The toll of death and the liveliness of matter : diffracting stories through the apparatus of art making

Abstract

This doctoral research is presented as an assemblage of published papers, an overarching essay and in the copies submitted for examination, visual artworks. The first and substantive focus of this project was death-specifically, the residual toll of death for art therapists working in end of life and palliative care. The second focus was methodological. In this research, I have developed a novel, collaborative research methodology that brings together new materialist and posthuman theory, and the knowledge generating practices of art therapy/therapists, extending the conceptual (and material) possibilities of both. Through art making and story in collective biography workshops with art therapists and academics, I explored the transitional movement between discursive and material practices, and the ways in which art making opens up sensations and perceptions in the body that disrupt and disturb embodied stories about, and the 'finitude' of, (others') death. The papers in this portfolio maintain a focus on the work of art and art making, in collective biographies about death, and in other entanglements with the matter and mattering of art. This experimental research challenges habituated ways of thinking about things, bodies and places, to focus instead on thinking with and within 'kinaesthetic' forces and intensities, in which the agency of all bodies, human and otherwise, is affective, distributed and co-emergent. In mobilising the work of theorists and scholars such as Barad, Deleuze and Bennett, I have theorised the ways in which matter becomes agential through encounters between human and other-than- human bodies, and enigmatically accumulates in material objects and spaces. In doing so, I have developed a non-representational, relational and new materialist lens for art therapy, in which art media is understood as lively and agential matter, rather than as secondary to human-centric psychotherapeutic processes in art therapy practice and pedagogy, and in social research more broadly.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English