Valie Export declared in her 1989 essay entitled Feminist Actionism that ‘The drama of material was a drama of meaning’. The drama I engage with is how the material of nature, the female body being implicit in this, in alignment with female, feminist action can reimagine a relationship to form that frees /reimagines previous, repressive historical conceptions of nature & form. By working in the "contact zone" between human corporeality and more-than-human nature, my work takes human relationships to nature as a starting point for the inquiry into the generation of novel forms through actions, movements & embodied experiences.
What I hope my practice embraces is what Stacy Alaimo calls tans-corporeality - "the time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from "nature" (238). Not as ‘a separation [...] where the body is cast as discursively produced and therefore acts as "passive, plastic matter". (237) I wasn’t passive any more than the materials I was using were. As Stacy Alaimo said; “If nature is to matter, we need more potent, more complex understandings of materiality.”
Stacy Alaimo describes nature and biology as “twin ghosts” and suggests that the only way to dispossess them of this position is ‘to endow them with flesh, to allow them to materialize more fully, and to fully attend to their precise materializations.” This project takes up through an active, embodied practice the material of biology & nature. As Haraway points out: “The point is not new representations but new practices” where “practices are [...] embodied, situated actions. I do not seek to represent nature, but to present a situated account of nature(?)- where “FREED EXTENDED material extends awareness and frees people from old and restrictive meanings and conditions.” Again, Haraway: Representation depends on possession of a passive resource. The paintings in this project use nature not as a passive, immutable, fixed source but as active, dynamic agents in an attempt to ‘radically rethink materiality.” These paintings are my attempt to bring nature to the surface as “matter that matters”.
