Excised Internals

Abstract

This study is a culmination of two years of research-creation that explored my personal narrative of ‘dwelling’ within multiple ‘beings of Self.’ My MFA was conducted through a ‘creation as research’ methodological approach (Chapman and Sawchuk, 2012). I adopted this self-reflexive creative method to gain bodily autonomy and agency and add to the greater conversation of gender fluidity in contemporary art. Through research-creation, I examine the concept of how phenomenological ‘dwelling’ (Heidegger, 1954) in a body that identifies as both artist and model “queers” (Ahmed, 2008) the standard perspective of viewing the female body in the traditional Academy style. I seek to address the following: How can I, through the methodology of research creation and using my own method of self-portraiture, support an expansion and redefinition of gender identity in art by reflecting on the aspects of its materiality and performativity? The research creation methodology influenced me to apply a variation of Sarah Ahmed’s autoethnographic approach. Inspired by her phenomenological methodology of working with structures of consciousness and immersive experience (Ahmed, 2008), I decontextualize the autoethnographic aspect of Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to engage my art in a self-reflexive creative process. Identifying my creative process within this phenomenon allowed me to gather meaningful data from multiple sources: academic, personal, artistic, and literary. The analysis of this cumulative data has been synthesized in to my final thesis exhibition: an immersive performative art installation which focuses on the strength of the body’s gestural language and its ability to create, change and make absent the ephemeral nature of trace, line and index. Using this creation as research method to gather data, understanding this knowledge and applying it to my MFA exhibition in a research-creation context as outlined in this paper, contributes to the evolving conversation of how data can be developed, expanded and applied within art using research creation methodology.