Going South: Traversal and Attunement in Painting

Abstract

Drawing on the insights of Kristeva and Merleau-Ponty, as well as the philosophical tradition of aesthetics, I consider how processes of artistic creation and aesthetic experience involve both traversal—namely, across the incommensurable differences among affect, cognition, emotion, cultural expectation—and attunement to the particularities of, and connections between, those cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and discursive possibilities. This commentary explores such creative possibilities through a consideration of selected works from my exhibition of paintings, titled Going South shown in Somerset House East Wing, King’s College London in June 2015. In so doing, I offer an account of how the feminist and deconstructive ambitions of this body of work are structured by the interplay of dialectical processes that mobilize oppositions, between, for example, the articulation of three-dimensional form and the performance of disruptive psychic drives. Such dialectical methods inform this body of work’s deconstruction of the northern tradition of sublime landscape painting, insofar as they open up the possibility of aesthetic processes and metaphorical journeys, through which we might go south, toward an improper, psychosexual, and viscerally sublime “edge of the skirt of the world.”