Research Enquiry

A workbook of ideas for the Research Design paper; Te Ao Mahora / Creative Practice Research Design.

Keywords

  • Autobiography, narrative, storytelling, auto-fiction, mindscape

  • translations, re-enactment

  • motherhood, parenting, maternal

  • sound, soundscape, recording, re-recording, installation

  • language, voices

  • affect, embodied

  • index, immaterial

  • feminism

  • domestic

  • identity, subjectivity, intersubjective,  relational

  • transformation, becoming, subjective becoming

Phrases

  • maternal subjectivity

  • autobiographical narrative

  • cultural phenomenology

  • inherited voices

  • maternal speech

  • inner self

  • the self looking at the self

  • the feels like of the mind

  • semblance of intersubjectivity

  • intersubjective encounters

  • inherited knowledge

  • dominant cultural narratives

Research Questions

Primary Research Question variations

  1. How might the "perceptual and affective, feeling and subjective dimensions" of a mother’s experience of mothering be translated into an art experience (Barnett) that disrupts conventional cultural narratives of motherhood?

  2. How might re-enactments of a mother's experiences of mothering which seek to disrupt normative stereotypes/rewrite inherited modes of power/dominant cultural narratives explore the transmission of affect in a sound and installation practice?

  3. How might sound/installation transmit the affective qualities of a mother’s experience of mothering that seeks to rewrite inherited models of power?

  4. How might the immaterial subjective becoming be materialised in a sound/language practice to transmit the embodied affective resonance of the intersubjective encounters of parenting?

    In real speak: How might the mother’s experience of herself changing in response to mothering her children over time be processed through sounds recordings?

  5. How might a sound installation produce a semblance of the embodied affect of a subjective maternal becoming? 

  6. How might an autobiographical maternal subjective becoming be indexed through re-enacted language based sound installation adding to the cultural representation of motherhood? (This language sucks)

  7. How does the immaterial artefact of the intersubjective becoming compare to the material artefact produced by a performative art practice, engaged with translating the mother’s experiences of her own mothering?

  8. What methodologies might support the translation of affect from a mother’s experiences of mothering that seek to disrupt dominant cultural narratives? 

Secondary Research Questions 

  1. What is it like to be alongside a child? (Baraitser - an account of maternal subjectivity)

  2. How can art be a becoming?

  3. How does the installation of sound - the materiality of the equipment of the sound’s production - matter?

  4. How does the installation of sound produce affect?

  5. If the mothers voice is one material index of the maternal subjective becoming where else does this embodied transformation lie or can be conjured into the audio visual space?

  6. What are the affective objects of a subjective transformation and what does this mean for an object based practice? Are they dematerialised?

  7. How might a practice of auto-fictive soundscapes add to the articulation of the variety of maternal experience outside the dominant cultural narratives of the ‘Good Mother’ and the ‘Monster Mom’?

  8. What methodologies would support a cathartic participatory performance of love/rage?

  9. What similarities are there between the maternal encounter and the art encounter?

  10. What historical artworks from Aotearoa already articulate complex representation of motherhood?

  11. Does an inclusion of fictional experience in the re-enactment of subjective affect add to the cathartic experience of self-portraiture?

Methods

  • Recording family conversations in the kitchen with google voice to text.

  • I-Phone crying selfies.

  • Sound recordings of re-enactments of outer and inner maternal dialogue.

Methodlogies

  • auto ethnography

  • relational, embodied, interrupted stream of language

  • affect

  • interruption

  • translation

  • becomings

 PGR2 March 2020

WORKING TITLE

Listening for the future mother.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

If the mothers voice is one material index of the maternal subjective becoming where else does this embodied transformation lie or can be conjured into the audio visual space?

What are the affective objects of a subjective transformation and what does this mean for an object based practice? Are they dematerialised?

The stuff of maternal subjectivity is maternal love, maternal desire, maternal ambivalence how is this articulated in a visual art?

How might a practice of auto-fictive soundscapes add to the articulation of the variety of maternal experience outside the dominant cultural narratives of the ‘Good Mother’ and the ‘Monster Mom’?

If the experience of new motherhood commonly feels outside of the inscribed cultural norms, how might a visual/sound art practice interrupt this cycle of maternal isolation? How does a representation of motherhood in visual art break out from archetypes?

How might a sound/performance art practice articulate the concerns of the specific ‘mother’ community?

What methodologies would support a participatory performance of listening and/or a cathartic performance of love/rage?

What similarities are there between the maternal encounter and the art encounter?

What historical artworks from Aotearoa already articulate complex representation of motherhood?

Does an inclusion of fictional experience or re-enactment add to the cathartic experience of self-portraiture?

OVERVIEW

“In order to tame the dangerous self”  Jane Lazar  

This is an art project situated across sound installation, performance, and participatory social practices. The project methodologies will be, in part, autobiographical and/or auto-ethnographic, building on feminist approaches of self-exploration (identity/subjectivity), social action, rewriting herstories and the maternal.

In this project I propose to explore my own embodied maternal subjective transformation as a site for social change. I’m interested in disrupting the normative cultural narratives and inherited models of parenting. Most importantly I seek to articulate the affect of such a subjective transformation. This project has three parts. 

Firstly, I plan to analyse the self-in-speech during a process of maternal self-improvement registering the emergent maternal subjective transformation as material index. The mother’s voices, both internal and external, is one material index of the production of a specifically maternal subjectivity that sits within the larger and ongoing becoming. 

Secondly, inspired by the Chorus of Greek Tragedy, I aim to expand the project into the parenting community, looking to invite other mothers and parents into a process of deep listening bringing forth an intersubjective transformation through sounding practices. 

Finally, I propose to develop a psycho-dramatic soundscape to accompany one or more maternal artworks from the Aotearoa/New Zealand canon. This may require a process of historical excavation to uncover works by mothers and/or about motherhood/parenting made here.

CONTEXT/METHODOLOGY

The richly analysed seminal maternal artwork, Post Partum Document (1973-79) by Mary Kelly, is a key reference. However, in contrast to Kelly’s exploration of the mother-child relationship my project shifts focus toward the transforming maternal subjective itself.

An enquiry between serious self-improvement and cathartic re-enactment, is informed somewhat by the performance installation work, Mother holding something horrific (2017), by Claire Lambe. Here Lambe draws from her own personal archive to create a sculptural tableau that functions as site for performance interventions on the subjective self.

Ron Pelias considers performance as an act of becoming. With this idea I look back to the ‘mothers’ of feminist performance such as Adrian Piper and Sophie Calle and their explorations of (auto)fictional personae.

In reference to my research I will employ theoretical work on affect, subjectivity and the encounter by Delueze and Guattari, Brian Massumi and Simon O’Sullivan. I will draw upon the concept of the encounter through the field of maternal studies: Lisa Baraitser’s theory of interruption as subjective transformer and the magic of things and the Matrixial Borderspace by Bracha L. Ettinger.

I will take Lisa Baraitsers ‘‘liveliness of ordinary life’’ as a methodology to my investigations of historical maternal works from Aotearoa/New Zealand. She argues that it is in moments that are often left out of the picture, are completely ‘‘overlooked,’’ that we are to look ‘‘if we are to glimpse some-thing we may term maternal subjectivity’’ (Giffney et al p 75)

The process of maternal self-improvement will be guided by the tools of Hand In Hand parenting through video tutorials, group coaching sessions and podcasts. This “Parenting by Connection” process of deep listening and self-excavation offers a methodology to rewrite inherited models of patriarchal power. This self-improvement work in done with the understanding that real or good motherhood is something that can be “performed”. 

Inspired by the editorial methodology of Performing Motherhood, I aim to be mindful of the pull toward a focus on oppressive tropes of maternal experience and instil a sense of play in the project. Susan Suleiman’s ‘playful mother’ inspires a move out od the domestic space and into the urban landscape as a strategy of agency, bringing the interiority of motherhood into public space.

ETHICS

I will need to complete an ethics application for the group portion of my research. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buller, Rachel. Reconciling Art and Mothering. Routledge, 2016.

Baraitser, L. (2009). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge.

Davey, Moyra. Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. Seven Stories Press, 2001.

Ettinger, Bracha. “(M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made mother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting” Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk 

Giffney, Noreen, et al. “To Encounter a Child: Maternal Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Reading.” Studies in Gender & Sexuality, vol. 13, no. 2, Apr. 2012, pp. 69–79. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15240657.2012.682543. 

Hawkes, Terri, et al. Performing Motherhood : Artistic, Activist, and Everyday Enactments. Demeter Press, 2014. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05020a&AN=aut.b26069301&site=eds-live.

Kelly, Caleb. Sound: Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Caleb Kelly London, Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, 2011.

Kelly, Caleb “Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art.” Dunedin, New Zealand: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2013. Exhibition catalogue essay.

Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Second ed. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Lena Šimić & Emily Underwood-Lee “Editorial”, Performance Research, 22:4, 1-4, 2017. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1374641

Liss, Andrea. Feminist Art and the Maternal. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 

Malloy, Judy. Women, Art, and Technology. MIT Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05020a&AN=aut.b10914596&site=eds-live.

Marchevska, E “Performing Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work.” Studies in the Maternal, 8(2): 11, pp. 1–14, 2016, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/sim.235

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Massumi, Brian. “Notes of the Translation and Acknowledgement.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. London & New York: Continuum, 2004.

McCloskey, Paula. The Potentiality of Encounters: A Response to Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters. University of Sheffield Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 13: 89–93, 2012

Nixon, Mignon. Bad Enough Mother October, Vol. 71, feminist issueS (Winter, 1995), pp. 70-92

O’Sullivan, Simon. “Art Practice as Fictioning (or, myth-science).” Simon O’Sullivan http://www.simonosullivan.net/articles/art-practice-as-fictioning-or-myth-science.pdf Accessed 28 August 2016.

O’Sullivan, Simon, and Gary Banham. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari : Thought Beyond Representation, Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aut/detail.action?docID=259486.

O’Sullivan, Simon. On the Production of Subjectivity : Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05020a&AN=aut.b1278235x&site=eds-live.

Pachmanová, Martina. Mobile Fidelities Conversations onFeminism, History and Visuality. Kt Press, 2006.

Radley, Emma. “Baraitser-Plus-Lacan: The Maternal Encounter, Interruption, and Language.” Studies in Gender & Sexuality, vol. 13, no. 2, Apr. 2012, pp. 101–105. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15240657.2012.682920.

Raphael-Leff, J., 2010. “Healthy Maternal Ambivalence”. Studies in the Maternal, 2(1), pp.1–15. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/sim.97

Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures : Feminism and Performance Art in North America, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/aut/detail.action?docID=3332008.