
Madhok, S. (2021) ‘Coloniality, political claims-making and the analytics of extractivism’, Contemporary Political Theory, 20(4), pp. 695–714.
Angosto Ferrández, L.F. (2023) Extractivism and Society in the Global South. London: Routledge.
Linguistic sexes and Genders
04 June 26
Gender As Identity or As Possession
‘Which means that men have attributed subjectivity to themselves and have reduced women to the status of objects, or to nothing. This is as true for actual women as it is for the gender of words’. pg 70-71
… Return to nature, return to what separates men and their objects…
Pavlovism at Art school
01 June 26
Pavlovian Pedagogy and the Conditioning of the Doctoral Researcher
My supervisory experience revealed a pedagogical model that operated less as a dialogic, research‑led exchange and more as a behaviourist training environment. When I attempted to introduce my ongoing research into supervision—seeking space for intellectual reciprocity and the time required for my dyslexic processing—the response I received was that “this is not what supervisions are for.” I was told that the purpose of supervision was to absorb information. This expert / student dynamic infantises the student and removes their voice. Enforcing the idea that the expert is objective and the student is merely an empty vessel awaiting expertise. Often I barely spoke any words, there was little to no exchange. This framing positioned me not as a researcher engaged in a live enquiry, but as a passive surface onto which institutional knowledge would be deposited.
This dynamic was never disclosed during interview, nor was it presented as part of the supervisory contract. Instead, it emerged through repeated encounters that gradually conditioned my bodily and intellectual responses within the supervisory space.
Drawing on Pavlovian models of classical conditioning, the supervisory environment functioned as a system of stimulus–response training. The rapid pace of questioning, the lack of conversational space, the interruptions, and the dismissal of my need for processing time became recurrent stimuli. Over time, these stimuli produced predictable responses: silence, contraction, self‑erasure, and the anticipation that my research would not be welcomed. The supervisory room itself became a conditioned stimulus, associated not with scholarly exchange but with the expectation of compliance, speed, and deference.
For a dyslexic researcher, the temporal demands of this model were not merely inconvenient; they were structurally exclusionary. My need for several minutes to formulate a response was treated as a disruption rather than a legitimate cognitive rhythm. The repeated pairing of my slower processing with supervisory impatience or dismissal created a form of aversive conditioning, in which speaking became risky and withholding became safer. This is not an interpersonal misunderstanding but a predictable outcome of a pedagogical model that privileges neurotypical speed and institutional fluency.
The insistence that supervision is a site for “absorbing information” reveals a deeper epistemic orientation: a positivist, hierarchical, and behaviourist conception of knowledge transmission. Within this model, the student is implicitly cast as a blank canvas, an unformed subject awaiting expert inscription. My attempts to bring my own research into the space were reframed as a category error—as if the presence of my thinking disrupted the proper functioning of the supervisory apparatus. This is a form of epistemic conditioning: the student learns, through repeated cues, that their research is peripheral, their voice secondary, and their agency misaligned with institutional expectations.
Such conditioning is not neutral. It reproduces a hidden curriculum in which certain bodies, temporalities, and epistemologies are legitimised, while others are rendered inconvenient or unintelligible. For a practice‑as-research, alternative to positivist modes, materially grounded researcher, this behaviourist supervisory model is not simply inadequate; it is fundamentally incompatible with the methodological and ethical commitments of the research itself.
In this sense, the harm is twofold. First, the supervisory structure conditioned me into a role I did not consent to: the compliant, silent, absorbent subject. Second, it attempted to condition me out of my own research, by repeatedly signalling that my enquiry, pace, and epistemic commitments were inappropriate for the supervisory space. The result was a profound dissonance between the stated aims of doctoral research—originality, criticality, independence—and the actual pedagogical practices enacted upon my body.
To name this dynamic as Pavlovian is not metaphorical. It is an accurate description of a supervisory environment that relied on repetition, affective cues, and behavioural shaping rather than intellectual engagement. Recognising this allows me to situate my experience not as personal failure or miscommunication, but as evidence of a broader institutional logic that conditions researchers into compliance rather than cultivating their research as a live, evolving practice.
Irigaray’s work makes visible the deeper cultural mechanism at play here. What she names cultural erasure—the systematic effacement of difference in order to maintain the dominance of a singular epistemic subject—provides a crucial theoretical frame for understanding the violence of this supervisory model. In my case, the refusal to accommodate my dyslexic temporalities, the denial of space for my ongoing research, and the insistence that supervision is a site for passive absorption rather than co‑construction, all function as practices of erasure. They do not merely overlook difference; they actively neutralise it.
For Irigaray, the respect for difference is not a matter of politeness or inclusion but a fundamental ethical relation. It requires recognising the other as a subject with their own rhythms, desires, and modes of knowing. In the supervisory encounters I describe, this respect was not in operation. Instead, the pedagogical structure enacted what Irigaray critiques: a subsumption of the other into the same, a demand that the student conform to the institution’s pre‑existing modes of speech, pace, and epistemic legitimacy.
Within this framework, my dyslexic processing time was not treated as a legitimate cognitive modality but as an interruption to the smooth functioning of the supervisory script. My research was not engaged as a live enquiry but as an inconvenience to the behaviourist model of knowledge transmission. The result was a form of epistemic conditioning and epistemic violence that attempted to train me out of my own difference—out of my methodology, my temporality, and my voice.
Seen through Irigaray, this is not simply a pedagogical misalignment. It is an instance of the institutional reproduction of sameness: a system that cannot tolerate the presence of an epistemic subject who does not mirror its own norms. The Pavlovian dynamic and Irigaray’s cultural erasure converge here: both describe mechanisms through which institutions shape subjects into predictable, compliant forms, and both illuminate how those mechanisms fail—and harm—those who inhabit difference.
By naming this, I reclaim interpretive authority over my experience. I refuse the conditioned role of the silent, absorbent subject and instead situate my response within a lineage of feminist, an alternative to positivist frameworks. In doing so, I reassert my research as a site of difference that cannot be assimilated into the institution’s behaviourist logic.
Luce Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference
31 May 26
Religious and Civil Myths
‘Patriarchy, like the phallocracy that goes with it, are in part myths which, because they don’t stand back to question themselves, take themselves to be the only order possible. That’s why we tend to think of myths as representing secondary realities rather than as one of the principal expressions of what orders society at any given time.’ p23-24
Women giving their voices away to men…
30 May 26
Women: Equal or different?
‘To demand equality as women is, it seems to me, a mistaken expression of a real objective. The demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or to what do women want to be equalised? To men? To a salary? To a public office? To what standard? Why not to themselves?’ Pg 12 Je,tu,nous: Towards a Culture of Difference – Luce Irigaray
This paragraph seems to come back to me now and again, it connects with Grosz’s book Volatile Bodies… I know it does. Both writers question why it’s equality, why women theorists tend to lend their work in comparison to white middle-class men, and by doing this they assert and confirm an imagined standard that they materialise through their own text. I find it bewildering that Kristeva doesn’t acknowledge the power of the abject to dismantle; a threat can be a good thing to a dangerous and inhumane situation, however she reduces it to a powerful threat to order that never steps out the house. And it could, it very well could. But it requires the actual act of refusal, refusal to go along with this idea that men’s voices take higher precedence. And to actually take note of difference rather than assuming and subsuming. This happened when, from my perspective, I wrote about whiteness; then in my draft I had the annotation ‘add Dyer here’. No. I’ve read Dyer inside out. Our differences matter. There was no, ok, let’s look at the differences, oh yeah he actually doesn’t say that …he said this.
The annotation ‘add Dyer here’ is not a neutral scholarly suggestion. It functions as a disciplinary reflex. The implication is that legitimacy arrives through citation of the recognised authority, even when my own analysis emerges from a different positionality or experiential relation to whiteness.
Of course, Richard Dyer is foundational to cultural studies. But my point generated from me; it seems to be that constantly routing discussion through established authorities can have the effect of flattening difference. The question becomes less ‘What is this argument saying’ and more ‘Which recognised voice authorises it’.
Critical but with exceptions ….as long as power dynamics stay intact
30 May 26
… be critical, use critical thinking, and yes use critical theory but apply it to the frameworks you work within, oh no, that’s not methodology, no, no, no.
The University decides the power play.
You can be “critical” and discuss critical theory as long as you don’t point that lens at the framework and institution that you are working within. That is what I’ve learned from University of Gloucestershire.
What happens when the object of critique is the institution that authorises the critique in the first place?
Epistemic violence.
Difference should not be subsumed – dancing-with
30 May 26
Within every body there exists a unique difference that should never be subsumed into sameness. Colonial practices have historically flattened difference into uniformity, erasing the complexity and specificity of lived experience.
My multi-sensory work emerges from my practice-based research, which investigates the body as multimodal, engaging, listening, smell, sight, presence, and relation rather than privileging vision alone.
As a neurodivergent person, my way of learning and understanding the world is deeply kinaesthetic and multifaceted. It is not purely visual. Traditional modes of learning often rely on a lead-and-follow model, encouraging us to look at something rather than experience with it. My practice seeks to shift this relationship towards an experience-with, inviting audiences into embodied encounters rather than detached observation.
Through the use of smell, touch, sound, and other sensory elements, I aim to create a non-exclusionary practice that welcomes multiple ways of engaging and relating. These sensory entanglements invite participants to form new associations and relationships with the work, rather than simply consume it visually.
Western epistemologies have long privileged vision as the dominant route to knowledge, positioning the gaze as a mechanism of distance, objectivity, projection, and mastery. My practice works against this hierarchy by engaging the body through multiple senses, allowing meaning to emerge through touch, breath, vibration, proximity, and other forms of embodied encounter. I aim to create situations that remain open to people who may not experience sight, hearing, taste or smell, refusing the assumption that knowledge must pass through a single sensory channel or be delivered from a fixed ‘knower’ to a passive receiver. Meaning is made together, and each person brings their own mode of relation.
Through these sensory entanglements, I seek to unsettle the colonial impulse to flatten difference into sameness. Instead, the work foregrounds relational, plural, and situated ways of knowing and relating — forms of knowledge that arise between bodies rather than from a detached observer. In doing so, the practice resists the authority of the gaze and opens space for alternative epistemologies grounded in multiplicity, access, and embodied presence.
Difference should be respected, not compared, that’s what is wrong with the western education frameworks. It is inherently colonialistic in it’s operation and how it ascribes and defines knowledge.
Take my words, (I) still exist
28 May 26
Je,Tu,Nous – Towards a Culture of Difference – Luce Irigaray
The Neglect of Female Genealogies // From Goddesses to Gods
…’A new logical order was established, censuring women’s speech and gradually making it inaudible.
Through incredible neglect and disregard, patriarchal traditions have wiped out traces of mother-daughter genealogies. Nowadays the majority of scientists claim, usually in good faith, that these have never existed except as a figment of female or feminist imagination’ p17
Many forms of female or embodied knowledge were prevented from becoming “official knowledge” in the first place.
It is important to recognise that many of these traditions and forms of knowledge may have been erased before they were ever able to leave a durable imprint within official history. Under patriarchal structures, men were historically positioned as the authorised “knowers,” controlling literacy, education, publication, and the institutional mechanisms through which knowledge acquires legitimacy. Credibility becomes possible only when publishability becomes possible. What is excluded from institutional discourse is often treated retrospectively as though it never existed.
I have become acutely aware of this process through my own academic experience. During revisions to papers, substantial sections concerning embodied artistic practices were repeatedly removed or struck through. Yet these same omissions were later described as “gaps” that a theatre-based supervisor could supposedly help me address. When I questioned these decisions, I was told that supervision was intended for “absorbing knowledge” rather than speaking within it, as though intellectual exchange were not itself an iterative process.
The effect of this positioning was to reduce me to a receiving object: a vessel expected to absorb institutional frameworks rather than contribute to them critically. Rather than supervision functioning as a collaborative exchange of ideas, it was often structured around preserving pre-existing intellectual authority and methodological boundaries.
Particularly revealing was the repeated use of the language of “evolution” by more than one supervisor. The implication was not simply that my work required development, but that the direction of my research — especially its engagement with embodiment and non-traditional forms of knowledge production — was incapable of properly “evolving” within accepted academic frameworks. Instead, I was subtly steered toward approaches aligned more comfortably with historically middle-class and institutionally sanctioned traditions of theatre scholarship.
Such experiences demonstrate how epistemological authority continues to operate through seemingly neutral academic language. Terms such as “affective development,” and “evolution” often conceal assumptions about which forms of knowledge are considered intellectually legitimate and which are regarded as excessively subjective, insufficiently objective, or methodologically marginal. Feminist and postcolonial theorists including bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Fred Moten, and Frantz Fanon have each, in different ways, examined how institutions shape not only the production of knowledge but also the conditions under which certain voices are authorised to speak.
My own experience functions as a case study of how spaces ostensibly designed for intellectual exchange — spaces in which cultural, methodological, and embodied differences should be engaged critically and respectfully — can instead become sites of erasure, curation, appropriation, or deletion before ideas ever enter the archive. Although much of this theoretical framework remains relatively new to me, encountering these thinkers has helped me articulate something I had already experienced materially: knowledge is not produced outside relations of power. It is shaped, regulated, and at times silenced through them.
In this sense, my disagreement was never with the idea of intellectual development itself, but with the narrow institutional terms upon which “development” and “evolution” were being defined. My knowledge is shaped by embodiment, social position, and lived experience, yet these dimensions were repeatedly treated as secondary to historically dominant, white, middle-class academic frameworks presented as universal norms. What this experience has ultimately forced me to question is not my capacity to “evolve,” but the limitations of academic structures that continue to mistake narrowness for universality.
Je, Tu, Nous – Towards a Culture of Difference – Luce Irigaray
27 May 26
The Neglect of female genealogies: From Goddesses to Gods
‘[S]ocieties other than patriarchal ones correlate to traditions in which there is a female cultural order, transmitted from mothers to daughters. Johann Jacob Bachofen, for example, outlines the basic characteristics of this female civilisation in Du regne de la mere au partrarcat. I myself have analysed certain events marking the transfer of the transmission of maternal-female power from the daughter to the son in Amante marine (particularly in the chapeters ‘Quand naissent les dieux’ and ‘Levres voilees’)
It should be pointed out that, with this transformation of spiritual genealogy, both the style and quality of the economy of discourse changed. Thus, in seizing hold of the oracle, of truth, the gods-men severed them from their earthly and corporeal roots. The change was accompanied by modifications in law, justice, and rhetoric. A new logical order was established, censuring women’s speech and gradually making it inaudible.’ Pg 17 (originally published 1990)
Irigaray describes a historical and symbolic shift from societies centred around maternal lineage and female spiritual authority to patriarchal systems dominated by men. Irigaray suggests that this transformation changed not only systems of power, but also language, law, ideas of truth, and whose voices were seen as valuable or authoritative.
Luce Irigaray and her book Amante Marine, explores the shift from female-centred systems of transmission and knowledge to male-centred ones.
Patriarchy did not simply displace women from positions of political authority; it also transformed the wider structures through which culture and knowledge were produced, including religion, language, law, logic, and systems of truth. Feminist historians have argued that these structures frequently marginalised female forms of authority, memory, and transmission.
Many historians continue to approach the past through frameworks historically shaped by male-centred and often white, middle-class academic traditions. At the same time, contemporary feminist scholars are frequently cautious about asserting the existence of a universal ancient matriarchy. This caution partly reflects an awareness that replacing one absolute historical narrative with another may reproduce the same phallocentric logic of universality and totalisation, only in reversed form. However this lends to phallocentric systems being unquestioned, full stop, instead of attempting to truth seek. That refusing to question phallocentric frameworks is itself a phallocentric move.
Feminist critiques also emphasise that historical knowledge itself was produced within institutions that long excluded women and non-white people from education, authorship, and scholarly authority. As a result, much of what became accepted as “history” was filtered through the perspectives, priorities, and assumptions of socially dominant men. This does not necessarily invalidate historical scholarship, but it does raise important questions about archival silence, representation, fuller accounts, history shouldn’t be biased based – then claim to be fact – constructing the idea of historical truth.
The theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen remain historically influential in debates surrounding matriarchy and the origins of patriarchy, although his conclusions are widely regarded as speculative and are not accepted as straightforward historical fact within mainstream scholarship. Nevertheless, concerns regarding gender imbalance within the historical profession remain relevant. A 2018 report by the Royal Historical Society found that over 60% of full-time permanent academic posts in history in the UK were occupied by men, while women held only 26.2% of professorships.
Royal Historical Society (2018) Promoting Gender Equality in UK History: A Report by the Royal Historical Society. London: Royal Historical Society.
University College London (2018) ‘New report on gender equality in UK History’, UCL News, 6 November. Available at: UCL News report (Accessed: 27 May 2026).
Gender Institute (n.d.) Academic appointments in history in the UK. Available at: Gender Institute report (Accessed: 27 May 2026).
Linguistic sexes and Genders: Gender As Identity or As Possession
‘[H]ow is gender attributed to words? It’s done on different levels and in different ways. At the most archaic level, I think there is an identification of the denominated reality with the sex of the speaking subject. La terre (the earth) is woman, leciel (the sky) is her brother. Le soleil (the sun) is man, the god-man. La lune (the moon) is woman, sister of the man-god. And so on. Something of this first identification always remains in the gender of words. The degree to which it is explicit or hidden varies. But there is another mechanism at work apart from the identification of designated reality and gender.’ Pg 70
The first claim is that in some older or mythic ways of thinking, gender in language comes from projecting human sex onto nature. The idea is that grammatical gender does not originate from formal rules, but from cultural imagination, where people first imagine natural things as male or female, and language then inherits those associations.
“Pinning Down”
26 May 26
Why is your methodology presenting as a reflection? …Because that is what it is…
The methodology is absent because, when you pin down a butterfly, you understand how it is displayed, but you do not understand the butterfly itself. Its very essence is removed in that violent colonial act of fixing and categorising. The refusal to do so is, in itself, the methodological and political stance of this work.
I understand that, in order to meet assessment criteria, a methodology section is expected. However, I am working through an intentionally elusive approach. In much post-structural writing — particularly in the arts and humanities — the object of inquiry often remains deliberately unresolved. Julia Kristeva does this in Powers of Horror: the entire text circles the abject through different examples and meditations precisely because the abject resists being pinned down as one thing or another.
I am not afforded that kind of word count or expansiveness, so I am trying to find a way to satisfy institutional criteria while also evading the epistemological violence those criteria can enact. This tension is purposeful.
To pin something down is not always to understand it; often, it is only to understand its display. My methodology is therefore not dependent upon a singular material object. It can be applied across materials because the methodology lies not in the object itself, but in the decolonial operation — rupturing object white, (Starkey,2023-). In the process, movement, and refusal.
You wrote:
“Our comments are about what goes where, so, what should be part of a PaR PhD methodology section. As we said, the methodology is absent because what we have is a reflective presentation of approach and stance without first offering context or pinning down criteria.”
But this absence is not accidental. The absence speaks for itself. It is not an omission but an active methodological gap — the presence of the absence is in fact presence of something live, contingent, and still in motion, that is why its absent because words do not operate the same way. Hence, I am choosing live art as a methodology, as it challenges what is ‘fixed’, “absolute knowledge”, it unsettles that very notion.
To put it bluntly, if fugitivity is not permitted as a methodological choice, then the assessment criteria operate through a colonial and ableist logic.
Pinning it down
26 May 26
The most violent act is to pin the butterfly down. To categorise it and display it does not mean to understand the species; in fact, that is how many butterflies became extinct. The violent act of “pinning it down” kills the very thing it is. It is a colonial act, where displaying something is mistaken for “understanding,” but it is the very act that draws the life and essence out of the butterfly. I feel the same when it comes to the PhD: the building pressure to “pin down,” define, and categorise. I believe PhD practice is inherently colonial because there is no other option; live art and performance art have to find ways to bend to its rules, when it is precisely their liveliness that challenges these colonial practices.
Writing itself is not inherently colonial. What becomes colonial is the insistence that knowledge must be stabilised, categorised, and rendered transparent before it can be recognised. Decolonial scholars have long argued that coloniality is not only a historical project but an epistemological one: a way of determining what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to produce it. Within the PhD, the requirement to define and delimit often functions as though it were methodologically neutral, when it is in fact grounded in particular traditions of Western academic thought.
This is why I am drawn to Édouard Glissant’s notion of the right to opacity. Glissant argues that understanding does not require transparency, and that demanding complete intelligibility is itself an act of domination. Some forms of knowing remain irreducible without becoming invalid. Live performance exists precisely within this opacity. It exceeds the categories that attempt to contain it, and loses something essential when forced into fixed description.
Likewise, Jacques Derrida repeatedly unsettles the desire for final meaning. Language never completely captures the thing it seeks to describe; meaning is always deferred, always in motion. The institutional demand to pin practice down therefore appears paradoxical. It seeks certainty from forms of knowledge whose very nature resists closure.
I understand why many artist-researchers adopt meditative, poetic, or post-structuralist forms of writing within their PhDs. Such writing performs a refusal of closure while still operating within institutional expectations. My own approach differs. Rather than writing around instability, I seek to foreground embodied knowledges generated through practice itself. Yet I remain required to produce a minimum of 20,000 words. Whatever strategy one adopts, practice must ultimately become text before it is recognised as research. In this sense, the institution does not simply ask artists to document their work; it asks them to translate it into a form that conforms to its existing epistemological framework.
Walter Mignolo reminds us that coloniality survives through the continued privileging of particular ways of knowing over others. If this is the case, then the problem is not writing itself but the assumption that writing – and specifically academic writing that defines, categorises, and stabilises – is the highest or most legitimate form of knowledge production. Performance does not fail because it cannot be adequately pinned down. Rather, the framework fails by insisting that pinning down is the only acceptable means of understanding.
I was advised that if I had any “critique” to comment on in my paper, I should write “institution” rather than “my supervisors”. To me, this merely disperses responsibility. Institutions are not abstract entities; they are enacted and sustained by the people who work within them. Supervisors, examiners, committees, and universities all participate in maintaining these structures, even as many practitioners elsewhere actively imagine alternatives. To shift responsibility solely onto “the institution” risks obscuring the everyday decisions through which institutional norms are reproduced. If we acknowledge that institutions are made through practice, then responsibility for changing them must also be shared by those who inhabit them.
Dancing with
23 May 26
“Dancing with” first appeared in my work in 2016 to describe the relationship between materials and people. At the time, I did not coin the term in the sense of claiming ownership over it, as I believe dancing-with is a quality — an empathy that is co-jointly formed between people — rather than something that can be owned. However, the premise of this PhD requires terms to be defined and “pinned down,” partly in order to demonstrate its contribution. In itself, this can be understood as a colonial gesture or action. I navigate this tension by demonstrating how a single work can generate multiple, plural interpretations. This pluralism is not a weakness; rather, it challenges the notion that knowledge is singular, conclusion-driven, absolute, and fixed.
My methodology embraces originality not as something possessed only by a select few, but as something present within every person. The way each individual moves through the world is unique. The elitism embedded within educational systems often suggests that only certain people possess such a quality. My methodology challenges this notion by proposing that originality exists within everyone; however, stillness and empathy are required in order to recognise it, rather than subsume or appropriate it in a colonial manner.
Dancing with and in materials
21 May 26
Diving into water without knowing its depth, temperature, or current requires a relinquishing of control; the body must trust what it cannot yet measure. Surrendering requires trust in elements outside oneself; this kind of vulnerability is generative, fruitful, and community-driven. This is how I enter my work, and how I enter educational spaces such as conferences: with an understanding that over-determination can close down the very encounter I hope to create.
To let go is not to abandon responsibility, but to make room. It allows agency to disperse across the room, repositioning the audience not as passive recipients but as active constituents of the unfolding event. Meaning is not delivered intact from one body to another; it is negotiated live through presence, attention, discomfort, and response.
In this sense, dancing-with as a form of live art offers educational spaces an alternative to fixed, positivist, capitalist, closure-driven models of knowledge transfer or “dissemination.” My model instead encourages fluid co-production in real time. I say “my model” loosely, because this diminishing of hierarchy has occurred throughout history: it happens when we become receptive to difference rather than attempting to eliminate it; it happens when ego is relinquished, or at least temporarily set aside.
To produce knowledge together, rather than to disseminate it as though there is a fixed “knower” and “receiver,” “expert” and “amateur,” “creator” and “consumer,” is to unsettle these capitalist and Cartesian binaries. Dancing-with proposes an alternative to hierarchical structures of learning. Rather than moving efficiently toward conclusion, it creates the conditions for a shared wilderness: a space of uncertainty, real-time relation, and mutual becoming, where each participant arrives at their own point of opening.
Hierarchy Inversion ‘world upside down’ (WUD)
21 May 26
‘The primary site of contradiction, the site of conflicting desires and mutually incompatible representation, is undoubtedly the ‘low’. Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired.’ pg 4 , The politics and poetics of transgression
Cultures often have a conflicted relationship with what they consider “low” — socially, physically, morally, or aesthetically.
Christianity as an Example
In many forms of Christianity, meaning is organised through oppositions between what is considered “high” and “low.” The “high” becomes associated with heaven, purity, rationality, restraint, transcendence, and closeness to God, while the “low” is associated with the body, sexuality, appetite, dirt, emotion, disorder, and mortality. However, as The Politics and Poetics of Transgression suggests, the “low” is never simply rejected. Christianity itself is deeply invested in the body through suffering, blood, birth, death, temptation, and sin. The “low” therefore becomes both condemned and necessary, because the “high” can only define itself through contrast with what it excludes. Purity depends upon the existence of impurity; salvation depends upon sin. This creates an ambivalent relationship in which the “low” is simultaneously reviled and desired, feared and fascinated over.
“High” “Low”
Heaven Earth / Hell
Spirit Flesh
Purity Dirt / contamination
Rationality / order Desire / excess
Divine Animal / bodily
Salvation Sin
Elevation / transcendence Descent / degradation
If the body is discarded the dichotomy and binary no longer exits , it needs a body to maintain the ideology, to enforce the ideologies.
Rather than a head /body binary I propose ‘relation’ rather than ‘understanding’ as relation is both, its seeing bodies as whole when they arrive to the space, whether that’s a conference, exhibition, public art work. They arrive as an equal with their own subjectivities and history, and its an opportunity to converse and share.
I propose a mode of relation rather than a mode of understanding it does not seek to culturally analysis, but rather accept that mutual understanding is always incomplete and that is actually a generative aspect of relating with rather than to other people.
‘A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other (in the classic way that Hegel describes in the master-slave section of the Phenomenology), but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticised constituent of its own fantasy life.
In the world of carnival the awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the realisation that established authority and truth are relative. (Bakhtin 1968:10)
‘Bakhtin is undeniably ambiguous in his use of the terms ‘classical body’ and ‘grotesque body’ yet the imprecision seems not unjustifiable. Clearly, as often as they are able, ‘high’ languages attempt to legitimate their authority by appealing to values inherent in the classical body.’ Pg 21
Mikhail Bakhtin’s draws theory of carnival and the body, especially from his study of Rabelais and His World. He argues that carnival culture challenges fixed authority by revealing that social hierarchies, truths, and systems of power are temporary rather than absolute.
The first sentence – “In the world of carnival the awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the realisation that established authority and truth are relative” – highlights two important ideas.
Bakhtin’s idea of “the people’s immortality” is not about literal immortality, but rather the continuation of ordinary people across generations. Carnival celebrates the cycles of death and rebirth, as well as growth, eating, sex, and reproduction, all of which reflect the constant renewal of life. In this sense, the collective body of the people endures beyond temporary structures of power such as kings, churches, or governments.
At the same time, carnival challenges the idea that authority and truth are fixed or absolute. During carnival, social hierarchies are temporarily reversed: rulers can be mocked, sacred beliefs parodied, and distinctions between classes disrupted. By making authority an object of laughter, carnival exposes it as something historically constructed rather than permanent. As a result, truth becomes unstable and open to different interpretations rather than controlled by a single dominant authority.
Susan Sontag
20 May 26
‘Every place is a different language’
-Susan Sontag
~2 The politics and poetics of Transgression – Peter Stallybrass & Allon White
20 May 26
‘The high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forma, the human body, geographical space and the social order – is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures.’ pg2
The opposition between “high” and “low” is a fundamental way in which European cultures organise meaning and understanding. These terms are not just descriptive, but carry value judgments, where “high” is often associated with what is superior, pure, or noble, while “low” is associated with what is inferior, base, or less valued.
This pattern appears across four symbolic domains. In relation to psychic forms, or ways of thinking about the mind, “higher” is often linked to rational thought, intellect, or self-control, “high society”, while “lower” is associated with instinct or uncontrolled emotion. In relation to the human body, certain parts such as the head are culturally valued as “higher,” while bodily functions connected to the lower body are often seen as “lower” or impure.
The same structure is also visible in geographical space, where “up” or elevated spaces are associated with power, purity, or authority, and “down” or lower spaces are linked with inferiority or disorder.
In the social order, people and groups are organised into hierarchies such as upper and lower classes, reinforcing ideas of status and inequality.
Stallybrass and White argues that this high/low opposition is not accidental but a deeply embedded cultural logic that shapes how European societies categorise and make sense of the world.
Chapter 2: The Grotesque Body and the Smithfield Muse: Authorship in the Eighteenth Century
‘An utterance is legitimated or disregarded according to its place of production and so, in large part, the history of political struggle has been the history of the attempts made to control significant sites of assembly and spaces of discourse.’, pg 80
An utterance is legitimated or disregarded according to its place of production…” speaks to the way authority is socially distributed before one even begins to speak. A statement is treated as credible or worthless according to the classed, institutional, and cultural position from which it emerges. As a working-class white person, this friction exists within me bodily; perception has been absorbed into habit and self-surveillance. When I speak, middle-class spaces become conditional — access is granted only insofar as I perform the correct forms of ‘enlightenment’, or are willing to “absorb”, “adopt” behaviours of a “higher class”, self-presentation, or speech comes with condemnation. Doors close, subtly or explicitly. Silence, however, often permits passage. To remain quiet is to become more socially acceptable, less disruptive, less marked in clown white paint, invisibly white and complicit in the violence.
I simply can’t stay silent. So I am marked a clown for not changing, for not embracing a middle-class customs and behaviours, and ‘knowledge systems’ and I am ok with that.
Working-classness and Pedagogy
19 May 26
Coming from a working-class background, I have had to navigate research and pedagogy not as abstract fields, but as conditions for continuing to make art. When I worked in Croydon in 2019, the Metropolitan College taught a predominantly Indian and Pakistani student community. Rather than expecting students to adapt to my own cultural or artistic references, I expanded my curriculum by researching and foregrounding artists from a wide range of global and diasporic backgrounds. Although many students had encountered largely Eurocentric art histories through secondary school, I wanted to open up a broader landscape of artistic possibilities and ensure that they could see themselves reflected in the material.
During this PhD, I have experienced first-hand the costs of epistemic violence. I have become deeply committed to holding space for difference and nurturing it, rather than subsuming it into institutional sameness. I am conscious of how projection can deeply harm students, and I work to avoid this through attentive listening, openness, conscious teaching, and creating space for students to articulate themselves on their own terms. I value the beautiful nuances and singularities that each student brings, and I see it as my job to enhance and nurture these qualities. Pedagogy as an ethical practice of supporting autonomy and difference outside of oneself, rather than flattening the student into institutional homogenisation.
I want my students to challenge through rigorous dialogue within a safe, non-judgemental, and non-deterministic space. Along this journey, I encountered both inspiring practitioners and supervisors whose violence operated in insidious and defensive ways. Rather than recoiling, those experiences taught how not to teach. Walking through that pain became a process of shedding old skin and understanding more clearly who I am. I learned that refusal — the ability to say no — is as important as critique itself; moving through difficulty, however painful, can become a site of growth and self-determination. These experiences taught me not only resilience, but also what not to reproduce within tutorials and pedagogical relationships. They reinforced my commitment to forms of teaching grounded in ethics, criticality, care, accountability, and critical openness.
During this difficult period of my academic life, referring to the entirety of my PhD, the writings of bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Sara Ahmed, and Breny Mendoza were formative in shaping my thinking around pedagogy, power relations, embodiment, and institutional life. Mendoza explains how essential it is to stay grounded. Maintaining my artistic practice alongside these structures has required persistence; I have had to try to fight the internalisation of being alienated by a space I had previously been accepted in. This came with resourcefulness and a refusal to allow institutional norms to dilute the specificity of my experience. As both an artist and educator, I approach pedagogy as relational, political, and transformative rather than instructional/directive driven, fostering spaces in which students can critically engage, challenge established structures, and develop their practices without abandoning the specificity of their own experiences.
Movement is unique, but it's not something that can be owned in the colonial sense.
10 May 26
10 May 26
What has happened to me over these past three years and three months has been unlike anything I could have imagined. The violence is insidious, self-serving, calculated, and designed to wear away at my sense of safety and self. Living inside something prolonged and intentional changes a person. It alters the nervous system, sharpens perception, and forces an awareness that cannot easily be undone.
For a long time, I think parts of me lived in complacency, half asleep at the wheel because I still believed life would largely unfold within understandable limits. What I experienced shattered that assumption. It exposed how vicious a collective, supposedly in the care of people, can be.
The experience activated a part of me that could no longer remain passive. It awakened the need to become proactive, discerning, and deliberate about my own life. Complacency, when it falls away, pulls back all the layers of epidermis and exposes flesh. It’s painful, but I really needed to wake up through the worst kind of death possible: relinquishing the skin. Survival needed my attention. I have had to learn how to protect my peace, trust my instincts, recognise patterns, and reclaim authority over myself all while doing a PhD.
There is grief in acknowledging what this period has taken from me. And they are welcome to it. There is also clarity in recognising what it revealed. I am no longer asleep to my own life. The violence may have shaken me, but it also disrupted the illusion that endurance alone is enough. I understand now the necessity of action, boundaries, awareness, and self-possession. To speak for oneself is the most powerful thing that anyone can do.
A philosophy that escapes ownership
10 May 26
The Art of Dancing With Life
Dancing with, is simply, you cannot own movement.
“Dancing with life” is not a formalised school of thought but a lived practice — an everyday philosophy. It means living with life the way a dancer meets movement; with responsiveness, presence, and openness treating life as something to move with rather than control.
The movement is not something that can be owned or coined like traditional philosophy, much like how many Indigenous traditions understood the land: as relational rather than possessive. It is closer to air or movement — something shared yet uniquely expressed through each individual life. Just as every body moves in its own idiosyncratic way, each person develops their own way of orienting themselves toward the world.
At its core, dancing-with-life invites a stance of attentiveness: an openness to pleasure, discomfort, ambiguity, and the shifting states in between. It encourages flexibility, responsiveness, and relational presence. Dance is powerful because it evokes movement, timing, remnants of personal history, and the capacity to meet what arises without rigidity. Life is framed not as something to control, but as something to move with.
Seen this way, dancing-with-life is less a doctrine than a mode of participation. It bridges contemplation and embodied action, offering both a conceptual lens and a set of practices for cultivating awareness, resilience, and grounded wellbeing in everyday experience. It functions simultaneously as a philosophy in intention and a discipline in enactment — a way of relating that becomes real only through how one moves through the world.
The Art of Dancing With Life
10 May 26
Integration as a Way of Living
Rather than operating as a formalised school of thought, the idea of dancing with life works more like an everyday philosophy , it is not something owned or coined, it would be like trying to own the air we breathe, or how each body moves in an idiosyncratic way — a way of orienting yourself toward the world. It invites a stance of attentiveness, pleasure, discomfort, states in between, flexibility, and relational presence. The dance is powerful because it is movement, timing, improvisation, and the capacity to meet whatever arises without rigidity. It frames life not as something to control, but as something to move with.
Seen this way, “dancing with life” is less a doctrine and more a lived action. It links contemplation with embodied action, offering both a conceptual lens and a set of practices for cultivating awareness, resilience, and a grounded sense of wellbeing in daily experience. It functions as a philosophy in intention and a discipline in enactment — a way of thinking that only becomes real through the way one moves through the world.
Alternative Abject: I am in love (May, 2026)
07 May 26
Alternative Abject: I am in love (May, 2026) – Live art and dual sound intervention: University of Gloucestershire, UK
The piece visits my mother’s birth of me, the messy floundering of a body coming into the world. She describes meeting me for the first time; the story resonated with Julia Kristeva notion of the abject, but instead of seeing it as a threat to order, “the friend that stabs you in the back,” as Julia Kristeva puts it, I see the destabilisations of borders and boundaries as a positive in unsettling whiteness.
I see abjection here as a decolonising force of nature: something that disrupts semiotics and visual language, exposing that which exceeds representation and escapes the limits of speech. In doing so, it begins to dismantle the fallacies of tradition and the proprietary structures that sustain it.
This disturbance extends into the sonic dimension of the work. Sound spills, breathes, and leaks beyond containment. Two adjacent speakers construct a contextual space in which the room itself — along with all bodies that accompany it — determines the work’s ultimate sound. Audio is therefore not fixed, but relational: shaped by proximity, movement, interference, and resonance.
Endless Vastness and Worlds Emerging
01 May 26
Water
Diving into water without knowing its depth, temperature, or current requires a relinquishing of control; the body must trust what it cannot yet measure. This is how I enter my work, and how I enter educational spaces such as conferences: with an understanding that over-determination can close down the very encounter one hopes to create.
To let go is not to abandon responsibility, but to make room. It allows agency to disperse across the room, repositioning the audience not as passive recipients but as active constituents of the unfolding event. Meaning is not delivered intact from one body to another; it is negotiated live, through presence, attention, discomfort, and response.
In this sense, live art offers education an alternative to capitalist, outcome-driven models of knowledge transfer. Rather than moving efficiently toward conclusion, it creates the conditions for shared wilderness: a space of uncertainty, real-time relation, and mutual becoming, where each participant arrives at their own point of opening.
Rupturing Object White: Notes on Method, Refusal and Making Knowledge Otherwise
27 April 26
For the past 13 years, my research has unfolded through a live, relational practice that refuses to treat art as an object and knowledge as something extracted, measured, or tidied into data. My methodology sits within what Brad Haseman describes as the performative paradigm — a mode of inquiry where research is generated through the act of making, in the presence of others, and in response to the contingencies of live situations. Rather than gathering data about people, this approach insists on working with them, acknowledging that knowledge emerges through encounter, co‑presence, and embodied exchange.
This way of working is inseparable from the political intent of my wider project, Rupturing Object White. The phrase names a structure I have encountered repeatedly in art and education: the expectation that artistic work should become a stable, legible “object,” and that students should conform to institutional norms that privilege neutrality, objectivity, “talent”, distance, and Eurocentric forms of polish. My practice pushes against this. It treats the live moment as the research, not the residue left behind.
A key part of this methodology is refusal — not as withdrawal, but as a generative act. Drawing on thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, I understand refusal as a way of protecting one’s epistemic position, especially when working within structures that often mishear or egotistically overwrite marginalised voices. In my own practice, refusal takes the form of resisting demands for documentation that flatten the work, or for explanations that translate embodied knowledge into institutional language. Instead, I work to hold open the space where the live encounter can speak for itself.
My research is practice‑led, but it is also pedagogical. It asks how knowledge is shaped, authorised, and constrained within art schools — particularly through supervision and assessment. These processes do not simply evaluate artistic work; they actively produce it. They determine what counts as legitimate knowledge, who is permitted to speak, and under what conditions. By situating my practice within decolonial and critical epistemologies, I examine how these structures reproduce certain aesthetic and intellectual norms, and how live, relational, and performative practices can unsettle them.
Rupturing Object White is therefore not only about the artwork, but its an ethical ongoing practice. It is about the art school, the institutional frame, and the broader systems that define what art is allowed to be. To rupture the “object,” each of these layers must be named and worked through. My practice becomes a way of doing this — not by offering a new object (reinstating white) but by shifting the conditions under which knowledge is made.
This blog post is a small part of that ongoing work: a marker, a trace, a public record of the methodological ground I stand on. The full project continues to evolve through live encounters, refusals, and the insistence that knowledge can be made otherwise.
Unravelling Fallacy
23 April 26
My Live artwork treats knowledge as emergent, relational, and unfixed. It’s not something to be served as a polished object at a conference. I don’t present images and text at conference and discuss past performance art pieces, but rather I use the conference as a shared arena to make work with people, rather than delivering it to them. Gestures have the power to dis-locate visual and semiotic language, as Baz Kersaw asserts (1991). Live art can offer educational spaces other modes that actually disrupt hierarchical ideologies and systems. My work challenges whiteness, through ‘presentation’ rather than representation, through the deemed white body in real-time I apply white paint, take off my bra and show a bare non white chest. I roll around onto the white paint on conference tables, allowing people to see the unravelling of the female white figure seen in eurocentric paintings. Rather than reinstating another ‘reinterpretation’ I choose performance as its ephemerality shapeshifts, and disrupt ideologies that depend on tradition/ the still, I don’t seek to replace whiteness with whiteness but to expose it’s fallacy. Hence I choose fugitivity.
Movement is my epistemology…
23 April 26
Movement is my epistemology:
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bodies know things that institutions cannot measure
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movement exposes knowledge that is personal, specific, and unrepeatable
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this undermines the idea that expertise belongs to a select few
What I am proposing is deeply democratic and anti-hierarchical.
Paulo Freire
19 April 26
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) insists that education must be dialogical, participatory, and rooted in the lived experience of the oppressed. He rejects neutrality, arguing that pedagogy is always political, and that true learning comes through praxis, reflection and action together.
Education is never neutral; it must intervene against oppression and create spaces of liberation.
Negotiating Visibility and Silence: The Dual Position of Working-Class Whiteness
19 April 26
To occupy the position of a working-class white person is to exist within a fraught and often contradictory social terrain. This position is marked by a persistent duality: a simultaneous proximity to and distance from the privileges historically associated with whiteness. Within this space, identity is not fixed but instead unstable, shifting rapidly depending on context, perception, and action. For example, I did not have an accent when I taught at Hagley High School; when I teach at Worcester schools, I do, and the students make me aware of my differences. The tension lies in a continual trade-off between speaking and remaining silent—between challenging the structures that uphold whiteness and benefiting, however uneasily, from them.
Whiteness has long been constructed as an invisible norm, a maintained social category that derives its power from its perceived neutrality. As Richard Dyer (1997) argues, whiteness secures its dominance by positioning itself as universal and unmarked, rendering other racial identities as “different” while escaping scrutiny itself. However, this system does not distribute its benefits evenly among all those categorised as white. Class complicates access to these privileges, creating fractures within whiteness itself. For the working-class white subject, this produces an ambivalent relationship to privilege—one that is both present and inaccessible, visible yet out of reach.
The historical construction of whiteness further underscores its instability. Nell Irvin Painter (2010) demonstrates that whiteness has never been a fixed or biologically coherent category but rather one that has shifted over time, incorporating and excluding different groups according to political and economic needs. This historical mutability reveals whiteness as a category that must be actively maintained. For working-class white individuals, whose class position may undermine full access to dominant forms of power, this maintenance becomes particularly visible.
The dualistic experience described here is rooted in this contradiction. On one hand, speaking out—whether through artistic practice, critique, or lived expression—risks alienation from the conditional privileges afforded by whiteness. To name and expose whiteness as a constructed and maintained category is to disrupt its invisibility, thereby relinquishing the comfort of its normative position. As bell hooks (1992) suggests, acts of looking and representation are deeply political; to interrogate dominant frameworks is to challenge the gaze that sustains them. This act of articulation can therefore result in a form of social displacement, where the speaker is no longer fully aligned with dominant structures of power.
On the other hand, silence maintains proximity to these privileges but at a cost. Remaining silent entails complicity, a passive participation in the ongoing reproduction of racial hierarchies. This silence creates a voyeuristic position, echoing what Edward Said (1978) conceptualises as the power of the observing gaze—the ability to look, categorise, and consume without being implicated. While Said’s work focuses on Orientalism, the underlying logic of detached observation resonates here: the working-class white subject may observe the operations of whiteness critically, yet remain positioned within its framework.
My notion of a “flicker” in the image underscores the instability of this identity. The working‑class white subject is continually reinterpreted through shifting social lenses: sometimes folded into the dominant category of whiteness, sometimes pushed to its edges through classed and cultural markers. This instability resonates with Fanon’s (1952) account of how identity is fractured by systems that assign meaning from the outside. While Fanon writes from a context shaped by colonial power, his analysis of externally imposed identity offers a way to understand the conditional and performative nature of whiteness as well.
Artistic and critical practices that engage with this duality play a crucial role in exposing the mechanisms of whiteness. By making visible what is often rendered invisible, such work disrupts the illusion of neutrality and universality described by Dyer (1997). It reveals whiteness as something sustained through silence, denial, and selective visibility. In doing so, it opens a space for interrogation and resistance.
Importantly, this exposure is not without risk. To challenge whiteness from within is to occupy a precarious position, one that resists easy categorisation. It involves navigating tensions between complicity and critique, belonging and exclusion. Yet it is precisely within this tension that critical insight emerges. By inhabiting this dual space, the working-class white subject can illuminate the fractures within whiteness and question the structures that uphold it.
In conclusion, the experience of working-class whiteness is defined by contradiction and negotiation. It demands constant awareness of the trade-offs between speech and silence, visibility and invisibility, privilege and marginality. By confronting these tensions, and by refusing the comfort of neutrality, it becomes possible to expose whiteness as a maintained social category–one that is neither natural nor inevitable, but historically constructed, contingent, and open to critique.
Reference List
Dyer, R. (1997) White. London: Routledge.
Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
hooks, b. (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
Painter, N.I. (2010) The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton.
Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Somatophobia and Western Rationalism
19 April 26
Somatophobia, understood as the systematic denigration or exclusion of the body as a legitimate site of knowledge, operates in Western philosophy not merely as a thematic bias but as a constitutive epistemic condition. It functions as a form of scaffolding that both inaugurates and stabilises the hierarchical organisation of knowledge, particularly within the rationalist tradition.
Once the body is positioned as a locus of epistemic unreliability—associated with contingency, affectivity, and error—philosophical inquiry becomes structurally compelled to erect and maintain a division between the cognitive and the corporeal. This division, far from incidental, underwrites the privileging of abstraction, the elevation of universality, and the systematic marginalisation of embodied modes of knowing. In this sense, somatophobia is not an accidental prejudice but a generative principle that shapes the internal coherence of rationalist epistemology.
The canonical articulation of this structure is found in René Descartes’ dualistic metaphysics, which establishes the foundational distinction between res cogitans and res extensa. In the Meditations, Descartes asserts that “I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks” (Descartes, 1641/1996, p. 19), thereby securing the thinking subject as the primary locus of certainty. This move is not simply ontological but decisively epistemological: it institutes a regime in which knowledge is grounded in the indubitability of thought, while the body—subject to deception and sensory fallibility—is relegated to a secondary and suspect status. The methodological doubt that structures Cartesian inquiry operates precisely through the suspension of trust in bodily experience, revealing the extent to which somatophobia is embedded at the very origin of modern epistemology.
The implications of this gesture reverberate throughout subsequent philosophical developments. Once the body is construed as epistemically contaminating, rationalism must continually police the boundary between pure thought and embodied experience. The sensory is recoded as a domain of potential distortion, while the intelligible is elevated as the site of truth. As Susan Bordo incisively observes, “the body is seen as the source of all that threatens our attempts at control” (Bordo, 1993, p. 144), a formulation that captures the affective undercurrent of rationalist epistemology: the desire to secure certainty through the exclusion of variability and excess. Somatophobia thus operates not only as a cognitive disposition but as an affective economy, organising philosophical anxiety around the instability of embodied existence.
Immanuel Kant’s critical project, while ostensibly mediating between empiricism and rationalism, in fact consolidates this hierarchical arrangement at a transcendental level. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously maintains that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant, 1781/1998, A51/B75). Although this formulation acknowledges the indispensability of sensibility, it simultaneously subordinates it to the synthesising activity of the understanding. Sensory intuition provides the manifold of experience, but it is only through the imposition of a priori categories that this manifold becomes intelligible as knowledge. The body, as the site of sensibility, is thus rendered necessary yet epistemically insufficient—its contributions always already mediated, organised, and ultimately governed by the structures of reason. In this respect, Kantian philosophy does not overcome somatophobia but rather rearticulates it within a more sophisticated transcendental framework.
The Enlightenment’s broader epistemic aspirations further entrench this somatophobic orientation. The ideal of a universal, disembodied rationality—what Thomas Nagel later terms “the view from nowhere” (Nagel, 1986)—presupposes the possibility of knowledge that is unconditioned by the particularities of embodiment. This ideal is predicated on the abstraction from all situated perspectives, thereby effacing the material and historical conditions under which knowledge is produced. Yet, as Donna Haraway argues, such claims to disembodiment constitute a “god trick,” a rhetorical manoeuvre that “conquers and contains all that is not itself” while denying its own positionality (Haraway, 1988, p. 581). The Enlightenment subject, ostensibly neutral and universal, is thus revealed to be a historically specific construct whose authority depends upon the exclusion of embodied difference.
These epistemic commitments crystallise into a series of binary oppositions—mind/body, reason/emotion, culture/nature—that structure the Western philosophical canon. Crucially, these binaries are not symmetrical but hierarchically ordered, with the first term in each pair occupying a position of epistemic privilege. Somatophobia functions as the mechanism through which this hierarchy is naturalised and sustained, rendering the marginalisation of the body both intelligible and necessary within the prevailing conceptual framework. Embodied knowledge, insofar as it is associated with particularity, affect, and materiality, is systematically devalued, while abstract reasoning is elevated as the sole legitimate pathway to truth.
However, the coherence of this structure has been increasingly contested within twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. Phenomenology, in particular, offers a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between body and knowledge. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “the body is our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 147) directly challenges the Cartesian exclusion of embodiment, positing instead that perception is always already embodied and that the body is the condition of possibility for any engagement with the world. Knowledge, on this account, is not the product of a disembodied intellect but emerges through the lived, situated experience of the perceiving subject.
Feminist epistemology further extends this critique by foregrounding the political and ethical implications of somatophobia. Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” insists that all knowledge is produced from a particular embodied standpoint, thereby rejecting the illusion of a universal, disembodied perspective (Haraway, 1988). This intervention not only revalues embodied experience but also exposes the ways in which somatophobic epistemologies have historically excluded marginalised bodies from the domain of legitimate knowledge production. The body, far from being a source of epistemic error, becomes a site of critical insight, enabling forms of understanding that are inaccessible to abstract reason alone.
To assert that “everything works together and in situ” is, in this context, to recognise the systemic character of somatophobia within Western epistemology. The exclusion of the body is not an isolated philosophical error but part of a broader network of conceptual, affective, and institutional practices that mutually reinforce one another. The privileging of disembodied reason is intertwined with other forms of hierarchical differentiation, including those structured by gender, race, and class. Somatophobia thus operates as a nodal point within a larger epistemic regime, sustaining both philosophical and social orders through the marginalisation of embodied difference.
In conclusion, somatophobia must be understood as a foundational element in the epistemic architecture of Western rationalism. From its Cartesian inception through its Kantian reformulation and Enlightenment consolidation, the suspicion of the body has structured the terms upon which knowledge is defined and evaluated. Yet, as contemporary philosophical interventions demonstrate, this structure is neither inevitable nor immutable. By exposing the historical contingency and normative implications of somatophobia, such critiques open the possibility for a reconfiguration of epistemology—one that acknowledges the constitutive role of embodiment and reclaims the body as an indispensable site of knowing.
References
Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Descartes, R. (1641/1996) Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by J. Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.
Kant, I. (1781/1998) Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D. A. Landes. London: Routledge.
Nagel, T. (1986) The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Somatophobia
19 April 26
Somatophobia becomes a kind of epistemic scaffolding once the body is framed as something that disrupts or contaminates thought. From that point on, rationalism is compelled to guard the line between mind and body, to privilege abstract or “pure” thinking, to distrust sensory or affective experience, and to treat embodied knowledge as a source of error or excess — and in some cases raw material that’s stolen from its roots. I was once told that I had “real gems” in my submitted modules; funny how I saw these gems distributed without citation, and or, gaslighted by, as educators like to put it, thank you for your thoughts… which is code for empty thinking. Body knowledge, knowledge derived from lived experience, I have found to be discarded in educational spaces by people supposedly “superiors” — I might say gatekeepers. This suspicion hardens into the familiar dualisms of the Western canon: Descartes’ split between res cogitans and res extensa, Kant’s unease with empirical or sensory input, and the Enlightenment’s investment in a supposedly universal, disembodied “view from nowhere.” This shows how early philosophical somatophobia sets the terms for the rationalist hierarchies that follow.
Art Institution
19 April 26
I no longer believe one can simultaneously take a seat at the table and attempt to dismantle it. The contemporary white educational system is not structured to accommodate such expansion; it is sustained by mechanisms of control and by an elitist, exclusionary logic. I was naive to imagine I could slip through the cracks and render education more inclusive. There is a profound hypocrisy in remaining within these sanctioned frameworks merely to secure the label of “research.” Yet I continue to wonder whether the degree of possibility is ultimately dependent on the institution itself.
Plural and Inclusive modes of practicing and relating in Education and the Arts
19 April 26
Pluralistic education systems aim to incorporate diverse perspectives and cultures into the curriculum, promoting understanding and respect among students.
Pluralistic education systems are designed to incorporate diverse perspectives and cultures into the curriculum, promoting understanding and respect among students. However, assessments often remain driven by middle-class norms, particularly in the way language and professionalism are defined. This means that forms of expression outside of what is considered “academic” or “professional” are frequently erased, while perspectives that do not align with middle-class academic expectations are misunderstood, modified, or excluded. As a result, students whose voices emerge through vernacular, oral traditions, or culturally embedded modes of knowledge are penalized, even though their contributions may be equally rigorous and insightful. This contradiction highlights how pluralism in theory is undermined by assessment practices in reality, revealing a hidden curriculum that privileges conformity to dominant linguistic and cultural codes while marginalising alternative epistemologies.
I am asking my supervisor and the examiner to resist such modifications, to attempt to stay with me if and when disconnect occurs. Essentially, I am asking for a request for epistemic hospitality or an appeal for interpretive patience. What I would call as ‘holding space even in indifference.’
Plural and Inclusive modes of practicing and relating in Education and the Arts
19 April 26
Pluralistic education systems aim to incorporate diverse perspectives and cultures into the curriculum, promoting understanding and respect among students.
Pluralistic education systems are designed to incorporate diverse perspectives and cultures into the curriculum, promoting understanding and respect among students. However, assessments often remain driven by middle-class norms, particularly in the way language and professionalism are defined. This means that forms of expression outside of what is considered “academic” or “professional” are frequently erased, while perspectives that do not align with middle-class academic expectations are misunderstood, modified, or excluded. As a result, students whose voices emerge through vernacular, oral traditions, or culturally embedded modes of knowledge are penalized, even though their contributions may be equally rigorous and insightful. This contradiction highlights how pluralism in theory is undermined by assessment practices in reality, revealing a hidden curriculum that privileges conformity to dominant linguistic and cultural codes while marginalising alternative epistemologies.
I am asking my supervisor and the examiner to resist such modifications, to attempt to stay with me if when disconnect occurs. Essentially, I am asking for a request for epistemic hospitality or an appeal for interpretive patience. What I would call as ‘holding space even in indifference’
Honey and Time
17April 26
Honey enters the work as a sacred, antiseptic, viscous substance. Its slowness and stickiness create a kind of temporal drag that resists the speed, efficiency, and disciplinary pace expected in institutional spaces — what I think of as capitalist time. Honey carries a long cultural history of healing and ritual (Howes, 2014; Classen, 1993), and I use it to bring a counter‑logic into the clinical atmosphere of the gallery, the university, or any space that tries to regulate bodies and behaviour.
It has been with me for a long time. In sickly sweet (2013), honey appeared as something tender at first — a sweet moment — until it tipped into excess. The kind of excess that surfaces in Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel & Dalí, 1929), particularly in the moment where a cloud slices across the moon and is spliced with the image of a horse’s eye being cut open, thick liquid spilling out. The horror arises from the scale tipping into imbalance — beauty crossing into violence, tenderness into rupture. That collision resonates with Georges Bataille’s sense of excess, especially in Story of the Eye (Bataille, 1982), which I happened to be reading at the time.
In this current project, honey works as an attempt at healing myself — gathering the parts of me that had been displaced and letting them come back together. There is a futility in trying to bring pieces back with a slippery, disobedient substance: it sticks, but it also slips through the fingers. But unlike strands of queer theory that frame this slippage as failure — such as Halberstam’s embrace of “queer failure” or Muñoz’s insistence on the not‑yet as a horizon — I understand it as possibility, an offering, an opening rather than a collapse. Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, with its attention to misalignment and deviation, helps me think of this movement not as error but as orientation. The work holds that tension. Things come together loosely, stickily, without forcing coherence, or a preconceived resolution and without betraying time or history.
Honey sits close to Kristeva’s notion of the abject, though I don’t treat the abject as something to be expelled or condemned in the way Kristeva frames it (Kristeva, 1982). I’m not interested in the symbolic restraints that keep the abject at the threshold of possibility. I move toward it. I treat it as a site of potential. The abject isn’t the “friend who stabs you in the back” as Kristeva describes it (1982); for me it is the untouched spirit, the part of the self that refuses to be sanitised or made palatable.
Honey’s sacred quality interrupts the expectation of neutrality. Its antiseptic nature gestures toward care, repair, and the tending of wounds — personal wounds, institutional wounds, the kinds of wounds that accumulate in spaces that claim objectivity while quietly disciplining the people inside them (Ahmed, 2012; Puwar, 2004).
Artist Statement #2
14 April 26
Emma Starkey is a Birmingham-born interventionist/ live artist and doctoral researcher. Her practice is defined by a radical rejection of traditional art education, which she critiques as a positivist system that treats knowledge as a fixed commodity. Instead, she proposes a methodology described as live art knowledges, where meaning is not something to be handed down from an expert to a student, but rather something relational and co-produced in the moment of live art.
Her core artistic philosophy, often titled Rupturing Object White, serves as a political and pedagogical stance against the extractive logic of institutions. This concept is a direct challenge to the white cube gallery model and the Eurocentric standards of polished, stable art objects. Starkey argues that turning art into a finished, sellable product allows institutions to own and refine the lived experiences of artists, particularly artists that also occupy the same space as ‘researcher’ and those from working-class backgrounds. By focusing on the body in real-time, unpredictable exchanges, she ensures that her work remains ephemeral and unpossessable, protecting it from being converted into institutional capital.
Within this framework, Starkey emphasises the importance of the politics of voice and the lived reality of the artist. She frames her research process using the metaphor of liquid to vapour to liquid, suggesting that knowledge can move through gestures, breath, and the physical dynamics of a space rather than being captured in a rigid text. This approach is intentionally disruptive, designed to interrogate the hidden power structures and hierarchies that decide whose voices are considered legitimate in academic and artistic spaces.
While her work involves rigorous intellectual debate that critiques the traditional roles of the educator and the curator. She continues to develop performance as a form of resistance. Her ultimate goal is to create a space where knowledge is recognised as a messy, embodied encounter that refuses to be refined or silenced, reshaped or dulled by elite institutional norms.
Artist Statement
14 April 26
Emma Starkey is a Birmingham-born live artist developing alternatives to positivist modes of knowledge sharing in educational and artistic spaces. Her work challenges the colonial assumption that knowledge is something delivered from an authorised voice to a passive audience. Instead, she positions knowledge as relational emerging between bodies, conditions, and the specific dynamics of a shared moment.
Through site-responsive, unrehearsed actions, she resists institutional demands for knowledge to be “polished” or fixed in text or image in order to be considered legitimate. Her performances create situations where meaning is co-produced, unstable, and felt rather than captured. Starkey’s practice foregrounds embodied, anti-extractive forms of knowing and relating that cannot be easily appropriated or turned into institutional capital.
She works from the belief that movement reveals nuances that are beautifully idiosyncratic forms of knowledge that dismantle the idea that only some people hold expertise while others do not. For Starkey, every person carries a universe of knowledge that becomes visible through relation, not hierarchy.
Starkey is currently making live work aimed at dismantling the properties that maintain whiteness. As part of this, she refuses to document her performances, understanding the ephemeral as an epistemic and political movement — a way to dismantle without reinstating, to let knowledge remain unfixed and unpossessable. Whilst undermining whiteness as it relies on the stable, static/ tradition, it relies on the fallacy of the image.
Live Art knowledges emerges, arrives, shift, evolves
14 April 26
My live art practice challenges the idea that knowledge is something delivered to an audience — a one‑way transfer from an authorised knower to a passive receiver. Instead, it insists that knowledge is relational, co‑produced, and contingent on the specific people, bodies, and conditions present. This shift is not just methodological; it is less colonial.
Rupturing object white refuses the extractive logic where knowledge is taken, fixed, owned, and circulated as a stable object. By working live, I create situations where knowledge emerges through encounter rather than being imposed. It is not captured, tidied, or made into property. It moves through gesture, sound, timing, breath, proximity, and the dynamics of the room; forms of knowing that cannot be easily appropriated or turned into institutional capital. The work resists the colonial demand for knowledge to be fixed in text or image in order to be considered legitimate. Instead, it honours knowledge that is embodied, unstable, and shared in the moment, without being claimed or owned.
Rupturing Object White
11 April 26
This is the ecology in which Rupturing Object White takes shape. It is a practice that refuses extraction as a pedagogical norm. It insists that the student’s work is not raw material for institutional consumption. It insists that the person behind the words is not irrelevant. It insists that knowledge is not a resource to be mined but a relation to be held with care. In this sense, the practice is not only pedagogical; it is ethical. It is a refusal to participate in the quiet violence/s that is so often misrecognised as academic generosity, when really it is theft, an erosion of the self enacted through the consumption of another. This is what happens to working‑class voices: their lives are treated like raw material that requires refinement, and that refinement is taken on by someone who has never carried the pain and weight of living it.
Snippets and methodology fragments
9 April 26
My practice is live: it unfolds through the body in real time, in the unpredictable exchanges that happen when people meet without a script, without distance, without the safety of the finished object. The work sits in whatever rises between us — the hesitations, the misreadings, the shifts in weight or tone that you can’t rehearse or control. Nothing is fixed in advance. Meanings are made in the moment, through the encounter itself, not through a representation of it.
Process and object are inseparable
7 April 26
There is always pressure — subtle, structural, sometimes explicit — to define what my practice is. To stabilise it. To make it legible in the ways institutions prefer: fixed, ownable, extractive. But my work has never lived comfortably inside those frames, and I no longer pretend that it should.
Knowledge is not a specimen. It is not something to be pinned, labelled, and claimed. The institutional fantasy that knowledge becomes “true” only when immobilised is a colonial one: a belief that understanding is achieved through capture. When an alive butterfly is killed and pinned, do we understand it better, or have we simply made it easier to display? Some practices lose more than they gain when forced into stillness.
My work sits firmly in that space of loss — or rather, in the refusal of it.
The Violence of Fixing Knowledge
The demand to define a practice as if it were a static object is not neutral. It assumes that knowledge is something that can be owned, that clarity is achieved through containment, and that process is merely the messy prelude to a final, polished thing. But this is not how I work, and it is not how many artists I admire work either.
Tina Campt teaches us to listen to images — to attend to what vibrates beneath the surface. Nan Goldin’s photographs are inseparable from the life that produced them; they are not documents but continuations of intimacy. Richard Billingham’s images refuse aesthetic distance, insisting that the conditions of their making are part of their meaning.
In all of these practices, the object is not the endpoint. It is a trace of a lived process, still warm with the conditions that shaped it.
Performance and the Demand for Detachment
Performance art, however, is often asked to do the opposite. It is asked to detach from its own becoming. To produce evidence. To behave like an object long after the moment of encounter has passed.
I have learned — repeatedly, insistently — that this demand reveals more about institutional distance from lived practice than it does about the work itself. When performance is forced to mimic the logic of objects, something essential is lost: the relational, the embodied, the emergent. The very thing that makes performance a form of knowledge in motion.
My practice refuses that detachment. Not out of vagueness, but out of rigour. Because the process is not separate from the work; it is the work.
Process as Knowledge
To articulate my practice is to articulate a methodology of refusal:
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I resist the idea that knowledge must be fixed to be valid.
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I reject extractive frameworks that treat art as evidence rather than encounter.
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I insist that process and object are inseparable — not metaphorically, but materially.
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I align myself with artists whose work understands that meaning emerges through relation, not through capture.
A Practice That Stays Alive
If the pinned butterfly teaches us anything, it is that stillness is not the same as understanding. My practice remains alive by staying in motion — relational, embodied, responsive. It cannot be owned because it is not an object to be owned. It is a way of being with the world, and a way of letting the world be with me.
Process and object are inseparable. They always have been. And the moment we stop pretending otherwise, the work begins to breathe again.
Keeping the student’s voice intact!
06 April 26
Methods for Preserving Student Voice and Resisting Epistemic Violence
This pedagogical practice has been shaped through years of being with students, listening with them, learning alongside them. It comes from the long, uneven path of my own life — a neurodivergent person with a working‑class voice who learned early, and in the body, what it means not to be heard.
I grew up knowing what it felt like to be spoken over before I’d even opened my mouth. Teachers who corrected my accent. Rooms where my thinking was treated as messy or excessive. Moments where I felt myself shrink, not because I didn’t know something, but because I knew too much in the wrong way. I learned to read the micro‑hesitations, the polite dismissals, the way people’s faces changed when they decided you weren’t the kind of person knowledge comes from.
Those experiences didn’t just sit in my memory — they settled into my muscles, my breath, the way I enter a room. They taught me how easily institutions can make you disappear, little by little. They taught me the slow violence of being tolerated rather than welcomed. They taught me how epistemic erasure doesn’t always announce itself; sometimes it arrives as a smile, a raised eyebrow, a "suggestion" to “polish” your voice.
My practice grows directly out of that history. It is shaped by the years I spent navigating classrooms where my pace, my tone, my ways of thinking were treated as problems to be managed. It is shaped by the exhaustion of constantly translating myself into middle-class performance when my bones are working-class. It is shaped by the stubborn refusal that kept me here anyway — the insistence that my voice, my body, my ways of knowing were never the issue.
So what I do now with students is not abstract or theoretical. It is relational, embodied, and grounded in the politics of being a person who has had to fight for the right to speak in her own voice. I build spaces where people don’t have to contort themselves to be legible. Where knowledge doesn’t have to be neutral to be valid. Where the room adjusts to the person, not the other way around.
This practice is, in many ways, the pedagogy I needed and was deprived of. It is a refusal of erasure, a refusal of tidying, a refusal of the idea that only certain bodies produce knowledge worth hearing. It is a commitment to making education a place where no one has to shrink themselves to fit.
If you want, we can deepen it even further — bring in a specific moment, a turning point, a classroom memory, or a scene from your early life that crystallises this stance.
A relational, embodied approach to supervision and artistic pedagogy:
1. Decelerating Time as an Ethical Gesture
To keep a student’s voice intact, the first requirement is time; time that is unhurried, uncompressed, and unclaimed by institutional urgency, an anti-capitalist time. Even if there is an hour on the clock, if urgency is slowed down, one solid piece of advice is better than a load, where the teacher or supervisor didn't listen and just said what they wanted to see from the student, while dismissing the student's work. Deceleration is not simply a slower pace; it is an ethical refusal of the extractive habits that dominate academic encounters.
When I spent long days at Oxstalls – moving between the performance studies studio and the Fine Art spaces – I allowed myself to be with the work rather than move through it. I walked in and out of installations, circled objects, returned to gestures, and let atmospheres settle. This temporal spaciousness created conditions in which the student’s concerns could surface without being shaped by my interpretations. During this process if time has slowed down, it allows you to understand that the artwork is offering something outside of oneself and that deserves to be heard and attempted at the very least to be held.
Deceleration interrupts the impulse to categorise. It creates room for nuance, for uncertainty, for the student’s own language to emerge before mine enters the space.
2. Deep Listening as a Conscious, Embodied Practice
Listening is not passive. It is a disciplined, attentive act that requires the listener to notice their own habits of projection and resist this coloinial taught urge. Giving the student space!
My practice of listening involved:
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Attending with the student’s words, hesitations, and rhythms.
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Listening, step back and listen-with the work itself; its textures, materials, spatial logic, and affective charge.
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Moving my body in relation to the work, letting proximity and distance shift what I could perceive. Taking note of the subtlest of details, and varying distances close and stepping away, seeing it in space and how it operates in space and amongst other works.
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Noticing the moment my mind reached for familiar references or interpretive shortcuts, and choosing silence instead.
Deep listening is a form of ethical restraint. It acknowledges that the student’s work is not raw material for my expertise but a site of knowledge in its own right.
3. Relinquishing the Authority to Define
Hierarchies are always present in pedagogical encounters, but they do not have to be enacted. Being a PhD student in conversation with BA students did not grant me the right to overwrite their voice or determine the meaning of their work.
To avoid epistemic violence, I approached each student’s practice as:
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A world with its own internal logic.
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A site of knowledge that does not require my validation to be legitimate.
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A conversation partner rather than an object of analysis.
This stance resists the academic habit of “knowing better.” It keeps the student’s authorship intact.
4. Offering Adjacent References, Not Overwriting Ones
When I did speak – only after an extended period of listening, (almost an hour listening)– I offered advice on what I saw, what it spoke to me, what I thought really came through in terms of the correlation between the intention and the artwork; I gave references that sat adjacent/ horizontally with the student’s work. This adjacency is deliberate; it avoids collapsing the student’s practice into pre-existing categories or implying derivativeness.
Instead, adjacency:
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Opens conversational pathways without closing interpretive possibilities.
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Provides companionship rather than correction.
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Allows the student to remain the primary author of their own conceptual terrain.
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References become invitations, not directives.
5. Entering Into Conversation With, Not To
The difference between speaking with and speaking to is subtle but foundational. Speaking to risks reproducing hierarchy, expertise, and closure. Speaking with creates a shared space of inquiry.
Conversation with a student means:
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Letting their concerns shape the direction of the dialogue.
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Allowing uncertainty to remain present rather than rushing toward resolution.
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Treating the encounter as co-produced rather than delivered.
This approach keeps the student’s voice central and ensures that the pedagogical space remains relational rather than extractive.
Conclusion in-motion
To avoid epistemic violence is to commit to a pedagogy grounded in time, attention, and ethical restraint. It is to recognise that listening is an active practice, that hierarchy can be softened, and that references can be offered without taking ownership of meaning. Advise and notice what's strong and unique; that's the teacher's/supervisor's job, not to impose but to nurture differences. That can't happen if they don't listen.
These methods form a relational, embodied approach to supervision - one that honours the student’s voice not as something fragile to be protected, but as something already powerful, already present, and deserving of space to unfold on its own terms.
My body knew something, I was yet to fully know
5 April 26
This early work became the seed for what later developed into a thirteen‑year project. At the time, I did not yet have the language to describe its intensity or the way it insisted on remaining alive in the moment of its making. Because of this, the piece was not written about or theorised in any sustained way. Only after more than a decade, and after engaging with the writings of Phelan, Moten, and others, did I recognise what I had been attempting. With that hindsight, I can now see the work as an initial germination of the methodology I would eventually articulate, even though it was shown only to a small group within the university.
The piece demonstrated a form of learning that unfolded through the act of making. It was not rehearsed or refined according to Eurocentric expectations of finish or technical control. Instead, it emerged through direct engagement with the space and materials, allowing the work to take shape through embodied responsiveness. This approach resisted the conventions of the gallery environment, which often demand clarity, neutrality, and a polished surface.
In the performance, the figure identified socially as a “white girl” becomes absorbed into the gallery wall. She removes a section of the wall and places it on the floor. She covers her face in white paint, splashing it across her skin until she blends into the architecture that surrounds her. This disappearance is not a retreat but a critical gesture. It exposes how certain bodies are absorbed or muted within institutional spaces, while also interrupting the authority of the gallery by altering its physical structure.
Seen from the present, this early work already contained the concerns that continue to shape my practice: the tension between visibility and erasure, the refusal of Eurocentric standards of polish, and the understanding of embodied action as a legitimate form of knowledge production. It was the seed from which the later methodology grew, even before I had the words to recognise it.
Crossroads
5 April 26
Throughout this project, I have come to understand that documentation both comforts and confines live art. It captures and distils what is otherwise ephemeral, yet in doing so it inevitably alters—or even kills—what would otherwise disappear into the subconscious, as Phelan argues. And still, the stakes of not documenting are too high to ignore. When stories, practices, and histories go unrecorded, they become vulnerable to erasure, misattribution, and appropriation by those who did not live the conditions from which the work emerged. My practice therefore sits inside this tension: refusing the violence of disembodied, positivist documentation while insisting on forms of recording that honour lived experience, relationality, and the bodies from which the work is made. It is at this crossroads that I chose writing over imagery, because the project attempts to escape representation created by visual culture such as painting.
Fred Moten Lecture
5 April 26
Dean’s Lecture Series: Fred Moten on Plato, Dickinson, and the Philosophical Blues
Fred Moten’s lectures enact a refusal of the normative tempo of academic discourse. His pace, slow, drifting, punctuated by pauses and “ums”, constitutes a methodological intervention in itself. In spaces where fluency, speed, and seamless delivery are often misread as indicators of intelligence, Moten’s mode of speaking insists on another epistemology: one grounded in breath, hesitation, and embodied thought. The “um,” so often treated as a flaw to be corrected, becomes a connective tissue, a site of thinking‑in‑motion, a material trace of cognition rather than its failure.
This stands in stark contrast to the demands of Eurocentric, capitalist academic culture, where speed is conflated with “rigour” and “intelligence” and where the polished, corrected, and “finished” product is privileged over the emergent, or the in‑process. Moten’s reading of Emily Dickinson makes this tension explicit. The institutional impulse to standardise, regularise, and “correct” her unconventional punctuation and spacing reveals how deeply the academy is invested in erasure as a mode of control. His later example, writing constrained by the geometry of a triangle – makes visible how form itself can discipline thought. The triangle becomes a figure for the institution: a structure that shapes, limits, and predetermines what can be said and how it can appear.
Correction, in this sense, is not neutral, it is a mechanism of sameness. Institutions are trained to respond to difference, whether stylistic, methodological, or embodied by attempting to normalise it. Yet the very premise of research is originality. Moten’s work exposes the contradiction at the heart of academic culture: the simultaneous demand for innovation and the disciplining of anything that does not resemble what already exists.
This dynamic is particularly acute in relation to voice. The academy whether that be the university or the art gallery often values compliance over autonomy, coherence over complexity, and legibility over lived experience. Those who refuse to conform to its normative structures are frequently framed as difficult, unprepared, or in need of correction. Moten’s work offers a counter‑position: that the idiosyncratic, the unruly, and the uncontainable are not deficits but sites of possibility. Live art, like Moten’s lectures, thrives in acts that cannot be corrected. It opens a space outside the Eurocentric pedagogical frame, a space where the personal, the embodied, and the non‑normative can surface without being disciplined into disappearance.
Knowledge Beyond Ownership – Decolonial Epistemologies
30 March 26
Knowledge is not something that can be claimed as property, nor does it belong to those who construct systems designed to assert control over it. Western epistemic traditions have long treated knowledge as a form of possession, something to be inherited, cited, anchored, and policed (Santos 2014). Yet knowledge does not behave like property. It exceeds the individual, resists enclosure, and often emerges simultaneously across bodies, geographies, and histories without contact or inheritance. Two people on opposite sides of the world can arrive at the same understanding without ever encountering one another’s work. This is not duplication but evidence of knowledge’s relational, atmospheric, and emergent nature (Simpson 2017; Kimmerer 2013).
I experienced this directly when reading Grosz. Long before encountering her writing, I had already articulated how women’s experience becomes anchored to male philosophers and writers in order to be recognised as “academic,” and the maternal erasure that such anchoring produces. What happens in this apparent ‘neutral’ process are the beautiful, intricate differences get subsumed, as if it were their understanding, their work. Removing credibility from self and placing it to another. This parallel thinking reveals the limits of genealogical models of knowledge production. It also underscores the need for vigilance — to discern the knowledges that arise from our own embodied, lived, and situated experience from those shaped by institutional demands, disciplinary conventions, and the epistemic habits of those historically authorised to speak. It’s a process that requires discernment , not to misplace the voice for the voice of another, but also to acknowledge that experiences can almost be identical, so the small differences are actually incredibly important and tender and must be held with sensitivity.
Knowledge rarely arrives in neat little packages, yet as part of an art PhD component, the artist is asked to deliver it in categories, sections, chapters, and methodology sections. However, for me knowledge is situational, relational, context-based, and non-repeatable performance art and live art disrupt the notion that it’s something printable, stable, fixed and absolute. I explore the possibility that it arrives without certainty, rather than fixed and absolute – how its presented in positivist traditions, it is fluid, in-the-moment.
Refusal Theorists and Their Importance to This Research
30 March 26
Refusal, as articulated across feminist, Black, and decolonial thought, is not a single gesture but a field of vibrations; an atmosphere of withholding, rerouting, and re‑attuning. It is a politics of not‑quite‑there, of stepping sideways, of letting the institution’s demand for clarity fall through your fingers like chalk dust. In this research, refusal is not an accessory but a structural necessity: a way of keeping the work alive, uncontained, and faithful to the body that makes it.
Simpson (2014) writes of refusal as a sovereign act, but sovereignty here is not the hard border the academy imagines; it is porous, trembling, a kind of quiet storm. Her insistence on withholding, on not giving everything away to the colonial archive resonates through this project’s own insistence on opacity, fragmentation, and the right to remain partially unreadable. Refusal becomes a method of survival, a way of protecting the research from being flattened into institutional legibility.
Moten (2018) approaches refusal as fugitivity, a movement that is less escape than drift. His writing suggests that refusal is not a door slammed shut but a door left ajar, a threshold where sound, breath, and relation gather. This project draws on that sense of fugitivity: the way a performance can slip out of the frame, the way a body covered in white paint can both appear and disappear, the way a voice can refuse to resolve into a single, stable meaning. Moten’s refusal is generative, improvisational, and this research leans into that generativity as a methodological anchor.
Hartman (2019) offers refusal as a narrative tactic, an unwillingness to reproduce the violences of the archive by telling the story the way the archive demands. Her practice of critical fabulation opens space for tenderness, speculation, and the incomplete. This resonates with the fragmentary, autobiographical textures of this work, which refuses to tidy its own wounds for academic consumption. Hartman’s refusal is a form of care, and this research aligns itself with that ethic: to refuse is to protect, to honour, to reimagine.
Campt (2017) brings refusal down to the level of vibration, gesture, the almost‑imperceptible. She writes of “quiet” refusal, the low‑frequency hum of dissent that lives in the body. This is perhaps where refusal most directly touches the live, visual, and sonic dimensions of this project. The body in performance becomes a site of micro‑refusals: a tremor, a pause, a refusal to stabilise into the image the institution expects. Campt’s work affirms that refusal can be soft, slow, barely-there—and still radically disruptive.
Together, these theorists form a constellation that orients this research. Their work legitimises the methodological choices that might otherwise be misread as evasive, excessive, or unstable. Refusal, in this context, is not a shutting down but an opening—an insistence on working otherwise, writing otherwise, appearing otherwise. It is the condition under which this research can remain intact, uncorrected, and in fidelity to the lived, embodied, and reparative logic that animates it.
Tina Campt and Vernacular Photography
30 March 26
Campt’s vernacular photographs are not “art objects” but everyday acts of self-fashioning, small gestures that assert presence in the face of structures designed to erase. My performances and writings operate in a similar register: they are not spectacles but minor, embodied acts of insistence. They refuse the demand to explain, to stabilise, to resolve. They hold open the possibility of being otherwise. Campt teaches that the ordinary is not neutral; it is charged with the labour of survival. My practice takes this seriously by treating the domestic, the autobiographical, the fragmentary as epistemic — as forms of knowledge that do not need to be justified to the institution.
Where Campt listens to images, I listen to the body whilst attending with collaborators and space. She hears the vibration of refusal in the stillness of a photograph; I feel it in the tremor of paint on skin, in the breath held during performance, in the moment the visual field becomes a site of abjection and tenderness. Both practices work in the register of the quiet, the low, the almost imperceptible. They operate below the threshold of what the institution recognises as “research,” yet they carry the full weight of lived experience and political force.
Campt’s notion of futurity — the idea that small gestures prefigure a world not yet realised — resonates with the irreversibility of my own work. Each fragment, each performance, each refusal is a gesture toward a future in which embodied knowledge is not marginal but central. My practice, like the vernacular photograph, enacts a future that the present cannot yet hold. It is a form of survival, but also a form of imagining otherwise.
In this way, my work and Campt’s thinking meet: not in content, but in frequency. We both operate in the low register, in the hum beneath the image, beneath the institution, beneath the archive. We both insist that the minor is political, that the quiet is radical, that the everyday is a site of resistance. And we both understand that refusal is not a negation but a generative act — a way of living, making, and imagining that refuses to be contained.
Wild Logic – Absolute submergence
29 March 26
My methodology is intentionally unruly and non‑linear, constituted through fragmentary, embodied practices that resist the university’s demand for coherence and legibility. In conversation with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s account of the undercommons, it treats study as a fugitive practice: knowledge is produced in rupture, in the margins, and through modes of attention that slip institutional capture. This approach privileges performative encounter, archival absence, and the materiality of the body as epistemic site, thereby refusing teleological narratives and conventional evidentiary forms. Rather than a derivative application of theoretical texts, the work operates in kinship with Moten’s “wild logic,” enacting fugitivity through durational performance, fragmentary writing, and practices that foreground sensation, refusal, and the politics of presence.
Concomitantly, the methodology is grounded in relational and decolonial ethics articulated by bell hooks, Breny Mendoza, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sara Ahmed, and Édouard Glissant. These thinkers orient attention to borderlands, complaint, affective labour, and the opacity of subjectivity, and they inform a practice that centres care, voice, and the protection of marginalised modes of knowing. My work therefore constitutes a methodological constellation: it mobilises fugitivity and relationality together, not as theoretical ornament but as operative commitments that shape research design, supervision encounters, and modes of dissemination. In doing so, it asserts originality through situated practice; an embodied, politically charged method that resists assimilation into institutional norms while producing rigorous, accountable knowledge.
Blackness as Paraontological Force
29 March 26
Black and Blur, Fred Moten
Moten’s argument is not simply that Blackness resists capture. It is that Blackness exposes the incoherence of the very frameworks that attempt to stabilise it. Whether those frameworks take the form of sovereignty’s insistence on bounded subjects, the juridical fantasies of self‑possession, or the metaphysics of property that underwrite modernity, each is unsettled by the blur’s generative excess. Blackness interrupts the presumption that the self can be owned, that the subject can be secured, that political authority can be grounded in the fiction of autonomous personhood. In Moten’s formulation, these regimes do not merely fail to contain Blackness; they are revealed as structurally dependent on the very sociality they disavow. The blur names this disturbance, this refusal of individuation, this ongoing dispersal that exceeds the logics of possession in all their forms.
Q & A
29 March 26
A Practice as Research Q&A with Clare Marshall
Clare: Who has influenced your work and continued to influence it?
Emma: My work has been encouraged by a constellation of people whose intellectual, artistic, and personal commitments have helped me keep my voice intact. At the centre of this are Lee Hassall, Alex Landrum, Kate Love, and Ros Jennings. Their support has been both constructive and nurturing, offering the rare combination of rigour and care. They model a way of being in academia that does not require the erasure of difference, and their belief in my practice has allowed me to hone an authentic voice — one that speaks most directly and honestly, which, makes it so much innately relatable.
Coming from a working‑class background, I have had to navigate research and pedagogy not as abstract fields but as terrains of access, survival, and self-definition. Maintaining my artistic practice alongside these structures has required persistence, resourcefulness, and a refusal to let institutional norms dilute the specificity of my experience. In very real terms, student finance made this possible; it created the material conditions for me to continue making work at all.
Alongside these academic influences, my artistic and theoretical lineage includes Poppy Jackson, Fred Moten, Tracey Emin, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, William Pope.L, Kiera O’Reilley, Peggy Phelan, and Brad Haseman. Each of them have encouraged my thinking in different ways:
Poppy Jackson for her radical, embodied approaches to performance and the politics of the female body.
Fred Moten for opening a space where refusal, fugitivity, and difference are generative rather than pathologised.
Tracey Emin for her unapologetic autobiographical honesty and the emotional force of imperfection.
bell hooks for her insistence that love, justice, and pedagogy are inseparable.
Sara Ahmed for her articulation of institutional violence, complaint, and the politics of diversity work.
William Pope.L for his commitment to abjection, endurance, and the politics of race and precarity.
Kiera O’Reilley for her attention to the body as a site of memory and rupture.
Peggy Phelan for her theorisation of disappearance, liveness, and the ethics of performance.
Brad Haseman for his practice-led research frameworks that legitimise embodied, creative methodologies.
Together, these figures form an intellectual and artistic kinship network that has allowed me to develop a practice rooted in embodiment, refusal, working‑class knowledge, and the politics of voice. Their work has helped me understand that authenticity is not a stylistic choice but a political stance — one that resists containment and insists on speaking from where I stand.
Clare: What are your long term goals?
Emma: My long‑term goals centre on stability, creative continuity, and the ability to build a life grounded in care. Financial dependability is a major part of this — not out of materialism, but because I want to reach a point where I no longer have to fight so hard just to stay afloat. Coming from a working‑class background, precarity has shaped every stage of my journey, and one of my goals is simply to live without that constant strain.
I want to make art for the rest of my life. My practice is not something I do; it is the way I think, feel, and move through the world. Protecting that practice — without compromise, without distortion, without bending myself to fit institutional expectations — is a long‑term commitment. Maintaining integrity matters to me. I’m not interested in performing compliance or currying favour to get ahead, and I know that this refusal has made my path slower. But it has also kept my work honest.
I also hope, in the future, to be financially stable enough to adopt children. I have a lot of love to give, and the idea of creating a home rooted in care, creativity, and emotional generosity is something I hold close.
Clare: What is integral to your work as an artist?
Emma: Honesty.
Clare: How would you describe your artistic process?
Emma: My artistic process is embodied, instinctive, and often fragmentary. I work from the body outward — from sensation, memory, rupture, and the reverberations that accumulate in everyday life. I don’t begin with a fixed idea; I begin with a feeling, a tension, or a residue that needs to be worked through physically, visually, and sonically.
A lot of my process is about staying open to what emerges rather than forcing something into coherence. I move between writing, live art, and visual action, movement letting each form bleed into the others. The work often starts as something private — a gesture, a line of text, a repeated movement — and then slowly becomes public as I allow it to have a life of its own.
Because I come from a working‑class background, my process is also shaped by resourcefulness and refusal. I work with what I have. And I refuse to compromise the integrity of the work just to fit institutional expectations or aesthetic trends. That refusal is part of the process itself.
Ultimately, my practice is about staying present contend with worldly, emotional and political forces that move through. It’s messy, intuitive, and alive — challenging Positivist modes of knowledge production and perception.
Clare: What values guide the way you move through the world?
Emma: I really do believe that kindness is the antidote to suffering, and that it actively resists hegemonic structures. Staying grounded in kindness is incredibly difficult — it’s not passive, it’s a form of labour, a discipline. I find myself protecting kind people because the world can be harsh, and we need those who move gently.
I also believe that being perceptive is essential. Awareness is a form of self‑protection; it helps me navigate environments where harm can be subtle, systemic, or disguised as care. Kindness and perceptiveness together shape how I move. I have been incredibly naive and trusting in the past, falsely believing everyone moves like that. After a while you learn more and more to trust your instincts. I have learned the body knows the truth before the brain catches up, trust your body!
Clare: What principles do you refuse to compromise in your life or practice?
Emma: Integrity. Always. But integrity comes at a cost — financial, corporeal, and systemic. Holding onto it means accepting that certain doors won’t open, that the path will be slower, and that you’ll often be punished for refusing to play along. But to forfeit integrity for any of those things comes at a much greater cost.
So I choose the harder route. I choose to keep my practice honest, even when it means navigating precarity, exhaustion, or institutional resistance. Integrity is the one thing I won’t trade, because without it, nothing would mean anything. Comfortability and a meaningless life, or integrity and poverty — it’s not as simple as that. Nodding to Tracey Emin, my hat goes off to her. She shows that you can stay firm and still build a life where food is on the table and the bills are paid.
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten
26 March 26
I took back a bell hooks book from the library today — “From Margin to Center” — a text that always reminds me why I care about pedagogy, relation, and the ethics of teaching. Her writing on love, student‑centred practice, and the politics of care continues to ground me.
As I was closing my bag, I slipped two books back into my bag Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, alongside Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. The movement caught the eye of the relatively new supervisor I am now working with.
She hurriedly wrote down the title as if she had discovered something new.
The Undercommons is so beautifully written — it weaves together fugitivity, refusal, study, and the cracks in institutional life. I would recommend it to anyone interested in breaking down categorisation and leaking between the seams of the university.
Richard Schechner: one of the many reasons I dislike his “performance studies”
04 August 25
Richard Schechner’s framing, especially the way he travels, observes, and then codifies non‑Western cultural expressions into the architecture of “theatre,” absolutely exemplifies a colonial gaze. It's problematic and extractive. The act of bracketing lived, sacred, or community‑based practices as “performances” available for scholarly analysis homogenises distinct cultures and epistemologies under a universalising conceptual umbrella. In doing so, it dissolves the distinct relational, situated, and cosmological meanings these practices hold, translating lived encounter into spectacle while positioning the scholar as a neutral authority. Such neutrality, however, is a fiction that conceals and legitimises relations of epistemic dominance.
The term “performance,” even when paired with “art,” carries the residue of this legacy. It conflates methodological disobedience with institutional legibility, reducing visual, embodied, and emergent work to theatre‑adjacent forms. My practice actively refuses this framework. It resists Schechner’s mode of observation, containment, and bracketing by foregrounding rupture, relationality, and disappearance as generative forces that refuse translation.
Conference – diving into the unknown, embracing it!
30 July 25
Real‑time live art avoids extractive modes of comparison because it is not an object to be taken away, dissected, and analysed at a distance. Instead, it exists as an event of presence, irreducible to reproducible form. Its refusal of objecthood safeguards against colonial tendencies to flatten difference into sameness, privileging vulnerability and gestures that cannot be corrected. In this way, live art becomes both practice and pedagogy: a mode of attunement that resists extraction, sustains multiplicity, and dismantles hierarchies between artist and participant.
Live art lives in the unpredictability of life—I embrace this through work that’s neither choreographed nor scripted. I’ve started to love not visiting the location beforehand and instead plunging into the unknown. Most recently, I arrived at a conference, initially horrified by the carpeted floor, knowing I’d be using white household paint—brilliant white gallery paint. It’s sloppy as hell.
I also hadn’t anticipated the monitor screens positioned at every angle of the room. I used those monitors to project a direct gaze of Reynolds. The tables were not placed in a conventional conference manner—they were positioned on either side of the room, facing each other, creating a strange mirroring effect. No one could hide from Reynolds’ gaze, or from my hairy body slapping on white paint.
At one point, I was thumbling under the weight of my own body as one of the tables lifted—threatening to throw the bowl of paint across the room. Everything had urgency and presence. I was present enough to feel the lift, and still remain in a state of alive.
While taking off my clothes and using the tables to paint my back, it was magnificent—energetic. I created something I could never have put together intentionally. I worked with the materials, including the room.
Live art thrives as it opens possibilities in the vulnerability of such acts that cannot be ‘corrected.’ It is in this space—this unruly, uncontainable space—that openings to possibilities unfold. These ruptures become sites for new discoveries for myself, and others. Surrendering becomes a shared act of love and relation.
Taking up space (on your own terms)
26 July 25
A voice can speak out, but is it heard? Is it really heard and understood? As a working-class person who has not forsaken my mother’s tongue, it is this tongue I have chosen to speak. It is this tongue that is often underestimated. It is this tongue that took me eight years of visiting various doctors just to be heard. In fact, it was never truly heard by my GP. It took an online physiotherapy survey, where I wrote down gradual urinary incontinence for the issue to be flagged.
My usual GP, unwilling to engage, placed me in ‘overflow’, assigning me to another doctor. I met a non-native speaking doctor; she actually heard the words and read the physio response and referred me to A&E. Insisting that it was an emergency.
It is this tongue that spoke to my initial PhD supervisors and went completely unheard for two years. A voice can be registered, but whether it is truly heard is another matter entirely.
Recent reflections have led me to understand that spatial occupation is not equitably granted, particularly to working-class artists. Their perspectives are routinely neutralised, their voices restructured to accommodate dominant academic resolutions. Within this process lies a quiet erasure. Originality, often rooted in alternative epistemologies, must be translated into bureaucratic legibility in order to be acknowledged. Even the structural insistence on Western essay conventions—including syntactical expectations and linguistic stylisation—serves as a mechanism of dominant control that emulate white male theorists. Feminist writers, in their attempts to slip these boney grasps, often reinscribe the very dynamics they seek to dismantle. The university—and the governing parties that define its parameters—perpetuate a narrow ontology of research. Methodologies that cannot be codified into metrics, outcomes, or scripted outputs are routinely sidelined. This stunts the epistemic imagination of research itself. Process-led inquiry, live art methodologies, and relational ruptures do not simply fall outside these boundaries—they threaten them.
Feminist and decolonial practitioners operate differently from theorists. Their offerings emerge through embodied process, live methodologies, and relational ruptures—modes of knowledge dissemination that resist codification. These practices should be embraced for their epistemic richness, yet they are routinely asked to translate themselves into the colonial frameworks of academic writing. Feminist theorists attempt to escape these claws by writing fluidly, by entering knowledge through lived experience, by refusing neat conclusions. Through shifting and challenging formats, and through the beautiful blending of the personal and theoretical, they enact resistance. I applaud them for this. But even these gestures remain under threat, as they are often forced to pander to dominant codes of legibility to be considered “research”—frequently citing white male theorists to anchor their legitimacy.
The demand to write—within syntactical, stylistic, and structural conventions approved by dominant institutions—reshapes what is being said, expressed or experienced. It forces the practitioner to reconfigure their offering into a legible form that risks reproducing the very structures it seeks to dismantle. And yet, this frame remains the apparatus through which recognition, publication, and citation occur. To dismantle from within risks complicity; to operate entirely outside invites invisibility, dismissal, or classification as “non-research.
The institutional critique that my voice “does not appear academic enough” exposes a deeply entrenched value system: one that confuses formality with legitimacy and privileges codified knowledge over experiential nuance. What is positioned as support often enacts constraint. The imperative to frame art practice through writing is not a gesture of accessibility; rather, it reinscribes the very colonial frameworks that radical artistic practices seek to disrupt.
The irony is that institutions profess inclusivity while preserving linguistic codes that alienate, especially when someone speaks with epistemic clarity outside the expected register. It’s not writing I object to, nor do I claim it’s inherently colonial. But when institutions impose template thinking, demanding all expression conform to sanctioned form, writing becomes a colonial gate screening out what cannot be easily codified. It deliberately silences voices that speak outside of these institutional restraints.
It exposes the double-bind where language, the supposed tool of liberation, becomes architecture for exclusion when regulated by institutional formality. This gatekeeping does not merely marginalise, it silences. What gets excluded isn’t poor scholarship, but untranslatable truths, embodied logic, forms of knowing that exceed the margins of institutional grammar. Why must these ways of knowing be translated into legitimacy via formats that distort or erase them?
The demand for bureaucratic legibility enacts its own quiet violence. It selects for “clarity” not as integrity, but as conformity, one that largely parrots the cadence and logics of white male voices. Legibility, in this frame, is not neutral. It is a template, a colonial imprint masquerading as standard. And it is boring, violent, and erases other voices through its insistence on containment. When legibility is gatekept by these inherited conventions, research becomes fundamentally un-expansive. It calcifies into an elitist playground, rewarding the familiar and rejecting the radical.
I work towards a future where live art — where knowledge remains unfixed, yet carries deep epistemic weight—are recognised as legitimate research methodologies. My refusal to script, contain, or stabilize is not an absence of rigor but an intellectual defiance of dominant frameworks, resisting the colonial legitimacy of epistemological frameworks. Knowledge doesn’t require fixing to have an impact, it is this very nature of live art that makes it powerful.
Its power resides in its capacity to disrupt/disarm, dismantle historical codes and vanish in the same breath. This fugitive movement destabilises the dominant without seeking to take its place. It undermines not through opposition, but through refusal to mirror, contain, or dominate. The practice doesn’t demand permanence or replication. It insists on disappearance as strategy, rupture as generative ‘life force’, knowing that to vanish is not to weaken, but a refusal to perform permanence. I am speaking of a space that evades representation and linguistic capture, where presence is felt rather than described, and knowledge breathes through relational residue rather than scripted form.
Slippages – Practice Research Symposium: Feminisms, Bodies, Messiness
20 July 25
The concept of slippage first emerged within my practice in 2017 and scattered in other posts on a-n blogs and further explored through an essay written as part of my PhD research modules. Drawing from lived experience as a dyslexic artist-researcher, slippage became a methodological tool: an epistemic refusal of containment, a drift from recognisable, normative knowledge structures and communication slippage into relational rupture and unscripted embodiment. A residue. Slippage is not a fault; it is a generative force for new knowledge, tacit expressions of knowing or ways of knowing.
In Saussurean linguistics, language is understood as a system of signs governed by convention. A structure wherein the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary yet socially stabilised (Saussure,1916). This structuralism positions language as a normative framework: signs derive meaning not through inherent properties but through differential relations within a linguistic code. Communication, under Saussure, is always already pre-scripted by these shared norms.
My practice enacts slippage as a slip from this normativity. It destabilises the Saussurean pairing—allowing signifiers to drift, misalign, or leak outside prescribed logic. Slippage names the moment when embodied experience resists linguistic containment and opens toward relational knowing. It is not noise, nor error; it is epistemic disobedience generated through the body.
In my essay Performance Art – Resistance, 2023 I explore Meredith Monk, Giacometti, William Pope.L and Poppy Jackson. As generative forces that step or slip outside of normative and dominant modes and epistemologies.
Monk fractures phonemic structures in Do You Be (1971). Giacometti dismantles visual fidelity. His repeated lines—seen in Head of a Man in Profile (c.1959) and Tête de Diego (1957)—conjure recognition through disobedience, offering possibility in repeated slip. Monk’s voice mouths no decipherable words; her range operates outside patriarchal language systems. These artists perform a rupture that cannot be contained within formal conventions—a state of language in flux rather than language in system. What I am proposing is the possibility that this may no longer be called language at all. It’s been pulled to almost if not the brink of what is currently considered visual or sonic language, Kevin Leomo Sound Space, 2025 is an incredible example both pre recorded and live. Making the visual, imagined liminal space otherworldly.
I later encountered work by Jacqueline Taylor that employed similar terminology and framing—positioning slippage(s) as a resistive force departing from representation. On first reading, these parallels felt affirming, suggesting shared stakes within adjacent research. However, upon witnessing her performance lecture—delivered by scripted text woven with descriptive language and Kristeva’s theory—the divergence in execution became clear. Jacqueline Taylor theorises the slip, but the vulnerability involved in allowing it was not present in her performance lecture. Too much control on making it perfect. In her abstract she states to embrace the slippage and to not see it as failure (Taylor, 2025). I completely agree with this sentence, however, there was no room for that in her carefully curated performance.
It offered no such opening, no departure, no rupture from normative structures. Slippages require vulnerability. As Foucault and Derrida explain, language is often used as a tool to assert power—organising what can be said, by whom, and how it will be received. Without rupture, there is only compliance. Slippage threatens this compliance by exposing the instability of meaning and the fragility of the systems that rely on it. To slip is to risk being misunderstood—and in that risk, to claim a space outside of authority. When meaning “fails” to land in expected ways, something else can emerge: curiosity, discomfort, reinterpretation, or the invitation to dwell in ambiguity. It not failure but offers opportunity.
My methodology privileges unscripted emergence, intuitive process, and material rupture. In contrast, Taylor’s enactment reinstated structure—the language and message were coherent, carefully paced, and embedded within the very framework she positioned as resistant. Slippage, in her work, was contained within representational performance logics.
Notably, the offering of glitter—a gesture that might otherwise suggest excess, leakage, or rupture—felt performative and carefully curated. It appeared aestheticised, and disconnected from any live relational risk. The work remained grounded within institutional frameworks rather than challenging or disrupting them and aligned with the expectations of academia and the dominant power structures of language. Had the act resisted legibility—had it involved invented utterances, untranslatable sound, or words beyond her own capacity—it may have opened toward something less scripted and more vulnerable. It could have slipped toward authentic noise, sonic rupture, a kind of embodied empathy that resists being named.
Power was asserted through the citation of credentialed academics, the deployment of elongated terminology, and the linear delivery of scripted thought. There was little space for possibility—no fracture, no vulnerability. The live setting held the potential for unpredictability, as something might slip, or rupture, in real time. These moments are precious. But they can only emerge when the framework loosens its grip—when control is relinquished and the outcome is permitted to unfold, rather than being predetermined.
Despite hearing my own language voiced in her published abstract/description, the performance itself did not embody it. The concept may have been spoken, but it was not lived.
My articulation remains rooted in resistance against normative western conventions, refusal of architectures of control and colonial restraint, leakage, and embodied slippage. Slippage, in my research, is not conceptual embellishment—it is an epistemic method forged from lived rupture and dyslexia. I invite possibilities and new discoveries through vulnerability. Perfection rides on the backs of Rubens and Da Vinci. It is sterile. It emulates life but never speaks of it.
Societally deemed as vulnerabilities are in fact openings for new ways of thinking and discoveries, original contributions.
This encounter illuminated the stakes and specificity of my methodology. It exposed the risk of conceptual flattening—how lived, emergent practices become aestheticised, made palatable—drained relational depth or processual integrity.
I anticipated rupture, live volatility, the kind of embodied mess that doesn’t clean itself up for theory. But instead, it arrived pre-digested. Smoothed over. I wanted crackle and splatter and uncertainty in the room—not a neatly packaged discourse about it.
If Jacqueline Taylor had handed out bowls of glitter—unframed, unspoken, uncontained—that gesture would have resisted in form, not just concept. It would have ruptured the institutional script by refusing to translate rebellion into legible, narratable theory. But narrating it, scripting it, polishing it into metaphor—folds the act back into the very apparatus it sought to subvert.
Can an act still claim resistance once it’s been made palatable to the very systems it claims to challenge?
Does rebellion survive once it’s narrativised into theory, or has it already been folded back into compliance?
The symposium room itself was already a frame to disrupt, marked by the history of symposiums and the normative structures already at play. It needed no amplification. The space was ripe for rupture. It could have been gentle yet defiant, relational and beautiful. But it completely missed the mark.
Footnote:
While Taylor does reference “slippage” in her 2013 chapter Collisions, Slippages and Getting Lost, her usage remains embedded within symbolic, discursive frameworks—drawing heavily on French post-structuralist theory and feminist poetics. In contrast, my articulation emerges from materially enacted rupture: unscripted, live, and relational. Slippage, in my methodology, is not representational—it is refusal itself. This distinction is not coincidental, nor a convergence of thought, but a methodological divergence enacted through lived practice. My usage precedes her 2025 framing and carries different stakes. I am not speaking in terms of language or reading from a script, as Taylor delivers during her performance; I am speaking from the site where slippage pulls language into a space ill-defined, indecipherable—something anew.
Replaying It Again
07 June 24
Replying Bodies and Gestures 18.05.2024
Dr Kevin Leomo
Review of Kevin Leomo’s sound space
As I settle into a conversation with James and Lee, a cacophony of sounds seeps through from a nearby exhibition, fluctuating in intensity and distance, prompting me to inquire if it is a sound installation. The auditory tapestry, a blend of the familiar and the enigmatic, with tones shifting from close proximity to distant echoes, evoking a sense of bustling human presence engaged in various activities. The melange of sounds defied clear recognition, teasing my senses like a fleeting memory on the tip of my tongue, slipping away just as I felt on the cusp of deciphering its essence. At times I thought I could hear chimes, nature, strange ambience. An auditory puzzle.
In the depths of the unnoticed, hidden within the crevices of the bustling courtyard/café, lie the small devices. Within the diverse sounds of various conversations and café sounds such as the frothing of a coffee, these sounds peered in and out of depth seamlessly blending with the modern landscape. The amalgamation of these collected sounds creates a symphony of anonymity, where distinguishing one source from another becomes an elusive task. Evoking a sense of communal consciousness, these invisible recordings breathe life into the space, blurring the lines between old and new. In this present and evolving space, converges the recorded with the live; it brought spaces together, rupturing the time/space continuum. As I delve deeper into this enigmatic audio tapestry, a subtle dance of certainty and ambiguity unfold before me. Gradually, I relinquished my need for definitive answers and instead immersed myself in the beauty of uncertainty, where the rhythm of the unseen orchestrates an evolving and wonderous atmosphere.
In the symphony of life, it is in the pauses that truly resonate, making us acutely aware of our own presence in the vast expanse of space. These moments of stillness hold a mirror up to our souls, reflecting the depths of our existence with profound clarity. These pauses linger in the air, shedding any pretence; it brought a communal freedom, an ease. We observe one another, while we become aware of our own body. It relinquishes suspicion and defence.
I found beauty in simply being, even if it was fleeting like shadows in the twilight.
This piece brought me back to Hassall’s work and the imagery of the desolate land in Dorothy Wordworth’s description, it reminds me that the stillness is valid in order to bring the soul and the body close.
Replaying It Again
07 June 24
Lee Hassall 17.05.2024
More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse Ekphrasis Tour
On reflection I found myself writing in both tenses, when it came to reflecting on Lee Hassall’s work ‘More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse Ekphrasis Tour’. The vividness and absorption of his piece meant that even a day or so after seeing the work, most of the writing seemed to take shape in the present tense, reflecting a subjective duration and an element of reliving the event as though still present. This is a testament to how immersive the work is/was.
Lee Hassall starts by describing the death of his Father, holding a light unbleached paper book. He describes his Father’s skin like thin wax paper, and embracing his Father and feeling skin and bone, using the words ‘he folded in on himself’. Tears surface and continue to stream down my face. This emotive response was unavoidable – and that was felt throughout the auditorium in the silence.
Baptiste initially sat in the front row with a camcorder. Stands up recording Hassall. Hassall puts on a black apron. And sits on a sculptor’s stool. On the large white table is a small stack of light-tanned paper. An unusual earthy sculpture. A leather sac the sort instruments and sculpting tools can be found in, and a plastic heavy-duty bag, type of bag clay resides in. A metal bucket on the floor. Hassall opened the plastic bag and took a piece of clay out. As he flattens and folds the bag, clay dust exhales. The presence of his Father’s death seems to hold remanence in each subsequent action.
As he softens the clay in his hands, going back and forth to the bucket of water, making a tiny bowl. Pouring water in and out of the small vessel, keeping its malleable vitality. Baptiste, with his camcorder, slowly moves around Hassall in a non-choreographed dance. I imagine this is how he works in anthropology, responsive to his human subjects while they’re deep in activity. As he moves around the sculptor, the moving breathing subject of his fascination it also brought us in. The very close proximity seemed odd at first. I had a suspicion that the camera must be discreet in order not to meet a performative demand of the lens, here the relationship did something completely unexpected, the camera did not seem to intervene with the sculptor’s flow/magic. The once strange action and presence of Baptiste became normal, we too were examining a man. With time the actions became ours.
A beeper goes off, a timer on his watch. Functions as a reminder to a mechanical sense of time, it places us back to our own position, separate to his. Slicing time. Showcasing a paradoxical relationship, how our collective body lost sense of time. We were pulled back from an immersive absorption of time into reality, so to speak. Like a puncture in a tire.
Hassall washes his hands and takes the small paper book, picking a page and starts to read a description of a woman alone in a desolate field, despite its appearance she has a sense of disruption that exceeds its appearance.
The puncture in time, pulled us to the desolate fields in Dorothy’s Wordsworth description. Here we became the woman knowing that underneath the earth lies a core memory. A reminder of sorts that time is not linear. That despite our surroundings the body functions on its own premise. Maybe, this land that won’t yield anything isn’t entirely fruitless.
Hassall returns to the pot adding water using a brush he stirs inside the small pot, creating a slip. He washes his hands intermittently intercepting time with material. He applies the clay to his face with the brush, the strokes appear attentive. The image of this desolate land juxtaposes Hassall; who is in the process of creation and bringing things into existence, sculpting life into a landscape that otherwise would be barren. He presses the light brown waxy paper on top of his clay face, pressing the paper, it forms a tight seal. Peeling back time, the impression leaves a print. I think of his Father as sharing the same flesh, possibly even some facial features of the sculptor. And the exhale of the clay, earlier in the work as not entirely an exhale but rather breathing life into life.
A beeping sound erupts, placing us back into a viewer rather than a witness or the artist ourselves.
Hassall removes himself from the table and washes his hands. And reads from his book. He describes the sculpture on the table, as between things; a taurus, amongst other things, it appeared earthy like a root, parts appeared clay like, like soft flesh, a small creature exhibiting a small horn, as though the other one like a teething child had not grown in yet, the bound creature one arm breaking out of a weaved material. It had a long piece of straw like grass, interwoven, loosely holding it together. This holding together reminds me of the different interconnecting woven elements brought into motion with each evolving movement and varied dialogue, the intricacy of skin.
The clay man returns to the small bowl, and mixes some more slip thickening the clay, the application to the face seems a little heavier this time, it shows a physical layering of time. When the paper was peeled back the impression more sculptural in terms of body, the internal coming to the surface.
An atmosphere built from disruption and silence, a back-and-forth tension, felt similar to when the sky opens up after days of sun.
The timer goes off, he washes his hands. Picks up the books, searches the pages. Hassall reveals a dream where his father is the voice of a cashpoint, an ATM. The voice speaks to his son, “All representation is a restriction of freedom.” This dream seems to speak of the connection capitalism has with the image. That perhaps underneath a picturesque landscape is hidden depth, it’s a skilled craft to make something beautiful – yet in this act, simultaneously, the depth is masked, sold on its aesthetic, representational appreciation.
Locating the socket with the charcoal bar, between Clay, Man and Father, Hassall draws eyes, figuring his eyes from the mask that lay tightly as a second skin on his face. His fingers dig deep between the eye socket and paper, paper resisting, it finally tears, piercing, two eyes peer out. He rips a mouth hole.
He picks up the earthy being, holding it up in a one arm cradle, bringing into focus the small baby, two hands crossed keeping the baby towards his chest, but toward the viewer wrapped in a blanket. Holding it out. A proud Father showing us his child. Only at this point is there a direct invitation for him and the child to be seen. It’s a strange and beautiful encounter, hopeful.
Places the baby down. He peels back the paper. And washes the clay from his face. Each clay print, same face differing in appearance, suggests that even the same actions produce various appearances.
Reflection
Hassall’s live work demonstrates how a loved one’s absence is always accompanied by their presence. They co-exist within us. And are not an image simply lost in time. Gestures, material pull memory into new life, never a complete repeat, neither indifferent. Living, doing, being can bring life to moments seemingly displaced in time, rather than replaying or reliving a moment in it’s entirety, as if sheer preservation is redeemable, his live work offers something anew. Re-play, the hyphen is more of an inference, that nothing is ever completely lost.
‘Nothing disappears completely, however nor can what subsists be defined solely in terms of traces, memories or relics.’
-Lefebvre, The production of space, 1974 (pg.229)
The symposium expanded the premise of ‘Replay’ and individual works seem to resonate with a Lefebvre quote all in unique ways and individualistic ways.
What subsists cannot be soley defined:
Memories
Memories allude to past events. Hassall’s work showed that memories do not reside in the past and can, through actions, be pulled into new life.
Traces : Skin on skin
disrupts the relic/ the desolate landscape
Through the clay, Hassall reveals the land's potential and the presence of something beyond the desolate land’s surface. Hassall challenges the idea of fixed meaning, the kind that the woman seemed to be surrounded by. The clay and paper a poetic gesture to his father, beautiful, sincere and moving disrupts the desolate landscape.
The symbolism of clay, with its biblical and healing connotations, is disrupted. The work creates new dimensions. Rather than an incarnation, we glimpse an ancestral lineage—a connection to memories and experiences that shape this man’s autonomy. An incarnation would suggest that the man was a blank canvas; the work defies this notion.
The young one, aka the child
The anthropomorphic creature takes various atemporal presences throughout the live work.
A ritualistic object, a root - mummified both alive and simultaneously dead, a taurus creature that had just been born, sac still apparent and appearing like a film/skin, a newborn child.
An embodiment of the child is shown in the last half of the work, where the child was held up by a proud father. We became witnesses to this joyous moment as he entered a full waiting room.
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Hassall’s live work starts with his father's passing; each subsequent action remains, suggesting that death is a part of life rather than a linear means to an end. The living, moving body that encompasses death while being alive seemed to contradict modernity’s concepts of time, linearity, dichotomy of life and death—in particular, the belief that life is a beginning. His work makes us question whether there are definitive binary breaks in time. And pulls into existence a space between rebirth and new potential.
The death of his father bought across such potent questions regarding postmodernity and modernity, because if a person has lost a loved one. It feels as though there is a puncture in time, a definitive break in time, to see, touch their human presence again is an impossibility, so there is a distinct line in the sand yet like genres and various ideas the loved one’s presence is still with us, and takes on various forms.
On the surface, there is a mechanical time. Perhaps a method for arranging the body. Rather than espousing a stance between postmodernity and modernity his work seemed to hold both paradoxes in terms of linear time and non-linear time. The beeping timer punctured the deeper levels and brought us to the surface, reminding us that we were at an event that determines time, we were brought in and out of these two contradictory positions, his work eloquently examining both. Usually, an alarm or beeping is a reminder to repeat a certain action/task, here it was an invitation for a free form trajectory, each time was a new intercepting narrative or insight that continued to weave an unpredictable narrative and created an individualistic notion to meanings. This challenged the presupposed function of the alarm and created new associations for the viewer, the watch no longer ascribed to its formal modernity usage, yet it still functions within the premise of time. A destabilised signifier of sorts.
The black space of the theatre did not command the art to appear a certain way, such as taking the form of a play. It presented a chasm akin to the woman’s surroundings in Dorothy Wordworth’s notes. And the light brought focus to a man deep in discovery and creation. To clarify my use of ‘chasm’ I mean it as landscape as an abyss or gorge and as a sudden interruption of continuity; a gap.
Reverse ekphrasis
Hassall’s reverse ekphrasis disrupts the typical ekphrasis by progressively interweaving fragments of a complex experience. Instead of summarising a piece of art’s exterior, ‘ekphrasis,’ it begins with the creative process (which began long before this moment in time), in fact, the work ruptures the idea of a singular moment or image, revealing hidden layers, highlighting its own live relevance as well as the fresh opportunities and potentials that arise when an action with several entry points is undertaken. The several entry points appeared as vignettes, different autobiographical experiences such as the death of his Father, a dream, Dorothy Wordworth’s notes. The notes although aren’t his, the interpretation is. The subsequent response, what I would call “periphery response”, where the influence is seemingly fragmented, therefore the response itself has gone through a deep analytical cycle, deeply digested, the responses can seem relatively removed from the initial influence yet is not devoid. The traditional ekphrasis is similar to a dense prefix or a synopsis, which makes little to no sense before a work is made and often confines the viewer and artist to predefined meanings, but Hassall’s approach breaks free from those constraints as discussed with the newer interpretations of clay, wax light brown paper, and binary conventions. This dive-in method revealed new and idiosyncratic material associations through process (Haseman, 2006).
Dislocating the silent image of ‘a woman in a field that won’t yield anything’ (Hassall, 2024), it is only in this space does she become aware of her own body differing to the landscape. The horror would be being lost to the still.
Fred Moten
06 June 24
Review of Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
At the heart of In the Break is Moten’s insistence that Black performance is not an object to be studied but a mode of thought and a site of theoretical production. His reading of the “break,” the rupture, the cut, the moan, the stolen breath, locates Black aesthetics in the very moment of dispossession. Moten’s argument that the sound of resistance emerges from the scene of subjection is both provocative and profoundly unsettling. He positions the scream of Aunt Hester, as narrated by Frederick Douglass, as a foundational moment for Black performance and insists that the sonic excess of that scene exceeds the violence that attempts to contain it.
This is not an easy claim, nor is it meant to be. Moten’s work demands that readers confront the entanglement of beauty and terror, creativity and coercion, fugitivity and capture. His writing performs the fugitivity he theorises, refusing closure, linearity, or the comforts of academic mastery.
Moten draws from an astonishing range of thinkers including Marx, Fanon, Derrida, Hartman, Baraka, and Cecil Taylor, yet his work never feels derivative. Instead, he reorients these traditions through the lens of Black performance and insists that the Black radical tradition is not an addendum to Western philosophy but a critique of its foundations.
His readings of jazz improvisation, particularly through the work of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, are exemplary. Moten treats improvisation not as spontaneity but as a rigorous, relational practice, a way of thinking with and through others, a mode of survival and invention forged in the wake of unfreedom.
Methodological Refusal
One of the most striking features of In the Break is its methodological refusal. Moten does not offer a stable analytic framework. Instead, he models a practice of reading that is improvisatory, relational, and resistant to capture. His prose is famously dense, at times elliptical and at times breathtakingly lyrical, but always in service of a politics of disruption.
For academics accustomed to positivist or linear modes of argumentation, Moten’s style can feel disorienting. Yet this disorientation is precisely the point. The text enacts the fugitivity it describes and insists that Black study must remain in motion, must remain ungraspable by the logics that historically sought to discipline and contain Black life.
Replaying It Again
28 May 24
16.05.2024
Replaying It Again – Symposium 15.5.24 – 18.5.24
Farah Saleh
What My Body Can/t Remember: Body Memory as Archive
Saleh presents a short film, of her dancing in a studio space. The dancer’s movements are accentuated by the light streaming in from the wide windows, and the close-up dynamic between cameraman and dancer performs a masterful fusion of movement and picture. Yet, neither party is completely lost to one another. Her graceful, free-form dance, breathwork and movement would suggest years of dance training, yet she still carried a raw, experimental essence. Her gestural movements captivating.
Saleh’s performance lecture integrated live dance and film with interwoven context rooted in her past experiences.
Live Performance
As she ran around in a circle, her feet made rhythmic sounds, although similar in texture and sound each temporal sound print differing, picking up pace. Sound evolving outwardly. I imagined this to be a small living room, possibly running around a small coffee table or another domestic object, while the artist was under curfew in 2002. Running around in circles, maybe to expel/exhaling energy. Maybe, breathing, moving as a form of resistance from Israeli military order and control. Her breathing, gradually louder, panting, also carried a rhythmic pattern along with her feet it was ritualistic both in terms of domestic dimension but also a louder excess that exerted out of her body. Like a breathing geopolitical landscape. Instead of keeping it in, in the prison the Israeli military attempted to assert, neither the domestic space or the artist’s body could be obtained. Restricted but resisted its frame, she reimagines its possibilities then and now as an inseparable form of freedom. I wouldn’t say re-play, but finding what is already there, and making it present.
Saleh then moved into a dining room, small squared wooden table and chair, she wrote on two pieces of paper in Arabic and sticks it to the wall. I am unsure on what it said. But the action, seems to be a reminder of sorts.
At times the artist moved in various ways, fingers in the mouth pulling the side of the cheek, what would usually be a childlike gesture brought to the surface, a horror, children being pulled apart, starving, the mouth empty and hungry. Saleh pulled her mouth and gestural sounds echoed in the theatre. The visceral quality made the work immersive, on a collective level it dispersed a live account, making it a shared body of sorts, bringing the current pain and Saleh’s exhale to the forefront. What is usually a detached far way enough ‘concept’ and othering of another’s pain was felt in this thought-provoking and bodily experience.
In the next part of the performance, Saleh asked us to close our eyes, and to imagine a moment in time and to outwardly gesture this moment. In the dark spaces of my mind, I held out my arms, asking why but no words came to the surface. I was a weird child but found comfort in nature. It was the playground, and I was fascinated by the tree where the white colour brought out its structural properties. And on this tree was a collection of bright green caterpillars. They were vivid grass green. I took one to look at, as I held out my palm flat the caterpillar moves along my fingers. Either proud to show the caterpillar or found out, a miserable teacher’s assistant came over, took the caterpillar, and stamped on it. In this dark place the crunching of its body was incredibly loud, I held out my arms asking why but no words came.
The artist filmed the audience and showed stills on the screen. Some gestures were held solely in the face, the determining muscles varied, some faces appeared concentrated creating slight frown lines, some a minimal smile the corners of the lip barely pulled but in the closed eyes there was a relaxed comfort, as though smiling in the warmth of a loved one. One person held one hand up, possibly returning to the classroom. Saleh then deleted these stills. I held no nostalgia or sense of loss to the image itself.
Q& A
Saleh spoke about the performance as a form of dissemination, and I felt an affinity to this sentence, as I feel a constant need to defend my live art practice on these terms.
Reflection
The active body offers something in real time, a shared experience, something that differs with every iteration. And performance as practice ideally would be the practice in which it is seen, for me, it opens so many possibilities in the present moment. History lives in us, it’s not something that is filed away. Saleh’s work ‘experiences’ this. The body is not an object. The body operates differently, it converges the now and then in constant flux in movement, a mobile presence with no strict linearity to time.
Language in suspension, ‘dancing-with’ and Nancy
07 March 24
The ‘error’ or inability to correct during live art/ performance art is where the slip can occur, a crack in normative structures, where language releases from a system of order and depletes into new terrain, a residue pulled into flux. An unwriting as such similar to writing in reverse, the lettering is almost decipherable in relation to what is known as writing, but the language is yet to be understood, which is the power of a slip/slippage. Instead of seeing this as a failure, I view it as new possibilities to make new associations, open up meaning, and dismantle representation.
Dancing-with is a type of discernment; a practice of staying present with difference as it appears, requiring openness and a refusal to project rather than rushing into comparison.
It’s a practice that asks for:
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Openness – a softening of the impulse to categorise.
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Non‑projection – letting the thing, the person, the moment speak in its own register.
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Presence to difference – noticing what is distinct, subtle, emergent, without rushing to sameness.
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Suspension of comparison – resisting the reflex to measure one thing against another.
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Attentiveness – allowing what’s seen or heard to actually land, to register, to matter.
In this sense, through practices of with-ness, my live art model offers educational spaces an alternative to fixed, positivist, capitalist, and closure-driven models of knowledge transfer or “dissemination.” A constellation of seeing-with, smelling-with, listening-with, and tasting-with moves throughout my practice, extending beyond the visual field through sound and scent while interrogating art history through its aliveness. Because the work is unrehearsed and I employ unpredictable materials, the experience unfolds collectively in real time. Rather than presenting knowledge as something already formed, the work invites its co-production, disrupting hierarchical distinctions between artist and audience. I use the phrase “my model” loosely, however, because this diminishing of hierarchy is not unique to my practice. It has emerged throughout history whenever we become receptive to difference rather than attempting to eliminate it or subsume it into sameness; whenever the ego is relinquished, or at least temporarily set aside.
Jean Luc Nancy
Nancy’s notion of dis‑enclosure deconstructs Christianity into an opening rather than a closure. He describes it as ‘the religion that provided the exit from religion,’ consisting of in “the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality” (Nancy, Dis‑Enclosure, 2008). This refusal of closure parallels my refusal methodology: absence, neurodivergence, incompleteness, are not deficiencies but openings. They safeguard presence by resisting enclosure, allowing difference and resonance to remain generative.
Nancy reframes Christianity as a historical force that dismantled itself, leaving behind openness and incompleteness.
Statement
07 March 24
I often refer to performance art as doing, as I don’t necessarily see the work as a performance in the traditional sense, but rather gestures, movement, a dance-with and in material that’s not choregraphed.
I work in the space of with: with materials, with bodies, with whoever arrives. A shared moment or moments of making, sensing, and evolving together. The work becomes a meeting place, co‑produced and continually shifting, shaped by relational attention rather than hierarchy. What emerges is live, fluid, and attuned, an unfolding that belongs to all who take part.
The location and settings are often premediated for their pre-existing frame/context. The intervention aims to disrupt that frame, to contest inherited knowledge and unsettle its presumed stability. There are possibilities in the vulnerability of such acts that cannot be ‘corrected’, and these possibilities offer openings for new discoveries for myself and the participant/witness. It offers a space where we simultaneously experience the unfolding and dismantling of the hierarchy between artist and audience/viewer. Rather than showing a finished artwork or polished performance to a viewer, it's experienced with the participant, encouraging the participant's influential agency.
The materials don’t stand in for something else; they are not symbolic. The way I use them actively disrupts symbolic order. This aligns with materialist thinking, where matter acts, behaves — or more accurately, misbehaves — and insists on its own terms. The materials set the tempo of the piece: the atmosphere, the rhythm, the way people have to move with it. They create the conditions of the encounter.
When they drip, stain, thicken, dry, or resist, those actions shape how the work unfolds. Knowledge comes from being with the materials as they behave, not from extracting meaning from them. I choose disobedient materials on purpose. No performance can ever be repeated; the originality lies in that possibility, not in any attempt at reproducibility. It’s in this non‑replicable space that idiosyncratic movement produces originality.
These moments yield possibility where risk becomes research, and presence replaces reproducibility. The process embedded in my practice is experiential: shaped through intuitive engagement with both internal reckoning and external encounter. I move with history, with material, with memory, with people not to represent, but to disturb what is presumed fixed.
I resist the idea that performance must be documented to exist. In my work, documentation cannot capture the intensity of the lived moment. It draws the viewer into an encounter that slips between memory and visibility, resisting translation into written form. Text is not the event, and I refuse to dress it up as such. I am not interested in simulating the ephemeral. I am interested in its force.
Where academic frameworks often demand legibility, my methodology embraces unfolding. The embodied practice generates knowledge that refuses to be pinned down. Memory, too, is fluid—malleable, reformative—and offers a kind of archive in flow/flux. Transformative potential is the research. It collapses boundaries between subject and witness, and encourages a shared encounter.
This is an alternative to positivist objectives: knowledge that breathes, bleeds, dances, and disappears.
Expression rather than medium
07 March 24
Performance art unlike any art medium is not an art medium. I share the same stance on performance as theorist Jonah Westerman, ‘performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world.’ (2016)
Methodology and pedagogy: Live Art as Decolonial Relational Praxis
07 March 24
My MR402 research module was completed before my MR401 due to the late induction of the Art cohort.
MR402 was completed in April 2023:
Practice as Research – Body as a multi-modal research method
Mr401 was completed in December 2023:
For full submission click here : s1513009 MR401 Performance Art – Resistance (2023)
‘Dancing with’ is an early articulation of my methodology. It was first documented in 2018 in my artist statement and has since been used synonymously with ‘dancing‑with’ (2023). It’s to express that the live action is not rehearsed and the audience is experiencing everything with me: the sound of paint on my body, the hesitations, bottles that won’t open; everything is ‘with’ the audience; we share a moment; this vulnerability makes it immersive and less hierarchical than the usual show-and-tell model.
Methodology and pedagogy through non-text transfer: Live Art as Decolonial Relational Praxis
My pedagogical practice ‘dancing-with’ attempts to bridge the separation of artist and witness, subject and object, and instead insists on compassionate attunement, fleeting unison with differing pluralities—a mode of relation that does not seek to resolve difference and the co-constitution of multiple meanings.
This is not a passive condition and requires active participation, a willingness to experience relational rupture, discomfort, and emergence. Relationality here is not soothing or symbolic; it is felt, metabolised through proximity, the co-constitution of meaning across difference. This methodology enacts relational rupture as a protective and generative force.
It is distinctly decolonial in its rejection of separation, hierarchy, and the classificatory logic of colonial knowledge systems. As Breny Mendoza (2016) argues, colonial epistemology operates through comparison, domestication, and the flattening of relational difference. This methodology counters that logic by foregrounding embodied presence, attunement, attentiveness and epistemic co-constitution. It resists the extractive gaze and the demand for legibility, insisting instead on opacity, emergence, and ethical proximity.
By not rehearsing, I collapse the binary between artist and witness (we are both witnessing and experiencing at the same time); this practice resists the colonial impulse to render the other as an absorbent object. It enacts what Catherine Walsh (2018) calls pluriversality—the coexistence of multiple epistemologies without subsumption or ranking. Relationality here is not inherited from Western ontological frames but reconstituted through situated, embodied knowledges. This aligns with Walter Mignolo’s (2011) call to delink from dominant epistemic paradigms and reorient toward practices of refusal, transformation, and care.
My methodology resonates with Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-action, where meaning emerges through entangled relationality rather than isolated entities.
As explored in EcoFutures: Queer, Feminist and Decolonial Ecologies in Live Art, live art offers a space for resisting colonial temporalities, capitalist extractivism, and institutional regulation through embodied, relational, and affective practices. In this way, live art becomes not only a site of performance but a site of methodological refusal—where tone, rupture, and co-presence generate epistemic clarity and protect the integrity of relational knowledge.
Fig.1 Performance Art Model, Embryotic cell, (2023)
My practice also draws from my performance art model inspired by the structure of a human cell. The circular form emulates the membrane wall—semi-permeable, autonomous, and selectively porous. As Kara Rogers (2023) describes, the cell’s thin wall allows it to evolve while remaining unabsorbed by its environment. This model, referred to as embryotic, is situated in an early developmental stage, capable of transformation both within and beyond its initial appearance. Possibilities emerge inside and outside the cell, enabled by its porous boundary—a metaphor for methodological openness and refusal of containment.
My model incorporates Derrida and Guattari’s rhizomic concept: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” This rhizomic logic resists linearity and hierarchy, instead embracing multiplicity, fluidity, and emergence. Viewed from a bird’s-eye perspective, the model has no fixed entry or exit points. Each element—object, context, dissolving the stage, environment, social work—moves fluidly together. Performance art’s vaporous ephemerality becomes a generative force; what disperses does not disappear, but returns transformed. Elements re-enter through a space between reflective analysis and the subconscious, continuously remodelling through a non-hierarchical, symbiotic process.
Michael Bryan’s feedback shows how my performance art model ‘dancing-with’ and how Gallagher’s notion of 4E cognition was enacted through performance. The combination of material application (embodied), previous experiences that the body retains (embodied) – such as those that are hard to grasp, background reading (embedded in context) on Whistler and instinctual movement (enacted)
results in a unique pedagogical synergy. As demonstrated in Bryan’s feedback the performance imbricates knowledge, and also disrupted preexisting knowledge on what is usually perceived as a neutral white gallery space, the performance dislodged its neutrality. Bryan’s feedback directly led me to Richard Dyers book White, (2017) [1997]. The performance feedback demonstrates a transference of
knowledge. This approach to knowledge sharing may allow for a more inclusive research model. As an artist with dyslexia, I was able to convey and produce new knowledge utilising a bodily cognition. Rather than collecting data then writing up in a traditional mode of research dissemination, it allowed me direct access to explore the body as a medium and disseminate research through non-linguistic
communication, a transference of knowledge that is non fixed and unpredictable.
The subconscious and the supressed information that is in memory is often reenacted with recently read information, and through the body relationships form that are expressed through gestures, movements, and choices in materials and environment, this method offers alternative readings, beyond the premises of discursive text. Extended – For the viewer as well as myself it becomes an evolving relationship of knowledge sharing through live experience. The feedback may assist in the performance’s absence, as a contribution in an accompanying book – part of the thesis. A multi perspective book displaying a post structuralist notion of meaning/truth, truth as multimedia, multi perspective and knowledge as intersubjective.
Dissolving the stage
Can knowledge be transferred mind to mind, body to body without a form of interface? The artist can dissolve the stage through emerging themselves within everyday context or the context they wish to contest. The line between ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ becomes blurred, when the staging evaporates, which can lead to a less authoritative understanding of the world.
My work unfolds as a shared exploration with materials and with the people who encounter it. I don’t position anyone as an audience; we experience the work live, together. What emerges is co‑produced — a meeting rather than a presentation, a space of mutual attunement rather than a one‑directional offering. The work evolves through these encounters: fluid, non‑hierarchical, and relational. The notion of with is central to how the work is made and how it is lived in the moment.
This cellular-rhizomic model affirms live art’s capacity to metabolise rupture, attune to relational difference, and refuse epistemic closure. It offers a visual and conceptual architecture for understanding live art as a site of decolonial methodology—where permeability, transformation, and multiplicity are not just aesthetic choices, but ethical imperatives.
The notion of extended mind as explained by Gallagher, ‘…is something that develops out of a theory of distributed cognition.’ And can be read in feedback, where a sharing of information takes place. Feedback helps confirm performance’s ability to transfer knowledge from what is usually perceived as a cognitively driven process to a unified bodily cognition.
Reference List:
Ahmed, S., 2006.Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. and Guattari, F., cited in: Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Heathfield, A., 2004. Live: Art and Performance. London: Tate Publishing.
Mendoza, B., 2016. Coloniality of gender and power: From postcoloniality to decoloniality. In: W.D. Mignolo and C. Walsh, eds.On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, pp.100–116.
Mignolo, W.D., 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rogers, K., 2023. Human Cell Structure and Function. [online] Encyclopaedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com [Accessed 31 April. 2023].
Walsh, C., 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Live Art Development Agency, 2020. EcoFutures: Queer, Feminist and Decolonial Ecologies in Live Art. [online] Available at: https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk [Accessed 22 April. 2023].
PhD
2021-2023
It took me a very long time to choose myself, and in March 2021, I finally ended a tumultuous relationship. I knew I wanted to pursue my art and teach, and I had a project that was a seedling cultivated over at least 10 years of practice. I wanted to take it into a more serious project and try more sound work, especially zoning in on my accent.
After communicating with Andrew Bick on and off for two years, I was accepted at Gloucestershire University to do a PHD in practice as research.
A-Level Teaching
2019-20
While teaching A-level Art at Croydon Metropolitan College, I consciously stepped beyond the traditional Eurocentric canon, researching and introducing artists from Indian, Pakistani, Black, and working-class backgrounds. This became a shared process of learning alongside my students. My teaching extended beyond classical drawing to include a wide range of drawing approaches, painting in diverse media, and discussions about the ontological properties of objects and materials. Many of my students, who came from diverse cultural backgrounds, were familiar with artists such as Picasso and Van Gogh, but I wanted to broaden both their artistic horizons and my own phallocentric Western-centered education by exposing us all to a wider range of artistic voices and perspectives. Because the class was small, I was able to provide student-focused tutorials, tailoring guidance to individual interests, abilities, and ambitions while fostering critical dialogue and independent artistic development.
I loved this job, it has been the only job that did not feel like a job. I still have cards from students. But I had to try and figure out a way to get out of an abusive relationship which meant moving closer to home. The feeling that I let the class down because I did not see them to the finish line will always linger with me.
Mutual understanding is always incomplete...
15 January 17
Live Practice and Physical Time-Space
10 January 17
In this physical time, its a shared experience, we simultaneously experience the unknowns together, as the work is unpremeditated. This breaks down hierarchical power systems. As a result, traditional hierarchies lose their grip: authority is negotiated in real time, influence emerges from participation, and power becomes relational rather than positional.
Co-presence names the simultaneous, embodied experience of people occupying the same physical moment where action is improvised and authorship is distributed. It foregrounds synchronous, unplanned interaction as a condition that redistributes agency, flattens positional authority, and makes decision‑making emergent and relational.
Live Art in Paint
09 January 17
Material often feels estranged from the human. It disassociates with ease—we animate it only to shut it down, divorce it from ourselves as if it never belonged. It becomes possession because it is deemed exterior. Yet it speaks. It remembers. It insists.
In my practice, material is not separate. When I pick it up, it fuses with the body. A new limb emerges. Its agency circulates through me—respiratory, circulatory, kinetic. It breathes. What draws me in is this possibility.
In live art, there is no apprehension. The live moment embraces reality—not as polished perfection, but as a site where depth emerges through rupture. Here, slippages are not failures. They are openings: pathways toward something unrepeatable, uncontainable, and profoundly generative.
Paint, for instance, does not merely signify—it hums with internal force. I apply it with my hands because it demands intimacy, a one-to-one bond. Through this encounter, the figure begins to shift. It ceases to be fully human or object. Skin slips.
This process blurs the edges of categorisation. The material doesn’t speak in language; it transmits through pulse, residue. It’s radial. It presses into me as signal, charge, texture. These are not metaphors—they are affective realities. In this slippage, human and object dissolve into shared thresholds. Transport systems deliver not just materials, but relational fragments, histories, spirits. Material carries consequence. It remembers contact.
Consider the use of white clay in Māori culture: it marks status, yes, but also seals a spiritual bond to land. I reflect on this when I use clown paint. It may speak to my white working-class background, a layered site of ridicule and resistance. I am often mocked for my Birmingham accent—but only by white middle-class people. That specificity matters.
Seen in the macroscope, this becomes a national mirror. The cultural farce of Brexit and the American absurdity of Trump emerged like twin ruptures. The clown craze preceded them by days, as if the collective unconscious was already rehearsing what spectacle would come. My performances occurred just before the craze—was it coincidence, or were we already attuned to the political grotesque?
We forget it
08 January 17
We forget material has agency, it has a life we forget it because we rely on visual/s. Yet this is the very thing that can and does deceive us.
River and clown paint
06 January 17
This particular piece was an endurance-based work. When I think of performance art I think of a few artists one Artist being Sandra Johnston, whom uses bare/minimal materials and her own body as the activating role within her work, her body is a material. In the untitled, work the body becomes naked from the removal of white paint. The water was very cold but the feeling lost its sensation over time. The objective slips into intuitive actions, I felt myself push past the coldness an inhuman encounter arose no longer feeling ‘naked’ in the conventional sense. There was no sense of self in this manner, but gained a deeper sense of nakedness. The material-immaterial being attempts to clean itself, the movements seem sincere like a swan- like, hands feeding through the volume of water. The washing removes a physical layer and taps into the internal layer as the body attempts to get clean.
The clown paint is the closest idea of whiteness that I identify with. Not so much the striking white but the striking white of the clown , it’s whiteness is absurd, its fakery is crude and laughable. As a child, I never felt clean, I went to a Christian school in dirty non-uniform maybe a jumper sometimes a floral dress underneath, whatever was clean enough I was dressed in. The clothes weren’t unified to what other school children wore. Which meant I was alienated. I don’t identify with ‘White’ or white. White supposedly symolises purity , holiness in the European sense of the word. And yet when I think of white its unattainable and impure in many ways. Which is what I’ve started to realise from the impurity of paint/ blood shed.
As I apply the paint its oily, and claggy, it leaves traces, it never dries. Its impermanent, my identity is removed from the body and through the performance ‘I am’ temporally displaced. The female form seems absurd in this way. ‘It’ appears otherly (but not Godly). The unknown male voyeur looks at the female white form until she reveals herself hairy and naked. He then walks away. The unknown man ruptures the act, I am temporally brought forward, all at once I become aware. It takes a sufficient amount of time till I become absent to myself again, but this does occur until the paint becomes more and more absent. Then I started to feel the cold. This might be due to the materially of the paint thining – the oil works as a barrier – the thinning conducted an emotive change that I became conscious of, therefore my actions became more conscious. I prefer my performance/ action led work to have no foreseeable end, allowing the body/mind to surrender to the acts completely, changed consciousness as if I am the viewer, surprised by my own actions only able to verbalise in the aftermath. I’m not sure what happens here, as the white woman is in fleeting states, and so am I but we are never together.
Artist Statement
04 May 16
My performances, sculptures, and paintings challenge the formalities, customs, and belief systems imposed by Western society by rejecting the notion of objective truth. Elements of my past and present ideologies, particularly my relationship to objects and theory, are unobtrusively adopted into various forms. By contesting the division between memory and experience, I seek to develop forms that resist logical criteria, instead emerging from subjective associations and formal parallels. These works aim to incite viewers to generate new personal associations.
My central aim is to dismantle dominant meanings and foreground knowledge as fluid, relational and embodied by interrogating the body as site. Performance actions are key to my practice. The ritual is live, and its inherent vulnerability resists correction. This vulnerability opens space for new discoveries, a shared space where both the viewer and I experience it live. It is a non-hierarchical approach to knowledge sharing, one that embraces attunement over authority.