Arts, Faculty of
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for
DSpace
UBCV
Yeo, Marika St. Rose
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This exegesis explores how creative praxes have the potential to disrupt the hold the modern notion of “Time” has on our minds. The exegesis explores this disruption by exposing the ways in which “Time” has contributed to the conditions that produce and sustain violence on a global scale and further offers an analysis regarding the ways in which artistic and creative works allow us to breach from this violence and harm, even if only momentarily. While it is mainly focused on the possibilities that arise through ceramic praxis, it draws from a range of aesthetic approaches that subvert the temporal dominance of a singular unfolding “Time” in order to conceive of the world differently. It is through creative works that it is therefore suggested that there are possibilities to enact alternative options and avenues towards transformation in our global world.
MOVING OUTSIDE SPACETIME: CLAY AND CREATIVE PRAXIS by MARIKA ST.ROSE YEO A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2022 © Marika St. Rose Yeo, 2022ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled Moving Outside Spacetime: Clay and Creative Praxis submitted by Marika St. Rose Yeo in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Examining Committee: University Examiner Additional Supervisory Committee Manuel Piña-Baldoquín, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC Supervisor Cash Ahenakew, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Nalo Hopkinson, Professor, School of Creative Writing, UBC University Examiner Renisa Mawani, Professor, Department of Sociology, UBC iii Abstract This exegesis explores how creative praxes have the potential to disrupt the hold the modern notion of “Time” has on our minds. The exegesis explores this disruption by exposing the ways in which “Time” has contributed to the conditions that produce and sustain violence on a global scale and further offers an analysis regarding the ways in which artistic and creative works allow us to breach from this violence and harm, even if only momentarily. While it is mainly focused on the possibilities that arise through ceramic praxis, it draws from a range of aesthetic approaches that subvert the temporal dominance of a singular unfolding “Time” in order to conceive of the world differently. It is through creative works that it is therefore suggested that there are possibilities to enact alternative options and avenues towards transformation in our global world. iv Lay Summary This critical exegesis explores the notion of “Time” and in particular, how this notion was developed and deployed during the period of Western modernity. This research focuses on the ways in which creative praxes can create new or alternative options to sense “Time” differently and suggests that in engaging with “Time” in alternate ways opens up possibilities to breach, even if momentarily, from the harm of Western modernity’s structures while also creating the conditions for transformation. v Preface This dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Marika St. Rose Yeo. vi Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Lay Summary……………………………………………………………...……………………...iv Preface……………………………….………….…………………………………..……………..v Table of Contents……………………………………………………………...……………....….vi List of Figures……………………………….………….…………………………………….....viii Acknowledgements……………………………….………….…………………………………...ix Dedication……………………………….………….…………………………………………….xi Introduction……………………………….………….……………………………………………1 Chapter One: Theoretical and Creative Context……………………………….………………...11 Part One: Openings through Foundational Engagements Engaging with the Notion of “Time”.……………………………….…………………..14 Engaging with Plural Temporalities.………….…………………....……….…………...22 Engaging Tidalectic and Rhythmic Temporalities.………….…………....……………..28 Engaging Black Feminist Perspectives………………………………………………….33 Part Two: Traversing through Creative Possibilities Unsettling Linearity through Creative Praxis ……....……………..……....…………….42 Exposing Options Through Creative Praxis……………………………………………. 50 Chapter Two: Mapping My Approach…....……….…....……….…....……….…....……….…..64 Part One: Theoretical, Analytic and Creative Lenses Black Feminist Approach…....……….…....……….…....……….…….…….…….…....66 Brathwaite’s Tidalectics……….…....…………………….…….…….……......….…….70 Creative Analytic Lens: Auto-ethnography and Living Inquiry……….…....………..…74vii Part Two: Practice-Led Approach Framing My Practice-Led Approach………………………………………………….....78 Research Design and Producing the Work…………………………………………..…..81 Engaging with the Work…………………………………………………………………84 Limitations, Advantages and Considerations of the Research Project…………………..87 Chapter Three: The Praxis…………………………………………………….................………92 Part One: Creative Conditions The Material……………………………………………………………………………..95 The Form………………………………………………………………………………..100 The Surface……………………………………………………………………………..105 Mapping My Ceramic Vessels……………………………………….…………………109 Part Two: The Possibilities Disrupting Modernity’s Timescale……………………………………………………..112 Cyclical Transversion....………………….…....………….…....…………………........128 Transformation……….…....……………..………………….…....………..…….….….142 Concluding Chapter….…....…………………….…………….…....………………….….…....162 Figures…………………………………………………………………………………………..170 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...……….187 viii List of Figures Figure 1…………………………………………………………………………………………170 Figure 2…………………………………………………………………………………………171 Figure 3…………………………………………………………………………………………172 Figure 4…………………………………………………………………………………………173 Figure 5…………………………………………………………………………………………174 Figure 6…………………………………………………………………………………………175 Figure 7…………………………………………………………………………………………176 Figure 8…………………………………………………………………………………………177 Figure 9…………………………………………………………………………………………178 Figure 10………………………………………………………………………..………………179 Figure 11……………………………………………………………………………………..…180 Figure 12……………………………………………………………………………………..…181 Figure 13……………………………………………………………………………………..…182 Figure 14………………………………………………………………………………..………183 Figure 15…………………………………………………………………………………..……184 Figure 16……………………………………………………………………………………..…185 Figure 17……………………………………………………………………………………..…186 ix Acknowledgments I am beyond thankful to my supervisor Denise and my committee members Cash and Manuel. Denise, thank you for being a great inspiration to my thinking and my work and the reason I continued to study in this program. I am forever grateful for your support in this process and for the opportunity to learn from you. Cash, thank you as well for your support and time. I have drawn so much insight and hope from your work and have so appreciated hearing your perspectives. Thank you Manuel for your encouragement throughout my academic, artistic processes and milestone life events. I’m grateful for your reminders to bring creativity and joy into the work. I would also like to thank my professors from my first years at UBC – thank you for your time, patience and encouragement during times when I truly needed it. Thank you as well to Phanuel for believing in my artistic work and opening doors of possibility. To my cohort and classmates, I have grown so much from learning alongside you and my thoughts were opened, changed and deepened thanks to your perspectives. While I can’t name everyone who I’d like to name here, I hold you in my thoughts as integral to this journey of growth. In particular, I’d also like to thank Dabney for your constant support, insight and uplifting friendship that helped me through some of the biggest challenges. I’d also like to thank Shereen and Eli. Meeting through that spring class was a gift and I’m so grateful you have thought through these ideas with me. Thank you as well to members of the department – especially Alicia, Wynn and Carmen who continually supported me in understanding the steps and details when I first began my studies. To my family and friends, all of whom I know I can’t name in this small page but whom I hold in so much gratitude and love. Thank you for your patience, for your kindness and for your care. Every voice-note, check-in, message or call meant the world to me and helped me finish x this project. A special thank you to Farideh, your daily notes of encouragement and your unending support has meant so much to me. Thank you to Shamina, your consistent support helped me heal, grow and believe that I could finish the work. Thank you to my Auntie Marce who taught me a love of art that then rooted itself deep within me. I am so grateful for who you are and the influence created by you and Uncle Chill has impacted me beyond words. Thank you for encouraging me and constantly making me feel so supported and loved. Thank you to my siblings for checking in with me along this journey, for your patience, love and for consistently offering support in so many ways. To my parents, thank you for helping me and encouraging me along the way, helping me set up my kiln and a studio, cheering me on with each step. I am so grateful for your support, love and belief in me. Lastly, I would like to thank my husband Alex. Thank you for your consistent joyful and loving support. Thank you for believing in my work, my growth, my art and for being there every step of the way. xi Dedication I dedicate this project to the women who came before me, my mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers. In particular, I dedicate this to my mom who has been there for me in all aspects of my life and through every stage, step and challenge. You have been a pillar of strength underpinning all my work. 1 Introduction Like our grandmother’s – our nanna’s – action, like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.1 -Kamau Brathwaite When I feel the smoothness of the clay between my fingers and sense both the water and dust that leave traces on my palms, I am reminded that I am in a conversation with the material. Not only am I reading the movement of the clay, its state of pliability and watching for its breaks or its cracks, but I am collaborating with it in creative praxis. As I move through this praxis, many questions arise, not only related to my own sense of “being” in the world – that is how I engage in, live in and conceive of the world – but also how clay (the earth) and creative praxis might open avenues to learn, wonder, sense and express a way of “being” in the world differently. This critical exegesis explores a range of engagements with artistic praxes, including my own, that offer insight into how we might begin to explore or open up further options to “be” in the world differently – that is how to engage in the world and create and live despite the weight of the structures of harm that exist in our global present such as dispossession, anti-blackness, colonial domination and extraction – particularly as related to how we might sense the world 1 Kamau Brathwaite, Ancestors: A Re-invention of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (New York: New Directions, 2001), 34. 2 outside of “Time.”2 My engagement with the concept of “Time” is based on the perspective that “Time” is profoundly implicated in the organization of the world as we have come to know it today; and further, that the attendant systems that are intertwined with “Time” are central to supporting the aims of Western modernity that sought to craft the West as the main site and generator of “progress” while categorizing the “rest” of the globe as, to varying degrees, backwards in “Time.” Further to this, I engage with the perspective of “Time” that adheres to a notion that “Time” as it was formulated during the period of Enlightenment created conditions which position History as a flat narrative or arc that pretends to capture the flow of reality while occluding perspectives, ancestralities and memories as local, marginal, or insignificant.3 This conception of “Time” is where I find my point of departure for this critical reflection of my artistic work – in other words, I begin with an examination of the notion of “Time” that is woven into the modern/colonial world-system which ultimately created “lines in land, sea and race” and has perpetuated, produced and supported structures of harm in our global world.4 The “Time” of Western modernity has been formulated as an essential component that makes up the backdrop against which all things move and exist; it is a structure through which we measure progress, efficiency, and the productivity of our lives. To breach with this concept and to engage with “Time” differently would ask us to “be” in the world differently, to imagine beyond current fact and to envision alternative futures that unsettle “Time” – and the attendant systems that are intertwined with it and support it.5 In the coming chapters, I suggest that to unsettle “Time” in 2 The notion of “Time” addressed here acknowledges Albert Einstein’s theory of spacetime. For this reason, I use spacetime in the title. 3 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020) 175. 4 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 152 and Walter D. Mignolo, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?" in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. by Katherine McKittrick (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 111. 5 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017), 119. 3 this regard, will allow for a release or breach from the structures of harm that attend to modernity in our global world today.In particular, I engage with the possibilities for unsettling “Time” through my artistic work by suggesting that my sculptural vessels offer an avenue to reveal other temporalities through the handling of the clay itself and their flux and movement through cycles. What might we be missing if we see “Time” as simply a unit of measurement, an empty backdrop or an unfolding sequence of moments? What if we could conceive of “Time” unfolding in more than one way, allowing us access to new, old or other worlds not yet imagined?6 What would be made possible if creative praxes could reveal avenues to sense “Time” differently thereby cultivating further conditions for us to work, think and live across many sites outside the familiar and through and within other temporalities so that we may come to know varying, changing and transformative worlds – worlds that have yet to arrive?7 While it might be more familiar to engage with the concept of “Time” as we see it playing out in our daily lives on the clock and our conception of “Time” through the arc of History or “Time” as a solely linear unfolding, I begin with the question of how creative praxes can allow us to sense beyond familiar notions of "Time," allowing us to create alternate conditions and possibilities of transformation and healing despite the weight of the structures we find ourselves in. As mentioned, this project will be carried out both through the analysis of my own creative praxis working with clay, and further, through the analysis of a selection of creative works from artists, musicians and poets, who attend to themes such as “Time,” “transformation” and “healing” in their praxes. In this exegesis, to engage with the question of “Time,” I begin 6 Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures: Kamau Brathwaite's Prose/ Poetry as Sound-Space,” Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2003): 5, https://doi.org/10.33596/anth.4. 7 Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea,” Antipode 1, no. 54 (2022): 5, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12773. 4 with a range of critical interventions regarding “Time” starting with the period of Enlightenment and its formulation of the concept of “Time” that we employ today. Further to this, my initial overview of the discourses surrounding this topic are focused on the ways in which “Time” was organized towards the aims of modernity to locate the West as “present in ‘Time’” and “the rest” as backwards, traditional and “primitive.”8 This initial engagement with the discourses surrounding “Time” provides insight into how “Time” was employed to create a global configuration where the planet lived in different temporalities and lines of separation within the global world were solidified and reified based not only on where a population was located in space but on the location of the population along a line of linear unfolding.9 Beyond the more obvious point of harm – that this configuration of the world not only drew lines of separation in a shared global world and positioned this configuration as “common sense” – it’s formulation further required the occlusion of the “rhythms, trajectories, and momentum of time” that attend to “the rest” of the globe, while positioning the “West” as the nucleus of progress.10 A brief overview of the discourses pertaining to “Time” in this light also provides insight into the conditions which produce the corporate ideologies of our global present where competition is accepted as the name of the game, “success” is equated with getting ahead and, subsequently, to lose is to “fall behind.”11 As these conditions are tied to the “Time” of the clock, a brief overview of this discourse exposes how the “Time” of modernity is interlinked with the multi-layered notion of what it means to “be” in a world formulated on the premises of Enlightenment thinkers. 8 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity,153. 9 Mignolo, 151. 10 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017), 2. 11 Rifkin, 177. 5 As I move on from an initial overview of the discourses surrounding the development of “Time” through the period of Enlightenment, I then attend to artistic praxes which offer an engagement with “Time” that moves beyond solely a linear unfolding and generates potentialities for us to sense the unfamiliar and to engage with the possibility of rhythms and cycles playing out in more than one way.12 These alternative options and avenues will be discussed in further detail with regards to artistic works that shift our engagement with “Time” allowing us to reinterpret and re-articulate temporality through creative engagement that generates the conditions for these other ways of “sensing” to emerge, offering possibilities for how we might be able to breach from the structure of “Time” as experienced in modernity and set the conditions for “Time” to be made anew while offering a release from the harm that attends to its structures. Imagining a world that is not yet here and traversing across varied temporalities outside the systems of harm that mark our global world requires the many elements described by the writers and scholars that I draw on in the first chapter of my exegesis, many of whom mention or discuss the need for creative possibilities. An overview of the works referred to in Chapter One gives context to my artistic work and processes as, ultimately, I seek to engage alternative possibilities for sensing and imagining outside this particular configuration of “Time” which is now deeply implicated within the structures of our global present. This framing of the notion of “Time” contextualizes why I hope to sense “Time” differently. That is, this contextualization will further inform my understanding and framework for the necessary conditions that would allow for alternative futures and options to emerge and resurge for “being in the world differently” while simultaneously exposing the 12 A reference to Carter Mathes’ description of communicating with listeners beyond familiar musical or aesthetic language in Carter Mathes, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 35. 6 limits and violence that attend to the notion of modernity’s particular construction of a singular unfolding “Time.” The initial overview of this discourse sets the foundation for Chapter Two which addresses my methodological, analytical and theoretical research approach with regards to my creative praxis and practice-led research. To describe this approach I will primarily draw on black feminist perspectives which will be framed by the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Tina Campt – with this approach I have intended to make room for the unknowable, leaving the results contextual, contingent, flexible and open to change,13 in part by focusing on how we come to know rather than solely focusing on the fixivity of “what or who or why we know.”14 As Ferreira da Silva’s work offers a framing of the radical and transformative potential blackness holds to make impossible the conditions which have perpetuated harm and sustained the modern categories, I draw upon this perspective to frame a black feminist approach that includes and does not limit the radical transformative potential for imagining the world anew beyond the infrastructure of modernity, through creative possibilities. In a similar sense to framing and engaging with black feminist perspectives that create the conditions to imagine what has yet to be, I further frame my approach by drawing from the work of Tina Campt where she proposes that the grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must. Campt’s description of black feminist futurity will further influence my engagement with black feminist perspectives and contibute to 13 A reference to Cash Ahenakew’s discussion of “resisting the temptation for certainty, totality, and instrumentalization in Western reasoning” in “Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing Onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination,” International Review of Qualitative Research 9, no. 3 (2016): 333. 14 McKittrick, “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea,” 3-18. 7 the framing of how these perspectives create the necessary conditions for being able to enact radical and transformative possibilities. I pair this approach with Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of the “tidalectic” which is described as engaging with the world in recursive movement, cycles and gathering points rather than adhering to a strictly linear unfolding.15 This “tidalectic” approach will be grounded in a model of movement that does not reproduce “linear progress,” but rather seeks to engage in a research process where moments, information and insight return in cycles leading to a deepening in understanding of my guiding research questions rather than resulting in a finalized conclusion or answer. Chapter Three will include my main body of research which is a detailed overview of my creative praxis and analysis. While this chapter initially gives insight into the clay, form and material of the ceramic vessels which I produced as part of my practice-led research, one of its main goals will be to explore the experimentation, creation and possibilities that arise out of my personal creative praxis and to situate my praxis in conversation with black and Indigenous artists, writers and poets who engage with the concept of “Time.” The initial engagement with my artistic pieces will be framed by the ways in which I see the potential for creative works to disrupt the “Time” of modernity. This exploration will be led by a discussion of Greek philosophy which will give insight into the development of “Time” during Enlightenment and how artistic works have already been disrupting modernity’s “Timescale” to introduce new, other and alternative modes of engaging with the world outside of “Time.” While I consider my analysis only a partial map of the ways in which black and 15 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2019), 8. 8 Indigenous artists, writers and poets have created pieces which generate possibilities to sabotage “Time”– that is creating the conditions to imagine the world outside the configuration of “Time” crafted in modernity – this particular chapter will offer a glimpse into what might be possible if we allow ourselves to breach, even if momentarily, from the harm that is created when we view the world solely through the lens of modernity’s “Time.”16 Again, while I do not seek to offer a complete or full mapping of the possibilities that might occur when diverging from modernity’s “Time,” I do seek to offer a partial mapping through a formulation of what I term “cyclical transversion,” a concept which I define as energy held within any given material turning across or into something else, moving and returning endlessly in cycles. My framing of “cyclical transversion” will be informed and influenced by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s articulation of the Plenum.17 Through engaging with these concepts, and in particular, the notion of the “cyclical,” I seek to offer language towards engaging with the 16 Reference to “partial map”: Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), 45. 17 Denise Ferreira da Silva’s articulation of the Plenum is one that is modified and marked by transversability which she quotes as: “the at-once crossing of physical and emotional lines of separation, real and imagined” Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(Ion) of Blackness toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (April 2015): 87. Ferreira da Silva describes that by drawing on the image of the Plenum she is able to articulate a different image of existence called “Corpus Infinitum.” Corpus Infinitum is an image that recalls Leibniz Plenum; however, it is modified by thermodynamics and quantum physics and is an image that pictures an unlimited and full context for existence without a center, where everything that exists is connected to everything else – through its mode of existence – and energy is released and absorbed or refracted within this existence continually transversing through everything that exists without end. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Thesis Lecture by Denise Ferreira Da Silva: "Corpus Infinitum," Vimeo, 2022, https://vimeo.com/528873608. Ferreira da Silva draws from Leibniz’s work which she quotes as follows: "For Leibniz, "everything is a plenum, which makes all matter interconnected": In a plenum every motion has some effect on distant bodies, in proportion to heir distance. For each body is affected, not only by those in contact with it, and in some way feels the effects of everything that happens to them, but also, through them, it feels the effects of those in contact with the bodies with which it is itself immediately in contact. From this it follows that this communication extends to any distance whatsoever. As a result, every body is affected by everything that happens in the universe, to such an extent that he who sees all can read in each thing what happens everywhere, and even what has happened or will happen, by observing in the present what is remote in time as well as in space.” G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), 221. 9 concept of “being” in the world outside “Time” and thus, the possibilities that all things are interlinked and move in cycles – which ultimately informs a way of “being” in the world that begins with the assumption that there is a connection amongst all things, the earth, each other, the living and the dead.18 I suggest that this can ultimately be felt, sensed or engaged with through creative praxis – this conceptual theme will be analyzed in particular through the lens of my own artistic work and the use of clay. I explore the concept of “cyclical transversion” two ways: through touching and handling the sculptural vessels I create and allowing the pieces to absorb all that they encounter, taking on new breaks and cracks; and through the ways in which the unfired clay vessels dissolve through touch and handling and eventually return to the earth in cycle. While I employ the concept of “cyclical transversion” to think about my own artistic work, this concept has particular significance in relation to thinking outside the “Time” of modernity as it suggests that when engaging with artistic praxis we are also engaging with the cyclical transversion of energy which exists and moves outside the notion of “Time” and its specific structuring. It is through engagement with artistic work and the cycles of energy that come through the material that I suggest there is this possibility to sense how to “be” in the world outside of “Time” and to breach from the worlds of harm such as colonization, dispossession and anti-blackness that informs its structuring.19 As I move into my last and final section of this critical exegesis, I offer an analysis of how creative praxes allow us to breach from the structures of “Time” as formulated in modernity and sense or imagine alternative temporalities, but further, I offer an analysis of how I seek to 18Manfred Kresmer, "Visiting Ancestors: St. Lucian Djine in Communion with their African Kin," Caribbean Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1993):82-99. 19 Leanne Simpson’s discussion of anti-Blackness and colonialism in “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between Time and Space,” interview by CBC, April 11, 2018. 10 engage with an imaginative and creative praxis that might allow us to sense across these multiple temporal frames and sites to create conditions for radically new or transformative realities that have yet to be imagined. I frame the concept of transformation as both an ongoing process and a radical change in conditions that might be explicit, non-explicit or occur in subtle shifts. It is through this framing and analysis where I suggest that creative praxis has the potential to disrupt the notions of “Time” established through the unfolding of modernity and to imagine that which is not yet here, to transform the conditions which cause harm and to open possibilities for healing.20 This critical study will primarily be focused on an analysis of what becomes possible or imaginable through the lens of my own creative praxis while also placing my work in conversation with the many other creative, theoretical and speculatives praxes which attend to the question of “Time.” I suggest, as previously mentioned, that creative praxes can – through visuals, touch, sound, poetics, and rhythm – expose options that allow us to re-articulate temporality, engage our senses differently, and disrupt conditions, assumptions and conceptions that sustain structures of harm. Through these works I begin to map the possibilities that exist through engaging with creative praxes, and in particular the praxis of vessel making and the use of clay, to open up new possibilities and pathways for transformation and healing. 20 A reference to Tina Campt’s discussion of envisioning that which is not yet here but must be. Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 11 Chapter One: Theoretical and Creative Context Introduction When I am looking at my ceramic vessels, I pick them up, feel the shape of the vessel in my hands and slowly turn the piece over, examining its surface, breaks and cracks. Just like waves gather and disperse at the shoreline, I feel and see the fragments and pieces that make up my vases converging, merging and overlapping, showing me the ways in which they too “gather.” It is this notion of “gathering” that mirrors the many moments, ideas, imagination and senses that inform my work and oscillate within it, many of which I cover in this chapter. While there could be many ways to describe what emerges through an engagement with these ceramic vessels and the convergence of ideas that move throughout the pieces, one aspect in particular that I sense when engaging with clay is that it allows for alternative temporalities, rhythms, patterns and cycles that disrupt a linear unfolding. Engaging with alternative temporalities is a primary consideration of this chapter as it also opens up the possibility to engage with different and alternative futurities; that is, opening up transformative possibilities for futures that are yet to arrive and would otherwise be foreclosed; futures that are yet to be imagined and that prevent the conditions which produce and reinforce systems of harm that we see in our world today. These temporalities, which open up possibility for other worlds to be imagined, are woven in and amongst a range of black feminist thought. These black feminist perspectives expose what is made possible by subverting the notion of the human Subject as produced in Western modernity and suggest that radical change to the systems of harm in which we find ourselves is possible through thinking with a black feminist lens. 12 In the following chapter I give a brief overview of a selection of the relevant literature that contributes to the discourse on “Time.” In this regard, I engage with a discourse that centers around the concept of “Time” solidified during the period of Western modernity and its ties to concepts such as linearity, progress, sequence, clock-time and the notion of a singular temporal register. Moving from this, I further engage with how the concept of “Time” was formulated towards the aims of Western modernity that sought to, for example, craft the West as the main site and generator of “progress” while categorizing the “rest” of the globe as, to varying degrees, backwards in “Time” along a singular chronological axis line of “progress.” While I seek to engage with this discourse regarding a particular formulation of “Time,” I also engage with the ways in which this notion of “Time” simultaneously supports, produces and reinforces structures of harm, such as dispossession, extraction and colonial domination. After an initial engagement with the formulation of “Time” as described and crafted in modernity, I then move through a range of perspectives that offer alternative engagements to “Time” such as tidalectic, cyclic and rhythmic temporalities; that is, temporalities which cannot be restricted within the narrow bounds of linearity – for example temporal registers marked by oscillating movement, rhythmic patterns or by cyclic tempos and occurrences. Drawing upon engagements that allow us to sense outside linear and sequential “Time” opens up pathways to sense time differently – outside the framework of modernity. By moving through various considerations on “Time” alongside the possibilities that emerge through black feminist perspectives, further potentialities for imaginative and creative praxis are opened; this allows praxes of creativity and imagination to open up avenues of thought and beingness that were once foreclosed, to stretch beyond limits of the structures we find ourselves in (such as the codification and categorization of how we come to “know” or “be” in 13 the world) and to move outside what has already been imagined – bringing about worlds we hope to collectively create – worlds that are not marked by structures and conditions which produce and sustain continual patterns of harm in our global world today such as subjugation, colonial violence, domination, exploitation, extraction and their entanglement with global crises and injustices such as displacement, climate catastrophes and violent governing systems. In the last part of this chapter, I draw upon a range of works that expose what is made possible through creative praxis and the ability for creative praxis to sabotage, unsettle, or expose the limits of “Time” as conceived in Western modernity. In part, I engage with creative praxes that deliberately seek to generate alternative senses of temporality such as poetic and musical works that draw upon notions of “sonic vibrations” or “echoes” in order to re-articulate temporal organization. Further, I draw upon discussions of creative praxes that deliberately seek to unsettle notions of linear “Time” through upending common or familiar aesthetic experiences in order to disrupt expected chronology and sequence while exposing other possible options. While these works unsettle “Time” as crafted in Western modernity, many creative praxes also engage with alternative possibilities that allow us to “be” in the world differently. The last section of this literature review will both summarize and introduce other potentials that arise through creative praxes that address the question of how to begin to sense “Time” differently. These options offer insight into the praxis of being in the world – that is the praxis of engaging in the world and creating and living despite the weight of the structures of harm that exist in our global present. These scholars, writers and artists thus offer openings of thought in regards to how to move into other and alternate praxes of “being” in the world – praxes which create the conditions for other possible futures that are yet to arrive. 14 Part One: Openings through Foundational Engagements Engaging with the Notion of “Time” One of the primary and foundational engagements that frame this critical exegesis will be an engagement with the notion of “Time” as formulated during the period of Western modernity and an examination of the ways in which this formulation of “Time” continues to be produced and re-established throughout our global world today. This engagement with “Time” is foundational to my own creative praxis as the sculptural vases I create – which I explore in further detail in later chapters – engage with attempts to unsettle linear time by drawing upon notions of cycles, interconnection, touch and sense, that seek to expose possibilities to move outside the formulations of space-time we find in modernity. My attempts to unsettle the “Time” of modernity through creative praxis are in part executed by positing that earth (clay) moves in cycles and that the artist and all those who come into contact with the ceramic sculptural vessels that I create are also in a constant process of co-creation to produce the artistic work – causing the vessel to be marked by flux, change, breaks, or complete dissolvability. These works are therefore rooted in the notion that artist, audience and material are in some form of conversation and that the material carries the imprint of all that it has come into contact with, and will continue to be transformed by imprints and touches which have yet to occur. Ultimately these vessels seek to act as gathering points that oscillate between past interactions and future possibilities – offering an engagement with “Time” that suggests that the “past” is continually present while simultaneously offering the potential that these artistic works will hold many possible futures, some of which could potentially involve the artistic work dissolving altogether and returning to the earth in cycle. 15 It is through engaging with these concepts and a desire to explore what is transmitted outside a strict understanding of space-time as configured in modernity where I position my work – as a creative praxis that has provided the conditions to sense rhythms, cycles and connection that exist outside a sequential unfolding. While there are many openings through which we may begin to expose and explore the particular crafting of “Time,” which I seek to expose and subvert through my own creative praxis, I begin with a brief overview of the ways in which “Time” was deployed towards the aims of Western modernity through its deep implications in the formulation of human subjectivity – giving further context as to why this particular notion of “Time” is foundational to modernity and foundational to this critical exegesis as I seek to explore creative praxes that offer the possibility to sense “Time” otherwise. In his work Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization Achille Mbembe addresses how the colonization of the globe by the European empire was, in its essence, both a negation of “Time” and ultimately a negation of the subaltern or those considered outside of Universality (which Mbembe refers to as “the native”). 21 This move of negation placed the subaltern as “without a past and without history…radically located outside of time,”22 while formulating Europe as the locus which holds the monopoly on the “essential human quality we call the disposition toward the future…”23 21 “Negation of the subaltern” is referring to Mbembe’s description in Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 53. “Universality” is referring to the following excerpt: “Following the sociohistorical logic of exclusion, critical racial theorists write the racial subaltern as barred from universality and the conception of humanity (the self-determined subject of history) that the transparency thesis sustains.” Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 7. 22Referring to the following excerpt: “The reason is that colonization in its essence was a fundamental negation of time. From the colonial point of view, natives were not simply people without a past and without history. They were people radically located outside of time.” Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 53. 23 Mbembe, 53. 16 The crafting of this particular notion of “Time” was therefore foundationally implicated in the crafting of the human subject as formulated within the context of Western modernity; it configured the “capacity for futurity [as a] monopoly of Europe”24 and generated alongside it the notion that this futurity could only be “brought to the natives from the outside, as a magnanimous gift of civilization.”25 By drawing on Frantz Fanon, Mbembe describes how “natives had to be ‘civilized’ within the context of their specific difference and within their particular position – frozen in “Time.”26 While Mbembe delineates how “Time” was associated with human subjectivity in connection to a “disposition towards the future,”27 Walter Mignolo similarly exposes “Time’s” deep implications with the formulation of human subjectivity in his work The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Mignolo describes the paradigm of coloniality as, amongst other things, requiring the existence of “barbarians,” which Mignolo details as people who “...had no choice but to deal with the fact that they had been classified as ‘barbarians,’”28 and were therefore seen as “different and lesser humans.”29 He offers further analysis regarding a shift that occurred in the 18th century when “Time” came into the picture and “barbarians” became translated into “primitives” who were located in “Time.”30 Mignolo 24Referring to the following excerpt: “Europe had the monopoly on that essential human quality we call the disposition toward the future, and the capacity for futurity was the monopoly of Europe. This quality had to be brought to the natives from outside, as a magnanimous gift of civilization— a benevolent gift that absolved colonialism of its plunder and crimes.” Mbembe, 53. 25 Mbembe, 53. 26 Referring to the following excerpt: “Consequently, natives had to be “civilized” within the context of their specific difference: societies without history or writing, frozen in time. To a large extent, decolonization only reified the failure of assimilation. Decolonization legally sanctioned the idea that nonwhite subjects of the Empire could not become French citizens. Thus, the barrier of race always stood between French citizenship and identity.” Mbembe, 61. 27 Mbembe, 53. 28 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 153. 29 Mignolo, 155. 30 Ibid. 17 notes that further to this, “primitives” were “in the lower scale of chronological order driving towards ‘civilization’.”31 Like Mbembe, Mignolo’s work offers an analysis on how the notion of human subjectivity is implicated within the concept of “Time” in the modern, and how this particular notion of “Time” generates, reproduces and creates the conditions to sustain Western modernity’s categories. Mignolo approaches this analysis through many angles including looking at how the placement of “tradition” within the paradigm of coloniality led to the distinction of “tradition” being a mark of the past while the West held ownership over modernity and the future. Further, Mignolo assesses that “Hegel, as it is known, organized Kant’s cosmo-polis on a temporal scale that relocated the spatial distribution of continents (Asia, Africa, America, and Europe) in a chronological order that followed a certain directionality of history, from East to West. The planet was all of a sudden living in different temporalities, with Europe in the present and the rest in the past.”32 Ultimately, Mignolo describes the translation of geography into chronology as the work of colonization which served to justify a particular ideology of progress which informed the notion of “development and underdevelopment” in the 20th century.33 Given this context, Mignolo describes the rhetoric of Western modernity as putting a value on specific and constructed notions of “Time,” “progress,” and “development” that served to sustain the formulation of the human Subject within modernity. Furthering this point Mignolo writes, 31 Ibid. 32 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 151. Mignolo refers to Kant’s description of cosmo-polis in the following way: “Kant’s cosmopolitanism was cast under the implicit assumptions that beyond the heart of Europe was the land of those who had to be brought into civilization…Now, if we jump from the era of European “cosmopolitan” modernity and the civilizing mission (with England and France leading the way) to a postmodern world guided by “globalism,” we have a sketch of the continuity and diachronic accumulation of the rhetoric of modernity (salvation, conviviality, prosperity, and freedom) and its darker side, the logic of coloniality (discrimination, racism, domination, unilateralism, exploitation)...” Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 281. 33 Mignolo, 151. 18 “Once you control (the idea of) “time,” you can control subjectivity and make the many march to the rhythm of your own time.”34 Mignolo goes on to describe three moments of the colonization of “Time”: the Renaissance invention of the Middle Ages; the Enlightenment invention of the primitive and tradition, both as previously mentioned; and lastly, the postmodern invention of the acceleration of time where time was measured against labour leading to the postmodern era where the idea that to fall behind is to lose and to go faster is to win – “and of course you accept that winning is the name of the game...Success is the companion of moving fast, coming in first, and being the winner.”35 It is this colonization of time, or chrono-politics,36 that Mignolo identifies as the era of neoliberal globalization and which has become part of the arsenal to promote competition, encouraging fast speed, “success,” and “consuming the energy of millions of people who live their lives constantly thinking of going faster and getting ahead, to being a winner and to avoiding the shame of being a loser.”37 As the colonization of “Time,” and all that is implicated within it, becomes intertwined with corporate ideology, we can see an incremental pace of production that disregards the inevitability of overproduction and creates labour which is being sold instead of a pace of production which is being used for the benefit of the community at large.38 Through this analysis of “Time” and its shaping within the context of Western modernity, Mignolo ultimately offers an analysis on how “Time” has generated, re-produced and sustained the conditions of harm such as exploitation, dispossession and the subjugation that both sustains and marks modern categories. 34 Mignolo, 177. 35 Mignolo, 177. 36 Mignolo notes this in reference to a term coined by Daniel Innerarity. 37 Mignolo, 178. 38 Mignolo, 178. 19 In a similar vein of exploration, Epsen Hammer relates “clock-time” to what he calls “chronometric linearity.” In his work, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory, he suggests that this form of measuring “Time” resulted in “human interactions and transactions”39 becoming easier to calculate and predict, and one might infer, also easier to determine, control and exploit. These increased demands on people’s lives to measure and discipline their actions in relation to the clock and calendar is, according to Hammer, in direct correlation to humans' experience of “Time” in Western modernity. In reviewing the relationship of “Time” to Western modernity, Hammer further notes: “…had the history of Western modernity been different in certain relevant respects, then we would most probably have thought of time in other terms. Perhaps earlier, non-linear conceptions of time would still have been dominant, or other instruments for measuring and calculating time than the clock and the calendar would have been invented, generating alternate understandings of time.”40 While in this work Hammer does not fully address the varied implications of “Time” in relation to the “Subject” in Western modernity,41 or the ways in which the notion of “earlier, non-linear conceptions of time” might again signal to the distinction between the equation of 39 Epsen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (Cambridge: University Press, 2011), 16. 40 Epsen Hammer, 17. 41Here I am referring to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s delineation of the privileging of “Time” when she writes about “History” as “The region of modern knowledge that assumes time as the privileged ontoepistemological dimension”. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 15. I am referring as well to Ferreira da Silva’s description of the tools of raciality as deployed to protect Time as a “privileged dimension of knowledge and being” as “categorization functions in an ontological context governed by Time.” Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 87. 20 modernity vs. tradition as described by Walter Mignolo, Hammer does provide a general overview of the ways in which Western modernity imposes “specific constraints on what we can take human existence in time to entail,”42 and how “Time” has ruptured from its association with “natural cycles and processes,” causing it to become “a disenchanted succession of essentially homogeneous now-points.”43 Through his analysis, what Hammer proposes is that the life of the “modern subject” is to a “tremendously detailed and overwhelming degree organized with reference to the chronometer” which is further delineated as “the representation of time according to a principle of successive instants, each of which has a similar weight, leading in a linear direction from a past that is gone forever to a not yet actualized future.”44 Hammer distinguishes the “time of the everyday” and “time considered as a fact of nature” as an important philosophical distinction that is necessary in order for him to further elaborate upon the way in which the “Time” of modernity is implicated within “everyday time.”45 Hammer goes on to delineate how the process of modernization itself involves impacting “systemic imperatives upon everyday ‘actionorientations’.”46 In other words, conceptions of “objective time” or the “Time” of modernity influences everyday human action and self-interpretation.47 Hammer refers to “clock-time” as one example of “systemic imperatives” influencing human action when he describes that the prevalent and socially enforced use of clock-time has deeply changed our conception of what “existence as a temporal being involves.”48 Hammer goes on to suggest that the 42 Espen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory, 2. 43 Epsen Hammer, 2. 44 Epsen Hammer, 3. 45 Espen Hammer, 15. 46 Espen Hammer, 16. 47 Espen Hammer, 16. 48 Espen Hammer, 16. 21 introduction of the chronometer made the organization of labour and the working day more rigorous as it moved alongside the fear of losing time and its various economic implications.49 Ultimately, Hammer’s analysis offers further insight that draws forward the implications of “Time” as it relates to “being” in the world or as Hammer describes the ontological conception of what it means to be in “Time” and to be a “temporal being” and how it creates the conditions for exploitation and extraction. In this respect, the above works critically frame this exegesis and my own creative praxis as I seek to subvert the assumptions and conceptions of what attend to a “temporal being” in modernity and to expose the way creative praxis can facilitate this subversion while opening other options. While Hammer’s overview of these particular implications does not fully assess the implications of “Time” within the formulation of human subjectivity as described by Mbembe and Mignolo, Hammer’s work opens up avenues that expose the implications of “Time” as it connects to “clock-time” or the “Time” of the everyday that regulates and governs the systems embedded within our global present. Through this work, Hammer therefore attempts to bring forward the ramifications of “Time” as shaped in Western modernity and in doing so addresses a parallel theme to that of Mbembe and Mignolo, which is that regardless of one’s philosophical perspective, “Time” and the distinct way it is understood in the global present is, by necessity, deeply linked to the discourses of modernity and the layered forms of subjugation and exploitation implicated within it. This particular engagement with the notion of “Time” is, as previously mentioned, foundational to contextualizing my own engagement with “Time” through creative praxis as it highlights a collection of perspectives as to how the particular conception of “Time” in 49 Espen Hammer, 16. 22 modernity creates and sustains circumstances that allow for elements of harm such as colonial domination, exploitation and subjugation. While my artistic praxis does not expand specifically upon this notion of “Time,” I engage with creative works that seek to diverge from the particular conception of “Time” as described in this section. In Chapter Three, I analyze further my own creative praxis as it relates to engaging with temporalities that dissolve the conditions that sustain “Time” and explore what might arise when “Time” can no longer be sustained. The following sections therefore will offer a brief outline of some of the alternative and diverging temporalities that I make reference to through my artistic works. Engaging with Plural Temporalities Engaging with a formulation of “Time” as crafted within the existence of Western modernity and the harm that is implicated within it requires possibilities and conditions not only to imagine outside the systems which sustain this harm but to cultivate conditions that allow new and transformative possibilities to emerge through, for example, modes of engagement that move across varied temporalities. As I discuss in further detail in Chapter Two, engaging with varied temporalities allows for an unsettling of hegemonic tools based in linearity and opens up potential for multimodal knowledge perspectives that signal beyond modernity’s particular arrangement of space-time. This is particularly relevant to my own creative praxis as it generates the conditions necessary for creative work to become an avenue through which we can imagine the world outside “Time” – a concept that I explore in detail throughout Chapter Three; and further generates possibilities to sense, through our interaction with the artistic works and the material, a breach, even if only momentarily, from the harm of these hegemonic tools. 23 While I discuss the implications of varied temporalities in further depth throughout Chapters Two and Three, Mark Rifkin’s work and analysis offers preliminary openings into how we might sense or experience “Time” beyond modernity, or more specifically in Rifkin’s work, beyond the settler colonial view. In particular, Rifkin focuses on Indigenous orientations towards “Time” as opposed to, or in comparison with settler orientations to “Time” that emerged through Western modernity. Rifkin notes what he calls “the single frame of reference” imposed by Western modernity which forcefully provides the background against which the movement of our lives is measured.50 To engage with alternative temporalities outside the colonial matrix of power, Rifkin begins by outlining “Time” within settler discourses and perceptions by describing that with “...respect to the contemporaneity of non-natives and Indigenous peoples, the frame for thinking their synchronicity usually is provided by settler discourses, structures, and perceptions.”51 He goes on to state: “More than offering invidious portraits of Indians as backward and disappearing, non-native accounts, governmental and popular, treat the space of the United States as a given in which to set the unfolding of events.”52 In this way, The United States “functions as something of an atemporal container for the occurrences, movements, conjunctures, periodicities, and pulsations of history, providing the background against which the movement of time can be registered.”53 Rifkin poses the question of how to see “Time” otherwise. That is, instead of approaching the concept of “Time” as one that is an “abstract, homogeneous measure of universal movement along a singular axis,”54 – with its particular implications and formulations derived through the 50 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 1. 51 Mark Rifkin, 1. 52 Mark Rifkin, 1. 53 Mark Rifkin, 1. 54 Mark Rifkin, 2. 24 ontological assumptions of modernity – or as Rifkin describes, its association with: “...a formation called modernity whose qualities and emergence are tied to conditions in ‘the West’... [which] bear little relation to the rhythms, trajectories, and momentum of time that preceded the modern in the spaces in which it arrives,”55 Rifkin asks if we can conceive of “Time” as a form of varied and plural temporalities. Rifkin’s discussion of “Time” again signals subverting modernity’s structures and moving outside the colonial matrix of power by conceiving of alternative options. This discussion of “Time” is particularly relevant to my exploration of artistic works and praxes as it demonstrates that if artistic works can create the conditions necessary to sense beyond “Time,” it is not simply an enjoyable speculative exercise. Rather, this sensing beyond “Time” becomes associated with a praxis of being in the world that subverts, transforms and breaches from the hegemonic tools of colonialism that create and sustain harm. Rifkin’s engagement with this particular notion of “Time,” resonates with Mignolo when he writes, “Time” in “the social sciences…the humanities, or the natural sciences... is caught and woven into the imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system.”56 “Time’s” impact, that is, the consequences of “Time” becoming an entity in itself, reveals, according to Mignolo, that “Time” as conceived within the “colonial matrix of power” forms a fundamental piece of Western civilization’s imaginary, and this imaginary continues to be “a major factor in the making of colonial and imperial differences.”57 In relation to this colonial difference and its undoing, Mignolo writes: “Undoing the colonial difference as was built in the concept of time will involve, among other things, removing “time” from the privileged position it acquires in complicity with science, capitalism, and the mono-culturalism (e.g., universalism) of Western 55 Mark Rifkin, 2. 56 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 152. 57 Mignolo, 153-171. 25 civilization.”58 Mignolo further describes that as “colonial and imperial differences are being disclosed, roads to the future are being built, and some are being repaired.”59 Through this description of “Time,” both Mignolo and Rifkin offer a call to engage with varied temporalities that allow for a transformative approach to engaging with the notion of “Time,” its privileged position and the possibility to open up alternative futurities. To do this, Rifkin underscores a refusal to engage with the “singular unfolding of time” of modernity and instead describes varied temporal formations that “have their own rhythms—patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge imminently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations.”60 Rifkin goes on to state: “Native peoples remain oriented in relation to collective experiences of peoplehood, to particular territories (whether or not such places are legally recognized as reservations or given official trust status), to the ongoing histories of their inhabitance in those spaces, and to histories of displacement from them. Such orientations open up “dif-ferent worlds” than those at play in dominant settler orderings, articulations, and reckonings of time. Developing such notions of temporal orientation and multiplicity opens the potential for conceptualizing Native continuity and change in ways that move beyond the modern/ 58 Mignolo, 175. I further relate this to Mignolo’s description of the privileged position of History as it accompanies and is implicated within the concept of “Time.” With this Mignolo describes: “In sum, undoing the colonial difference means to accept and act on the fact that History is the flat narrative of imperial dominium that pretends to capture the flow of reality, while histories, ancestralities, memories are local, marginal, insignificant narratives from the perspective of History. Sciences, in the same manner, built formulas, invented laws based on the belief in objectivity without parenthesis.” Mignolo, 175. 59 Mignolo, 175. 60 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 2. 26 traditional binary; that do not take non-native frameworks as the self-evident basis for approaching Indigenous forms of persistence, adaptation, and innovation; and that enable consideration of temporal sovereignty…”61 Through Rifkin’s discussion of varied temporalities and “Native continuity” that moves beyond the framework of Western modernity and refuses “non-native frameworks as the self-evident,”62 Rifkin clarifies that he does not seek to mark an absolute distinction between “Natives and nonnatives” or to find an “authentic Indigenous conception of time against degrading forms of settler influence.”63 Rather, Rifkin suggests that “the effects of non-native expropriation, superintendence, and exploitation can be understood as intimate parts of Native experiences of time and becoming, as contributing to Indigenous orientations but in ways that exceed the paths of development envisioned by such interventions and invasions.”64 While Rifkin notes a type of temporal engagement and Indigenous temporal sovereignty that is not insulated from settler influence or violence, he simultaneously acknowledges “the dominant coordinates of Euro American sociality and governance” that continues to provide “the basis through which to register processes of becoming.”65 Rifkin goes on to state: “[this] problematic arises in a number of prominent efforts to try to map the violences of what is envisioned as the contemporary world system.”66 61 Rifkin, 3. 62 Rifkin, 3. 63 Rifkin, 3. 64 Rifkin, 4. 65 Rifkin, 3-7. 66 Rifkin, 10. 27 Rifkins brings into clarity a series of questions, one of which he articulates as: “What possibilities are there for temporal multiplicity under the conditions of settler dominance?”67 He goes on to suggest that “processes of being and becoming that emerge out of everyday life” and arise from “among other things, memory, storying, collective practices, dynamics of maturation and family formation, modes of inhabitation and connections to place, encounters with law and policy in their quotidian effects, histories of dispossession and opposition to it, and engagements with nonhuman entities of various kinds”68 generate durable frames of reference,69 and that multiple possibilities come into view when one “ceases to take settler frames of reference as the necessary background.”70 Through engaging with the possibilities that emerge by releasing the version of “history” associated with a singular unfolding of “Time,” both Mignolo and Rifkin outline possibilities for varied temporal registers to exist and move outside the singular temporal register of “Time” and make possible alternative roads to the future while generating and allowing for multiple possibilities to emerge.71 As engagement with these scholarly works informs my creative praxis in terms of formulating and creating options to sense “Time” differently, I particularly employ Rifkin’s discussion of multiple temporalities when discussing my praxis in Chapter Three, as it moves outside a singular axis of measurement and offers a framework for thinking with creative works that is marked by expanding complexity. 67 Rifkin, 16. 68 Rifkin, 12. 69 Rifkin., 20. 70 Rifkin, 192. 71 The concept of “alternative roads to the future” refers to Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 175. The concept of “allowing multiple possibilities to emerge” refers to Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 12. 28 Engaging Tidalectic and Rhythmic Temporalities While multiple temporalities that subvert hegemonic tools and systems is a key concept with which I engage throughout my creative praxis, sensing the patterns and rhythms in which these temporalities move is another foundational consideration which I frame in relation to my artistic works. As mentioned in the previous section, I frame my praxis within the context of multiple temporalities (which can and are playing out) and it is through an engagement with creative works that I suggest we may begin to sense, even if only for a moment, alternative considerations of “Time.” Further, I draw upon works that suggest the rhythms and patterns through which these temporalities move, as it is these same rhythms and patterns which I explore in Chapter 3 and which I have sought to mirror, employ and facilitate in the making of and interaction with my sculptural pieces. One such pattern of temporal possibility that I engage with in the framing of this critical exegesis is Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythmic principle of the “tidalectic” – that which emerges as rhythmic shifts and cycles rather than a linear or sequential unfolding.72 This possibility is described by Brathwaite in the following way: “Instead of the notion of one-two-three, Hegelian, I am now more interested in the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear.”73 This can also be further sensed in his poetic writing when Brathwaite describes “coming out” of Africa and arriving on the Caribbean islands. In this discussion Brathwaite asks, “How do we come from? Where do we come from? And why are we as we are?” He goes on to wonder why we are not “successfully dialectical in the way Western philosophy has assumed people’s lives should be” and proposes that instead we are 72Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures,” 1-16. 73 Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Trials of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” World Literature Today 68, no.4 (1994): 697. 29 tidalectic: “Like our grandmother’s – our nanna’s – action...like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.”74 In discussing Barthwaite’s work, Anna Reckin writes that it “presents a kind of recursive movement-in-stasis”75 which seems to offer us another possibility to see motion and stillness at once, as the “tidalectic” might help us sense the ways that stillness or stasis in “the present” can also be in motion. Elucidating further upon the philosophy and possibilities of the “tidalectic” approach, Silvio Torres-Saillant writes: “Contrary to dialectics, [Brathwaite’s] notion permits us to see achievement in the Caribbean "'success' of dialectics: synthesis. For dialectics is another gun: a missile: a way of making progress: / farward [sic] / but in the culture of the circle 'success' moves outward from the centre to circumference and back again: a tidal dialectic.”76 With this, Silvio Torres-Saillant’s analysis of Brathwaite’s work adds to the examples of how the rhythm of the tides might offer another approach to thinking about movement that veers away from marking reality through a linear or sequential unfolding, offering in tandem, the potential for sensing another way of being.77 This again offers context for my own creative 74 Kamau Brathwaite, Ancestors, 34. 75 Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures,” 2. 76 Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Trials of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” 704. 77 When I refer to sequentiality I am referring to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s description of sequentiality where she describes Hegel’s dialectical method as introducing the notion of sequentiality marked by “Spirit as movement in time, a process of self-development…History as the trajectory of Spirit.” Ferreira da Silva notes that “With these moves, [Hegel] introduces a temporal figuring of cultural difference as the actualization of Spirit’s different moments of development and postulates that post-Enlightenment European social configurations represent the fullest development of Spirit.” as quoted in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s, "On Difference Without Separability", text by Denise Ferreira da Silva for the catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial, "Incerteza viva" (Living Uncertainty). 30 praxis as both my methodology (as discussed in Chapter Two) and my creative praxis (as discussed in Chapter Three) seek to create the necessary conditions, circumstances and support that will allow for the possibility to sense “Time” differently or rather to sense other rhythms of time, and therefore, to sense other and different ways of being in the world. In Archipelago of dreams: utopianism in Caribbean literature, Bill Ashcroft similarly offers insight into the possibilities of “tidalectics” to open up or sense other ways of being when he writes: “The ontological and historical transformation embodied in the term ‘tidalectics’ is the confident assertion of a different way of being, a becoming that will lead into different kinds of future…the concept of…a different way of understanding time offers a different and independent way of perceiving the future.”78 To engage with another way of being and another way of sensing the future offers a different way of understanding time that opens alternate temporal possibilities. This offering of a different way of understanding time works alongside an engagement with aesthetics as providing radical possibilities to re-shape our understanding of “Time” which is described in further detail in the following section. Creating ruptures in our sense of “Time”, or in other words engaging with alternative ways of understanding “Time” that open up the possibility to alternative futures, offers, according to Mbembe, the potential to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination. In particular, through the potentiality of the continent of Africa, Mbembe articulates how notions of history based on “Time” and its linear approaches are gradually being replaced by newer and 78 Bill Ashcroft, “Archipelago of Dreams: Utopianism in Caribbean Literature,” Textual Practice 30, no. 1 (2016): 102. 31 other senses of futures based in narrative models.79 He suggests that there are growing numbers who increasingly believe that through small ruptures, myriads of “tipping points” can lead to deep and profound alterations in the direction that both the continent and globe take through making and calling in alternative futures.80 Mbembe goes on to describe that the African continent holds within it the conditions and therefore the possibilities to “pose new questions” both about our epistemological understanding and further, to pose questions regarding the groundwork for the epistemologies stemming from modernity that form our global present. Mbembe engages with the notion that there are a multiplicity of pathways and trajectories for transformation and change and that these pathways are based in “creativity of practice” as they are always “ahead of any knowledge that can be produced about them.”81 With this Mbembe describes the nature of study and scholarship needed to open up these pathways. Mbembe goes on to describe that enacting modes of thinking that will bring forward possibilities of transformation and bridges towards alternative futures requires other ways of “speaking [of] the visual, of sounds, [and] of the senses.”82 It is with these other ways of engaging with visuals, sounds and the senses that I again signal forward to later chapters wherein I describe the possibilities of creative praxes for facilitating and creating the conditions for these other ways of “sensing” to emerge. In particular, Mbembe’s articulation of these requirements frames my creative praxis (as described in detail throughout Chapter Three) as it outlines the alternative senses I hope to engender through my engagement with the use of clay, the processes I employ and the aesthetic co-creation that occurs through touch and handling of the work. 79 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 10. 80 Mbembe, 10. 81 Mbembe, 12. 82 Mbembe, 28. 32 Further elaborating on engaging with “other ways” of thinking and articulating visuals, sounds and senses, Mbembe states that there is no better starting point in his perspective, than starting with the question of “Time.”83 For Mbembe, “structures of temporality in colonial and postcolonial conditions are thoroughly entangled with the vicissitudes of the affective, with the subjective play of desire and uncertainty.”84 Mbembe goes on to describe that many people who are caught in the vortex of colonialism and what comes after, see the main indexes of “Time” as the “contingent, the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the fortuitous…” and radical changes go hand in hand with various other gradual and subtle shifts that are almost imperceptible.85 The interrogation of “Time” then, according to Mbembe, is an interrogation regarding the labour involved in the production of a sense or illusion of stability, continuity, or “something like permanence”86 in the face of the known temporariness of the arrangements of social existence.87 Ultimately, Mbembe critiques the presuppositions that created the conditions for the “relations of subjection woven under the Empire between natives and colonizers and, more generally, between the West and the rest of the world.”88 Mbembe describes these relations as embodied in military, cultural, economic institutions, and mechanisms of symbolic coercion.89 While Mbembe notes the need to deconstruct “imperial sciences that previously enabled the domination of non-European societies,”90 he also describes the necessity of this deconstruction to go hand in hand with “a critique of all forms of universalism that, hostile to difference and, by 83 Mbembe, 28. 84 Mbembe, 28. 85 Mbembe, 28. 86 Mbembe, 28. 87 Mbembe, 26. 88 Mbembe, 106. 89 Mbembe, 106. 90 Mbembe, 106. 33 extension, to the figure of the Other, attribute the monopoly on truth, “civilization,” and the human to the West.”91 For Mbembe, the aim of decolonization is a radical metamorphosis of relations that must take into account the central question of “Time” and how this has been profoundly implicated in the organization of the world as we have come to know it today. Akin to Mignolo, Rifkin, and Brathwaite, Mbembe frames alternative possibilities that diverge from a singular and forceful frame of reference that forecloses other ways of being and coming to know the world such as storying, collective gathering points, collective practices, dynamic and rhythmic pattern making, cyclic and tidalectic perspectives or other ways of engaging with and articulating the senses. This approach aligns and gives context to my artistic work and processes as I similarly seek to engage alternative possibilities for sensing “Time” differently through my engagement with clay and the use of the vessel as a gathering point for various imprints, patterns, breaks and changes. While the works in this section align with a few of the possibilities with which I engage to frame my own creative praxis, they further inform my understanding and framework for the necessary conditions that would allow for alternative futures and options to emerge and resurge for “being in the world differently,” while simultaneously exposing the limits and violence that attend to the notion of modernity’s particular construction of a singular unfolding “Time.” Engaging Black Feminist Perspectives Another foundational element that frames this critical exegesis will be my engagement with black feminist perspectives. While this field is vast, what frames this critical exegesis are perspectives that engage with alternative senses of “Time,” calling on futurities, alternative 91 Mbembe, 106. 34 temporalities and expansive and complex possibilities beyond the familiar or oppressive weight of Western modernity’s systems. In particular, I draw from black feminist perspectives that not only engage with varied and multiple temporalities as suggested in the previous section, but further ask ontological questions that open avenues for contemplation regarding how blackness and a black feminist perspective can subvert and sabotage the structures that uphold Subjecthood while exposing the limits of the systems we find ourselves in. It is with this mode of “question making,” occurring through the lens of blackness and black feminist perspectives, that the necessity to imagine outside the systems we are in comes further into clarity and lays the groundwork for how creative praxes can facilitate, support and create the conditions for this imagining. I explore these concepts in the following sections and chapters. To begin, the work of Katherine McKittrick informs the black feminist lens which I draw upon within this critical exegesis as it frames black methodologies and perspectives as ones which hold the potential to shift thought away from linear models and open up new spaces for entangled and overlapping concepts, texts and perspectives. In referring to black methodology in the work Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea, McKittrick writes: “…this methodology has the capacity to shift our thinking away from a linear model that moves from data collection to data analysis (wherein the data are, for example, black); what we see, instead, is a method that moves with and through uneasy and uncomfortable temporalities, many entangled concepts and texts, and rigorous study. From there, we can 35 also notice that black studies scholars are encouraging us to focus on and share how we know rather than incessantly listing what or who or why we know.”92 McKittrick further describes “wonder” as study and delineates how the practice of bringing together “multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites,”93 therefore opening possibilities and “coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.”94 McKittrik’s outline of black methodologies not only signals to the range of openings that exist when we create the conditions to think across disciplines and outside the bounds of the familiar – to engage with radical, new and expansive possibilities through and within “uneasy and uncomfortable temporalities”95 – but it also draws together the ways in which we can imagine and enact these possibilities outside the weight of the systems we find ourselves in, in part by focusing on how we come to know rather than solely focusing on the fixivity of “what or who or why we know.”96 It is these notions in particular that guide my own artistic praxis as I explore in the following chapters how artistic works might expand and contribute to the possibilities for thinking across many sites, outside the familiar and through and within other temporalities so that we may come to know the varying, changing and transformative worlds such as McKittrick describes. In referring to the work of Sylvia Wynter and the potential black methodologies hold in opening up alternative possibilities and ways of “being” in the world, McKittrick states that what we can learn from Wynter is that there is a tendency to articulate blackness in ways that 92 McKittrick, “Dear April,” 5. 93 McKittrick, 5. 94 McKittrick, 5. 95 McKittrick, 5. 96 McKittrick, 5. 36 “rely heavily on the subordinated and oppressed black body.”97 McKittrick further draws on the work of Wynter to delineate that describing blackness in ways that affirm black subjugation “limits our imagination by foreclosing other ways of being.”98 By drawing on Wynter’s work, McKittrick not only describes the formulations, workings and conditions that foreclose other ways of “being” in the world but also draws upon Wynter’s “deciphering practice” – a practice that takes into account various social realities and psycho-affective fields – to offer alternative modes of engagement that crucially and critically expose the “intense weight” of the systems of knowledge through which the structures of our global present have been and continue to be formed.99 In elaborating on the possibilities of black methodologies and Wynter’s “deciphering practice”, McKittrick writes: “A deciphering practice recognises the intense weight and how it induces how we feel and know the world; this recognition, importantly, signals and has the capacity to honour other ways of feeling and knowing the world. A deciphering practice notices that the tendency to describe black (as less than human, defective, captive) is not a measure of black life. A deciphering practice imagines and enacts an aesthetics of black life outside the intense weight of racism.”100 While there are many elements of McKittrick’s work to consider in the framing of a black feminist perspective, one foundational element that is key in the framing of this critical exegesis is engaging with methodologies and lenses which allow for expansive possibilities, 97 McKittrick, “Dear April,” 9. 98 McKittrick, 9. 99McKittrick, 9. 100 McKittrick, 9. 37 varied temporalities and imagining outside the weight of the limits of the systems shaped and re-produced by Western modernity. In other words, McKittrick delineates methodologies that allow for a re-imagining of the contours of the systems we are in while simultaneously illuminating and exposing its limits.101 Moving alongside Katherine MacKittrick’s work in a framing of black feminist perspectives, I engage with the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva who describes the black female subject as one that holds the radical potential to both confront and expose the limits, weight and violence of the Subject, which is again a key framing for a black feminist perspective as engaged through this critical exegesis. While the implications of the potential for the possibilities of this perspective are vast and endlessly multiplying, I again draw on Ferreira da Silva’s comments to further frame an engagement with black feminist perspectives that unravel, expose and sabotage the harm that is perpetuated through the weight of Western modernity’s systems and the formulation of the Subject. In engaging with an approach to black feminism, Ferreira da Silva further describes how blackness can dissolve the architecture that holds the Subject and release and break apart all of its elements allowing us to build a different image of existence.102 101 Referring to McKittrick’s engagement with the work of Kandice Chuh where she writes: “In The Difference Aesthetics Makes, Kandice Chuh similarly observes how black literature overturns liberal humanism by creatively reimagining the contours of humanity. She moves away from a framework that seeks “difference” within the context of liberal humanism and illuminates, instead, how black literature exposes the violent limits of this system.” McKittrick, 9. 102 Referring to Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of blacklight when she writes: “What I do in the book [Unpayable Debt] is to stage the confrontation, but in the third moment, which is the moment I call negativation, blackness becomes a blacklight mirror. A mirror that reflects blacklight which reaches the other side to destroy the subject, the white European subject, that sees itself reflected as better or more powerful than blackness. The mirror that reflects blacklight actually changes the code of the subject, it breaks away the code, it dissolves the whole architecture and infrastructure that holds that modern subject. And in doing so, it releases all the micro-elements that allow us to then build a different image of existence. And along with that, also to raise other questions, questions different than the ones that characterize modern thinking. So the aim is not to stay within the Marxist dialectics, it’s not to inhabit that position in the afropessimist sense, but to destroy the whole context in which that confrontation takes place.” Sarah El-Taki, Emil Elg and Nina Cramer,, “The Value and Uses of Blackness. A Conversation With Denise Ferreira Da Silva: The Value and Uses of Blackness. A Conversation With Denise Ferreira Da Silva,” Periskop – Forum for Kunsthistorisk Debat no. 25 (2021):112-19. 38 With this, Ferreira da Silva offers a framing of the radical and transformative potential blackness holds to make impossible the conditions which have perpetuated harm and sustained the modern categories. It is here where again I draw upon Ferreira da Silva’s work to frame a black feminist perspective that includes and does not limit the radical transformative possibilities for imagining the world anew, beyond the infrastructure of modernity, cultivating a praxis of imagining what has yet to be imagined. To do so, Ferreira da Silva offers an image of existence that does not require the Subject, this image of existence which she titles Corpus Infinitum, is an image that proposes that every existent or event is a body without limits. That is, everything that exists is connected to everything else – through its mode of existence – and energy is released and absorbed or refracted within this existence continually transversing through everything that exists without end.103 This image of existence paired with Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” and further informed by the work of Katherine McKittrick is crucial to my black feminist approach as it allows me to frame my work through the lens of alternative temporalities, cycles, and tidalectic rhythms which expose the limits of the systems we find ourselves in, while also opening avenues for creative possibilities that offer varying and shifting worlds and ideas; and ultimately, a different image of existence.104 Further, Tina Campt’s description of “practices of thinking, plotting, envisioning, and realizing alternative forms of possibility”105 along side her description of black feminist futurity that also frame my engagement with black feminist perspectives and offer insight into how these 103 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Thesis Lecture by Denise Ferreira Da Silva: "Corpus Infinitum," Vimeo, 2022. https://vimeo.com/528873608 and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Corpus Infinitum - a thought experiment” in The Post Research Condition, ed. Hendrik Pieter Slager, (Utretch: Metropolis M Books 2021), 59-66. 104 Referring to Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of coming to know shifting worlds and ideas alongside Denise Ferriera da Silva’s proposal of a different image of existence. 105 Tina M. Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 146. 39 perspectives create the necessary conditions for being able to imagine the world anew through radical and transformative possibilities. In a similar sense to framing and engaging with black feminist perspectives that create the conditions to imagine what has yet to be, Campt proposes that the grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must. She writes that, “It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now—as imperative rather than subjunctive—as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present.”106 Through this lens, Campt poses the question of how black feminists grapple with a future that hasn’t happened but must, while witnessing the mounting disposability of black lives that don’t seem to matter.107 While Campt similarly engages with alternative temporalirities and transformative futurities, she also draws upon the notion of the “loophole” which offers further potential to imagining openings for thinking outside the weight of modernity in order to offer refuge and relief from the systems implicated within it, while simultaneously creating potential to disrupt and make impossible these same systems. In referring to Harriet Jacobs 1861 account, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Campt describes how “loopholes” can be used as pathways to be and live outside systems and strucutres of harm. In referring to Harriet Jacob’s account Campt describes that a loophole is a way of extricating oneself from a seemingly impossible situation – a sanctuary or pathway out – that allows us to enact “practices of thinking, plotting, envisioning, and realizing alternative forms of possibility.”108 106 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17. 107 Campt, 107. 108 Tina M. Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, 145. 40 To imagine the world anew and to think outside the limits of the systems of Western modernity, the oppressive weight of which marks the systems of our global present, gives rise to the possibilities of what questions need to be asked rather than determining the solutions or problems solved. In this regard, I further draw upon a black feminist framing through the work of Christina Sharpe and her engagement with the writing of Saidiya Hartman. Sharpe draws upon Hartman’s work to describe new possibilities and alternative modes of “being” in the world that offer further openings to think outside the weight of the systems in which we find ourselves. To explore this notion, Sharpe draws upon the following quote from Hartman’s work The Terrible Beauty of the Slums: “The old black ladies perched in their windows shout, “Girl, where you headed?” Each new deprivation raises doubts about when freedom is going to come, if the question pounding inside her head—Can I live?—is one to which she could ever give a certain answer, or only repeat in anticipation of something better than this, bear the pain of it and the hope of it, the beauty and the promise.”109 Through engaging with the question “Can I live?” Sharpe exposes a multitude of questions that arise in its connection. It is this form of question making that I further see as central to the engagement with black feminist perspectives – these works open up possibilities to attend to, create and communicate questions rather than seek proposed and finalized solutions and answers. Sharpe furthers this notion of question making and the possibilities that arise from it when she articulates how the singular and collective girl/s of Hartman’s work live, move and 109 Saidiya Hartman,“The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” Brick: A Literary Journal (Summer 2017): 43, https:// brickmag.com/the-terrible-beauty-of-the-slum/. 41 walk through anti-black worlds which are interrogated by the question “Can I live?”110 Sharpe adds layers to the question of “Can I live?” when she goes on to write: “Can I live? Where can I live? How can I live? Can I live and not, just, barely, almost, survive? What is living when that living requires that black girls and women be small, be half-living, be subordinated, be open to condemnation, abuse, and censure? What about the worlds they are making? Can you see them? Do you apprehend them and the beautiful lives that they make in the midst of deprivation and terror? Can you hear them—their sorrow and joy, their pain and refusal, and their insistent desires and political demands? What are the conditions, the grammars and the tenses, in which those expressed demands and desires might be heard and met not with force, but with care?”111 It is through this example of question making that I have sought to engage with black feminist perspectives that open up possibilities for posing and creating and imagining new questions rather than solely seeking to engage with their answers. It is with a black feminist lens that I see possible openings to expose the limits of the ontological assumptions crafted in modernity, but also to enact creative praxes that that allow us to imagine and cultivate senses, images, modes of engagement, conditions and questions that will make the assumptions that attend to modernity’s Subjecthood less possible or completely impossible all together. With this, I tie together Tina Campt’s proposal of striving for the future we want to see and living it now with Sharpe’s posing of the question: “what about the worlds they are making?”112 It is through 110 Christina Sharpe, “And to Survive,” Small Axe 22, no. 3 (2018): 171. muse.jhu.edu/article/710221. 111 Sharpe, 171. 112 Sharpe, 1. 42 these proposals and questions that call us to imagine a world we are making where I see a familiar thread that moves throughout the black feminist perspectives which I have drawn upon in this section, creating elements and conditions that allow for the possibility to traverse outside of the systems one finds oneself in, in order to imagine and generate possibilities of world making, cultivating anticipation of another world that is not yet here.113 Part Two: Traversing through Creative Possibilities Unsettling Linearity through Creative Praxis Imagining a world that is not yet here and traversing across varied temporalities outside the systems of harm that mark our global present requires the many elements described by the writers and scholars in the above sections, many of whom mention or discuss the need for creative possibilities. It is through the elements discussed in the previous section regarding moving our thinking away from solely linear models, finding ways to come to know shifting worlds and ideas that are constantly in flux, imagining outside the ontological limits of modernity, and asking questions that allow us to envision, plot and realize worlds that are not yet here, where I form the basis for how I engage with my own creative praxis and further the praxes of artists, writers and musicians whose work I explore in the coming sections. These elements, as mentioned above, not only offer creative possibilities to sabotage the harm of the systems we find ourselves in but to imagine worlds where the conditions for subjugation, violence and colonial domination cannot exist. 113 A reference to Christina Sharpe’s work: “What does care have to do with freedom? I would like to approach this question through Bonnie Honig, who writes that to care is “to cultivate anticipation of another world and to live now dedicated to the task of turning this world into a better one.” Christina Sharpe, “And to Survive,” 172. 43 In this section I delineate further as to how creative praxes in particular can allow us to sense varied temporalities – that is sensing various rhythms, cycles and tempos that move outside the structures of “Time” marked by modernity and the systems of harm “Time” sustains such as ontological categorization that mark humans as lesser or backwards in “Time”; dispossession or jettisoning of those who find themselves outside the bounds of Subjecthood and its particular formulation tied to “Time”; or the extraction and exploitation that occurs through the crafting of “Time” towards particular and determined aims. It is through creative praxes that I then discuss the ways in which this move outside “Time” opens up possibilities for other ways of being and coming to know that would otherwise be foreclosed. It is further through the works I am exploring in this section where I continue to frame and contextualize my own creative praxis as I draw upon many of the methods, theoretical engagements and approaches to frame and analyze my artistic process that detail my creative praxis with clay and vessel making. It is through the frameworks outlined by the scholars, writers and artists included in this section that I have been able to ground my engagement with my own processes related to clay and its implications with cyclic temporalities and patterns as described in Chapter Three. To contextualize further the works and perspectives which I employ to frame and analyze my own creative work, I have drawn from the writing of Laurel Recker who describes modernity’s temporality as a point of departure for her analysis alongside her understanding of the possibility to imagine beyond it through the avenue of poetic works connected to the black Atlantic. Through a delineation of the work of Walter Benjamin, Recker moves towards a suggestion of “Time” that does not fall within the model of linear unfolding but rather opens up 44 possibilities for temporal “conflation”. Recker notes that Benjamin contested the assumption that history provides a “linear, causal relationship between events…[that orders these events] like the beads of a rosary, to fill the abstract void of time.”114 Recker describes Walter Benjamin’s objections to a temporal model which configures “Time” as a spatialized void, forging false causalities. Recker’s use of Benjamin’s work points to an exploration of temporalities that exist outside of the “Time” of Western modernity and supports a recognition of the harm that modernity has deployed. Recker then opens the door to what she refers to as “temporal conflation”, where multiple temporalities are conflated as one, layered on top of one another interfusing past and present in non linear ways.115 To do this, Recker highlights the unique possibilities of poetry in conflating multiple temporalities through layering past, present and future together through poetic exploration. In furthering this point, Recker draws on the work of Albert James Arnold, noting his proposal that poetry is especially suited to “depict the violence of colonization,” as he describes “its potential to connect colonized peoples both collectively and individually to their unknown pasts.” Again, Recker draws upon temporal conflation to describe poetry’s radical creative possibilities when she notes how Aimé Césaire draws upon conflation to describe those who are “defined along the axis of the African diaspora” as ones who have to manage the linear order of modernity with the historical vertigo of disenfranchisement.116 114 Laurel Recker,“‘Happen Is Never Once’: The Temporality of Modernism’s Black Atlantic,” Arizona Quarterly A Journal of American Literature Culture and Theory 70, no.4 (2014):30, https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2014.0024. 115 Recker, 30. 116 Recker, 33. 45 Through a discussion of modernity, Recker draws on the notion described by William Faulkner when he states, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”117 Recker goes on to elaborate on her poetic analysis when she writes: “Temporal conflation in Faulkner and Césaire reminds us that the transatlantic slave trade constructs modernity and that any understanding of modern space, including that of its circulation and production, necessarily invokes the temporal circuits of the Black Atlantic.”118 While Recker does not go into a deep analysis of “Time” and all its implications, she does survey a range of scholarly works that lead to transformative possibilities of seeing “Time” differently through creative poetic work while simultaneously offering insight into how these creative works might disrupt the “Time” of Western modernity – through, for example, temporal conflation which enables us to reconsider and rearticulate the complexities of a modern Subject and its production through the legacy of the Black Atlantic – allowing for a temporality where “going forward and moving back coincide.”119 This again connects with the concepts which I explore further both in my methodological approaches as described in Chapter Two and in the analysis of my own creative praxis in Chapter Three where I seek to engage with a process 117 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random, 1951), 92. 118 Laurel Recker, 39. Recker offers further elaboration regarding a focus on “origin” and the past, when she brings in the work of Paul Gilroy who she describes as interrogating “preoccupations with origin” in his work The Black Atlantic. Recker notes that Gilroy sees an investment and preoccupation with “origin” as “containing a traditionalist impulse” and regards Gilroy as denouncing it “both for maintaining a model of linear progress and for its implicit desire to minimize or even erase the memory of slavery (by reducing it to simply an obstacle to progress),” Recker, 189. 119 Recker, 43. 46 of analysis and working with the clay that allows moments, experiences and senses to conflate, gather and layer upon each other through engagement with the work and material itself. What Recker is able to do through her engagement with poetic praxes and temporal conflation is to offer a brief analysis of “Time” in modernity and to outline one of the many possibilities for creative praxis to diverge, disrupt or undo the linear time scale of Western modernity. In a similar form of exploration as that of Recker, Julius Fleming analyzes how engaging with music can carry us beyond solely experiencing linear temporalities as music creates moments of “elongated temporal spaces.”120 Specifically looking at the work of jazz musician John Coltrane, Fleming focuses his analysis on how Coltrane plays with the “rapid, forward-moving impulse of modern time”121 and thereby cultivates “an environment of duration that engenders different aesthetic and phenomenological horizons for performers and audiences alike”.122 What Fleming suggests through this analysis is that Coltrane’s creative praxis and his methods of engaging and creating artistic works are able to open up possibilities for temporal alternatives to the linear march of “Time” in Western modernity. Fleming goes on to analyze to a much greater extent, the radical possibilities of aesthetics to re-shape our understanding of the type of “Time” formed through a Western lens. Drawing upon the notion of unsettling linear understandings of time alongisde the possibility to forge new relationships, or what Mbembe calls radical metamorphosis of relations, Fleming’s analysis directs attention to a focus on creative praxis (through the example of Larry 120 Julius B. Fleming Jr., "Sound, Aesthetics, and Black Time Studies," College Literature 46, no. 1 (2019): 283, doi:10.1353/lit.2019.0014. 121 Fleming, 282. 122 Fleming, 283. 47 Neal)123 that can challenge or sabotage “western hierarchies of aesthetic expression (and the valuative judgments they generate)”124 while also “[straining] against the grain of temporal and aesthetic norms and the racial orders they set out to conventionalize.”125 Fleming’s reading on the possibilities for disrupting “Western” temporalities and opposing the regulation of “Time” as a solely linear construct gives space to the generative possibilities of creative praxis in loosening Western modernity’s grasp on “Time” and, as referenced by Fleming, offers radical possibilities to forge (or remember) new (or already existing) relationships to time, space, the world and each other.126 In a similar move to explore what is made possible through creative praxis, Kate Brettkelly-Chalmer’s exploration of timescales that diverge from the singular clock-time and the legacy of determinism from Enlightenment is carried out through references to artistic works that put pressure on the seemingly “neutral” gauge of clock-time which she describes as standing outside human experience.127 To do so, Brettkelly-Chalmers addresses “Time’s” variable “status” as a feature of the physical world in relation to aesthetics. While Brettkelly-Chalmers surveys a range of philosophical, cosmological and spiritual frameworks in relation to “Time”, she focuses on how, in a sense, aesthetics can sabotage the 17th - 20th century notion of “the singular ticking timescale.”128 More broadly, Brettkelly-Chalmers looks at the ways in which the widely accepted global timescale of modernity represents the definitive techno-scientific 123 Fleming draws upon the work of Carter Mathes (as quoted in later sections) for this analysis. 124 Fleming, 284. 125 Fleming, 284. Fleming offers a range of examples such as that of Larry Neal and his philosophical engagements with sound and experimental aesthetics. Fleming describes Neal’s work in the following manner: “Neal imagines a black-centered sound capable of unsettling linear understandings of time. For him, this enterprise of altering the epistemologies and coordinates of western time through the sounds and vibrations of black experimental art would enable audiences to forge new relationships to time, space, and ultimately the world.” 126 Fleming, 284. 127 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, “Beyond the Clock: The Aesthetics of Time in Contemporary Art” (PhD. diss., University of Auckland, 2016), 117. 128 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 2-3. 48 ‘triumph’ of human rationality over the messy inefficiencies of nature.129 When discussing the artistic work of Christian Marclay, Olafur Eliasson and Marina Abramović, Brettkelly-Chalmers describes how these artistic works put pressure on the authority of a singular ticking time and offer varied temporal textures that contest, challenge and confront the idea that “‘The Time’ is the only time.”130 Brettkelly-Chalmers goes on to articulate how “Time” is a legacy of Enlightenment rationality and capitalist modernity – which moderates and regulates the “messy gradients of work and life.”131 What then artistic works offer, according to Brettkelly-Chalmers is a temporal discourse that engages both singularity and multiplicity. What is of particular significance in relation to this critical exegesis and my own creative praxis is Brettkelly-Chalmer’s engagement with the possibilities that aesthetics hold to disrupt and unsettle the notion of a singular ticking timescale while also revealing alternative and multitudes of temporal textures and varied temporal registers. Brettkelly-Chalmer’s exploration of visual artistic works in this regard, give further support and context to my own exploration of the possibilities that aesthetics hold not only in revealing and exposing varied temporal textures, but in what this exposure might allow for – that is, that which is made possible as we expose other temporal textures – and if this exposure could allow us to sense and transform how to “be” in the world differently. Brettkelly-Chalmer’s elaborates further on the unsettling of a singular ticking timescale through her engagement with the work of Rosalind Krauss, American art critic and theorist. Brettkelly-Chalmer’s describes how Krauss asserts aesthetic ‘meaning’ as placed within the purview of a physical encounter between viewer and artwork which Brettkelley-Chalmers 129 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 115. 130 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 2. 131 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 3. 49 describes as a method of undoing “the traditional Cartesian distinction between an obdurate body that simply exists as a vehicle for the superior cognitive functions of the mind”132 and that further moves us away from a reliance on chronology and the notion that a “rational intelligible mind is held aloof from the messy vagaries of the body.”133 Brettkelley-Chalmers further suggests that aesthetic meaning can be generated in ways that are not structured by causal or chronological actions, but rather by the interplay of different embodied explorations.134 Brettkelly-Chalmer’s ultimately suggests that visual art and sculpture can disrupt the “Time” of modernity and as delineated by Krauss, can serve as a medium between the juncture of “stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing” through which comes “enormous expressive power.”135 Brettkelly-Chalmer’s work not only underscores the possibility for aesthetics to undo the linearity of the singular ticking timescale, but also critically exposes the ways in which Enlightenment’s framework of “Time” has been the pivot point around which Western visual art has been assessed and that in exposing the many layers and textures of time, other creative, expressive and imaginative possibilities arise. Brettkelly-Chalmer’s work poses no solutions to “thinking time differently” but rather surveys the way visual aesthetics exposes the shaky foundation on which we “make sense” of “Time” through the lens of modernity. Just as Brettkelly-Chalmer’s work describes creative praxes that hold the potential to expose varied temporal textures, Recker and Fleming similarly suggest that in engaging with creative praxis, these works can offer methods to alter epistemologies that attend to modernity and the potential to forge new and alternate way of living within the constraints of systems 132 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 25. 133 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 22. 134 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 25. 135 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007), 7. 50 marked by disenfranchisement, violence and domination – ultimately bringing clarity to the ever-bubbling questions that aesthetics pose regarding how we measure the rhythms of our lives. Exposing Options through Creative Praxis Many of the works described in previous sections signal towards the possibilities that exist when “Time” is disrupted, sabotaged or unsettled, allowing for alternative and transformative possibilities. While, as previously mentioned, these works do not attend to an in depth analysis of what options might emerge as “Time” and its linearity are unsettled, these works do bring to the surface how we might sense “Time” differently through creative praxes. Working through a range of examples from poetic conflation, elongated temporal spaces and artistic works that allow us to diverge from ticking clock-time, the analyses mentioned in this chapter therefore set the groundwork for thinking about what options might then be exposed as we find alternative ways to engage with “Time.” Moving from the groundwork of how we might sense “Time” differently, I then seek to engage with creative works and processes that expose and generate alternative options to “Time”. These alternative options and avenues will be discussed in further detail with regards to artistic works that shift our engagement with interpretation, re-articulate artistic temporality and provide mappings for thinking through racial formation and resistance. The work of Tina Campt, as mentioned in previous sections, offers both ways to unsettle “Time” and further offers some avenues for thinking through alternative temporalities. Campt’s work offers the potential to sense “haptic” and “sonic” temporalities alongside the notion that stasis is not an absence of motion, but a continual balancing of multiple forces in equilibrium.136 136 Campt, Listening to Images, 10. 51 Campt’s work suggests a transformative engagement with stasis that allows for and exposes alternative senses and temporalities such as the “haptic.” Campt describes this as picking up and holding a photograph or reaching out to touch a sculpture which is then a “link between touching and feeling” alongside the meditations we construct in connection to our affective relations.137 In this regard, Campt releases us from the singular unfolding of “Time” as she writes that “these haptic relations transpire in multiple temporalities, and the hands are only one conduit of their touches.”138 Further, Campt suggests that “quiet” -- a sublimely expressive unsayability -- is “a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.”139 For blacks in the diaspora, Campt suggests, both quiet and the quotidian are mobilized as everyday practices of refusal as the photograph or artistic work can enunciate alternate accounts that opens up radical interpretive possibilities.140 To further expose the potential of haptic temporalities, Campt refers to photographs in the archive141 and describes the following: “ [The haptic temporalities are] moments of contact when photographs touch us and animate reflections and responses. These temporalities include, but are in no way limited to, the moment of photographic capture; the temporality of the photographic re/production of material objects; their assembly and reconfiguration as nodes of state, social, and cultural formation; and the present and future temporalities of their interactions with researchers, archivists, and the broader community.”142 137 Campt, 100. 138 Campt, 100. 139 Tina Campt, 4. 140 Campt, 5. 141 Here she is referring to the visual archive of the African Diaspora. 142 Campt, 72. 52 Campt suggests that by refocusing our attention on the haptic and the sonic we can expose the expressiveness of quiet and the generative dimensions of stasis where we can then reveal the power to imagine beyond current fact and to “envision that which is not, but must be.”143 Without determining any solutions, Campt’s analysis suggests that our meditations on “touch,” “quiet” and “stasis” reveal the possibilities of diverging from the singular unfolding of “Time,” allowing us to sense multiple temporalities that open up radical interpretive possibilities for alternate accounts of engaging with aesthetics alongside alternate futurities. As in the work of Tina Campt, Robert Hayden engages with alternative options through creative praxis and the possibilities latent with notions of the “sonic,” “quiet” and the generative dimensions of stasis through his reference to “Echoic Time” in the poem “On Lookout Mountain.” In this poetic work Hayden writes of engaging with the present moment beyond “Time” and a sequential unfolding. This meaning is imbued within Hayden’s poetic work in the following excerpt: "I listen for the sounds of cannon, cries vibrating still upon the rocky air, timeless echoes in echoic time— imagine how they circle out and out in concentricity with Kilroy’s cries as now somewhere beyond 143 Campt, 17. 53 tangent calm of this mid-century morning (Ballad 10)"144 With this work Robert Hayden offers a description of the experience of being present in a moment of stasis while standing in stillness upon a mountain and looking out at the present landscape and simultaneously sensing the echoes of what has once “passed” which continue to vibrate out in concentricity through the air. Through reflection on Hayden’s work, Derik Smith, author of Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era, writes of the “imperceptible relation of past and present” that Hayden portrays “by claiming that the Civil War sounds are ‘vibrating still.’”145 Smith describes the “stillness” in relation to Hayden’s work by writing the following: “The poem allows still to function as both adverb and adjective: the sonic tumult of the war, and thus some sense of the war itself, can “still” be experienced almost a century after it took place; yet in the placid morning of the speaker’s present, the air is “still”—it seems to carry no sound.”146 While Smith focuses on the presence of “Echoic Time'' in this particular piece, he also notes that more than one conception of history exists in Hayden’s poetic work more generally. Smith articulates the differing aspects of Hayden’s work as depicting a history in which humanity is “impelled” toward a telos and at the same time, another version of history wherein the “past chaotically and continually returns…”147 What Hayden and Smith offer are aesthetic tools and an aesthetic translation to engage with something beyond “Time” that allows for the rhythms and cycles of life to occur in different 144 Robert Hayden,“On Lookout Mountain” Phylon (1940-1956) 13, no. 2 (1952): 140. https://doi.org/10.2307/271548 145 Derik Smith, Robert Hayden In Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era. E-book (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 157. 146 Smith, 158. 147 Smith, 13. 54 layers at once. Further, Hayden’s offering of “Echoic Time” is elaborated on by Smith, who describes “timeless echoes in echoic time—” as an echo in and of itself that serves as an example where both “time and echo are repeated” with “the dash potentially indicating endless reverberation.”148 Hayden’s work can therefore be described as a poetic conversation that reveals the expressiveness and the generative dimensions of stasis when he makes reference to “vibrating still” and offers the creative potential of this poetic work to expose moments that cut through “Time” by engaging with the act of stillness.149 It is Hayden’s engagement with stillness and Campt’s description of stasis which similarly frame my creative praxis and will be explored in Chapter Three as I draw upon the notion that engaging with stillness or moments of stasis allow us to traverse through layers of time or other textured and varied temporalities. Working in a related sense along the lines of sonic possibilities, Carter Mathes’ Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights offers insight into how the generative creative praxis of sound-making through the use of vibration and resonance can act as methods for similarly undoing and unsettling our understanding of “Time”. Mathes’ description of sound or “the sonic” as an “experience that resists overdetermined perceptions of historical consciousness”150 is presented as an aesthetic tool that allows us to reimagine what is possible outside the constraints of “linear historical time.”151 Viewing the sonic as intrinsically linked with expressive possibility, Mathes analyzes sound, particularly through the post-Civil Rights era in America, and views the possibility and 148 Smith, 158. 149 “Generative dimensions of stasis” is referring to the description given by Tina Campt in Listening to Images, 11. 150Carter Mathes, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 8. 151 Mathes, 31. 55 option for music and sonic interventions to form conceptual expansions within black art to act as aesthetic and political approaches to “refashioning African American literary form during the post–Civil Rights era” and as a mode of disruption towards the narrative process of “state and racial formations.”152 Through this analysis, contextualized within the post–Civil Rights era, Mathes suggests that sonic aesthetic experience has brought forward an imbrication of sound, politics and black consciousness that continues to influence black futurity.153 Mathes writes, “this shift toward engaging with sound as a distinct expressive possibility reflects the desires and designs of black musicians, writers, critics, and artists who were formulating a notion of black aesthetic and political indivisibility.”154 Mathes ultimately suggests that the expressive possibility of sound offers a method towards socio-political transformation. This point is echoed throughout Mathes' work particularly in his discussion of John Coltrane’s engagement with free jazz. In referencing experimental work done by Coltrane at the Olatunji Center in 1967, Mathes describes the imbrication of sound and politics and suggests that free jazz is a refusal of mainstream culture. He goes on to write the “struggle against the containment of form that circulates between the energy and texture of the sound, and the sociopolitical contexts of its creation and transmission” both reimagines and rearticultes “freedom” as something that can’t be conceived of or considered within the architecture of “Time.”155 Mathes’ reflections on the transformative possibilities of free jazz and the implications of thinking outside of “linear historical time”156 are in his discussion of Coltrane’s work titled 152 Mathes, 8. 153 Mathes, 31. 154 Mathes, 24. 155 Mathes, 31. 156 Mathes, 31. 56 Interstellar Space, a series of drum and saxophone duets released posthumously in 1974. Mathes draws attention to how Rashied Ali, the drummer in Coltrane’s musical quintet, stated that the “duets created a destabilization and re-articulation of musical temporality through an ephemeral idea of what the beat might feel like”157 Rashied further stated: “If you listen to Interstellar Space, you can hear that something’s going on that’s holding the whole thing together. I’m not playing regular time, but the feeling of regular time is there. I’m thinking in time. We’d start out in three or four; five-eight or six-eight, whatever. I would anchor it in my mind, but play everything not on it, but against it. I’m hearing the beat and I’m feeling the beat, but I’m not playing it. It’s there, but it’s not there.”158 In this sense, Mathes describes Rashied’s work as one that generates alternate aesthetic and phenomenological options and possibilities that open up new sonic space to communicate with listeners beyond familiar musical or aesthetic language.159 It is this notion which I return to through analysis of my creative praxis in Chapter Three as I seek to expose and explore the ways in which engagement with artistic works, and in particular my own creative praxis, might allow for sensing beyond the familiar and might be one element of many that attribute to the conditions necessary for both sensing and imagining outside the constraints of modernity and towards what has yet to be imagined. 157 Mathes, 35. 158 Mathes, 35. 159 Mathes, 35 - 36. 57 The work of free jazz musician Marion Brown was also analyzed thoroughly by Mathes in order to further suggest the possibilities of the sonic to interrupt Western conceptions of relation to the crafted temporal register of modernity and open up alternative options through sound. Mathes notes that Marion Brown’s creative praxis consisted, in part, of “hearing outside the time of performance” in order to access the “unreal quality of imagination.”160 In Mathes’ understanding, Brown offers a space to go beyond the boundary line of what music is imagined to be by summoning sensations “outside the range of familiarity that marks musical and social convention, as these convergences of the experiential and the sensory move through time, space, bodies, and levels of consciousness.”161 For Brown, going beyond the threshold of what we imagine to be “musical and social convention” to allow for a different type of movement entails recognizing and summoning experiences and sensations outside the range of familiarity that marks these conventions.162 Mathes makes note of the relevancy of James Baldwin’s commentary on time related to the sonic which seems to resonate with Brown’s description of the experiential and the sensory when Baldwin describes an ability to sense an alteration to the structure and nature of time – one where suddenly there are no clear vistas and everything is superimposed on something else and one can sense being pulled into the future while simultaneously being pulled into the past. Baldwin described his own deciphering practice where he tried to, in his words, “decipher whatever it was that my own consciousness made of all the elements in which I was entangled, and which were all tangled up in me.”163 160 Mathes, 53. 161 Mathes, 51. 162 Mathes, 51. 163 Mathes, 188. 58 Mathes’ analysis of Baldwin’s commentary is manyfold; however, for the purpose of this critical exegesis, Mathes’ analysis of “Time” is most relevant. First, Mathes references the tension animating consciousness through a reference to Baldwin’s meditation in regards to the architectonics of San Francisco in 1968.164 Mathes notes the tensions that give rise to the present moment and that linear conceptions of historical recounting cease to be useful. Second, Mathes notes that for Baldwin, sonic formation resonates through “transatlantic time and space”165 and that in Baldwin’s utilization of sound as a critical framework, and its inability to conclude, he is able to extend “the reach of the present”166 as he “writes across multiple temporal and critical frames at once.”167 It is this writing across multiple temporal and critical frames at once and therefore extending the reach of the present that allows for what Mathes describes as the need to signal towards radically new theoretical forms in order to speak to new realities. It is this discussion which again frames my own creative praxis as I seek to engage with an imaginative and creative praxis that might allow us to sense across these multiple temporal frames and sites to signal toward radically new or transformative realities. Mathes further makes reference to the theoretical work of Jacques Attali, who in the work Noise: The Political Economy of Music, conceptualizes sound as holding the potential to be “free from the confines of music…[and] outside the political economy of the mass production of music [while also being] within its potential as prophetic critique of a world increasingly defined by efforts to control the aural environment.”168 Mathes draws on Attali’s work to describe the 164 Carter Mathes,“‘The Mind Is a Strange and Terrible Vehicle’: Fractured Time and Multidimensional Sound in No Name in the Street,” African American Review, 46 no. 4 (2013): 587–604. 165 Carter Mathes, Imagine the Sound, 190. 166 Mathes, 191. 167 Mathes, 191. 168 Mathes, 7. 59 properties of sound that allow for nonlinear openings through which imagination can be refined and therefore delineates how Attali’s attention to sound, and the systems within which it is generated, offer deinstitutionalizing properties through which radical imagination and narrative construction can occur – providing what Mathes calls “an expressive map through the complexities of racial formation and resistance… as sound becomes indispensable in exploring intersections of lived experience and the historical constructions of blackness.”169 Mathes' use of Attali’s work regarding theoretical practices of sound explores the possibilities of sonic temporalities in opening up alternative modes of engagement with “Time” that crystalize and expose critical reflections of the systems within which the sound is generated -- that being colonial state systems rooted in violence and harm. Mathes’ analysis of Attali’s work alongside the poetic work of Hayden and the aesthetic engagements of Campt are various examples of how creative praxis generates alternative options for imagining the world outside the harm of the systems we find ourselves in and, similar to the work discussed in the above sections, these artists and writers explore the ways in which non-linear openings provide potential for radical and transformative creative praxis. This critically frames my own artistic work. This framing not only lends itself to contextualizing the potential creative praxes hold to expose other layers and ways of sensing tempos and temporalities, but further frames how creative praxes can – through visuals, touch, sound, poetics, and rhythm – expose options that allow us to re-articulate temporality, engage our senses differently, and disrupt conditions, assumptions and conceptions that sustain violent state and racial formations. It is through these works that I begin to map my own creative praxis and through many of the 169 Mathes, 7. 60 elements mentioned above such as visuals, touch and sound, begin to frame the possibilities that exist through engaging with the praxis of vessel making and the use of clay. Conclusion This chapter gave a very brief overview of some scholarly works that contribute to the discourse around “Time,” how it functions, and the ways in which it is formulated towards the aims of Western modernity. This chapter particularly engaged with the notion of “Time” as it relates to the harm that is produced by sustaining the concept of “Time” as it was fashioned in modernity, examples of such harm being colonial violence and domination; anti-blackness; land dispossession; criminalization of immigrants; displaced people or those jettisoned from the state; and categorizations that mark peoples as lesser humans. While there are and can be many examples of harm that “Time” sustains and supports, this literature review and the subsequent chapters focus primarily on how “Time” was formulated to serve the aims of Western modernity and how creative praxis can uncover the possibilities that exist to “be” in the world differently, opening up other possibilities that do not generate the same conditions that sustain the harm of “Time.” With this foundational focus in mind, the literature review covered many assumptions that stem from an adherence to Western modernity’s particular notion of “Time” and reveals avenues for alternative options. While there are a range of possibilities that are explored in relation to other temporalities that exist outside of and despite “Time,” some of the main alternative options discussed such as Rifkin’s description of plural temporalities or Brathwaite’s discussion of tidalectic rhythms, are examples of avenues for sensing and marking the patterns of life outside the bounds of “Time.” 61 While marking rhythm or plural temporalities is one consideration that I attended to in this chapter, I further grounded these explorations in black feminist perspectives that are already based in the notion that traversing through varied temporalities – that is moving outside the bounds of “Time” in ways that allow us to come to know shifting worlds and ideas170 alongside other creative possibilities – are some of the many elements that create the conditions to “be” in the world differently and to disrupt the ontological assumptions of modernity by exposing the limits of who and what we are in ways that dissolve the structures that hold the modern Subject.171 Through this survey of literature and a glimpse into the discourse surrounding “Time,” I hope to have given some context for the work of my own artistic praxis of vessel making and engagement with clay. It is through this initial overview of the discourses around “Time” that I have explored that other articulations of “Time” are possible and that these articulations offer many avenues for thinking of “Time” differently. I have also set the groundwork for what is to come in the following chapters where I engage with cyclic rhythms and suggest that moving outside “Time” through the avenue of creative praxis allows for alternative futurities – futurities not marked by harm, violence, dominationation and subjugation – alongside transformative possibilities and healing. To further explore what is made possible through creative praxis, the second half of this chapter therefore engaged with the ways in which creative and imaginative praxes can unsettle the linear and sequential “Time” of modernity while also exposing other potentialities for sensing time specifically through creative praxes. Through a varied exploration of artistic, poetic 170 Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April,” 5. 171 Sarah El-Taki, Emil Elg and Nina Cramer, “The Value and Uses of Blackness. A Conversation With Denise Ferreira Da Silva: The Value and Uses of Blackness. A Conversation With Denise Ferreira Da Silva,” 117. 62 and musical works, the second part of this chapter surveyed many ways in which these praxes have exposed and increased possibilities to sense layers of time playing out in more than one way that diverge from clock-time and the bounds of “Time” in modernity.172 In closing, my exploration of literature offers insight, analysis and elaborations upon how creative praxes, critically situated within the context of how “Time” functions, can expose the varied and alternative options to sensing temporalities – in their various forms, layered, simultaneous, textured and rhythmic to name a few – that not only exist and move outside the linear notion of “Time” in modernity, but further disrupt and make less possible the conditions for “Time” to exist as it is. That is, this exploration exposes ways of engaging with the world through creative praxes that sabotage the limits of who and what we are and make more possible ways of “being in the world differently” that lead to the generation of other possible futures and worlds in the making.173 Alternative options to the assumptions that attend to the temporal register of modernity are at the root of my creative praxis and vessel making process as I propose that these alternative options offer a breach, even if only brief, from the harm of modernity’s structures, as mentioned in earlier sections. While this literature review demonstrates the many possibilities that creative and imaginative praxes offer – for example, to engage in processes of world making and question posing that could lead to alternative futurities marked by hope rather than the despair that attends to the structures of harm, violence and subjugation – the following chapters will move from this exploration into a detailed analysis of how my own creative praxis with clay works in conversation with these discourses and seeks to suggest how an engagement with the material of 172 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock: The Aesthetics of Time in Contemporary Art, 104. 173 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme", in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 102 – referring to the limits of who and what we are. 63 clay itself can offer speculative and creative options for disrupting the ontological assumptions that sustain modernity’s structures. 64 Chapter Two: Mapping My Approach Introduction When I look at the movement of the tides and the way water glides, fluxes and recedes and returns in the shallows, I am reminded that both earth and water are part of cycles that move outside a linear unfolding. I am reminded that the elements of the earth do not come to an “end” but are continually moving through all that exists and that in their existence they break apart a notion of movement along a singular axis line. It is the tides and the earth in particular that help me think about the rhythmic cycles that exist outside modernity’s shaping of space-time and offer a notion of movement that allows for cyclic return that moves like the tides in their indeterminate rhythms. My overall purpose in moving through this practice-led research will be to gain insight into the methods employed through creative praxes that allow us to sense “Time” differently outside a linear unfolding; how sensing “Time” differently might allow us to “be” in the world differently; how engaging outside the structures of modernity allow for generative moments of healing and transformation — moments which contribute to the disintegration of colonial oppressive frameworks and what creates the conditions for these moments to occur; and how our engagement with the artistic work and material itself allows us to sense varied temporalities, rhythms and cycles. More generally, this research is guided by an analysis regarding how these praxes can open up new and alternative pathways that attend to alternate futurities and possibilities and further, what might create the conditions for innovative and new pathways within the field of social justice and the creative arts. In the coming sections I outline my approach in attending to these questions. 65 In Chapter One, I outlined a range of research which contributes to the discourse on “Time,” both in how “Time” was formulated towards the aims of Western modernity and the structures of harm it continues to produce and reinforce; and further, I gave an overview of scholars who are engaging with creative praxes beyond “Time,” opening up new forms of engaging with the rhythms and cycles of life. In this chapter, I first begin by outlining my theoretical framework as informed by black feminist theories. In particular, I ground my framework in the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and her discussion regarding the “radical potential blackness hosts,” alongside the work of Tina Campt and her elaborations on “black feminist futurity.” My theoretical framing then moves into Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” where I position “tidalectics” as a theoretical analysis for my creative work as delineated in Chapter Three. I then offer a brief description of a broad creative lens which I employ throughout the entirety of this critical exegesis. This broad lens is a creative analytic approach that primarily focuses upon Caribbean and Indigenous thought and creative works to inform my sculptural praxis and research. In the second part of this chapter, I delineate my approach to a practice-led research project; how I produce the work guided by my research questions; and how an analysis of my sculptural work will be carried out. I then offer a brief outline of some considerations regarding the advantages and limitations of the project. In considering the creative process itself and artistic works, I contextualize both elements within the theoretical framework as outlined above and will further consider these elements within a conceptual framework that orbits around themes such as transformation, time, rhythms and cycles, and healing. As discussed in this chapter, my analysis will include interpretations 66 connected to self, audience and other creative praxes which find their foundation in related conceptual themes. Part One: Theoretical, Analytic and Creative Lenses Black Feminist Approach Underpinning my approach to the analysis of my praxis and research, I will utilize a few key assumptions based in the formulation of black feminist perspectives. To begin, my analysis will be grounded in a black feminist approach of “living experience” which is the belief that black women’s knowledge is acquired through living, surviving and thriving within multiple forms of oppression and is in itself a self-defined way of knowing.174 This analysis will further seek to draw on the notion that using counter-hegemonic tools in a collaborative way is a form of resistance to the harm of oppressive structures that “position black women beyond knowledge production”175 and perpetuate the view that “increased distance from the research allows for more objectivity and thus valid research.”176 Some examples of counter-hegemonic tools which I seek to employ throughout this methodology are those of “slow scholarship” and what Lena Sawyer and Nana Osei-Kofi describe as “multimodal knowledge construction.” Sawyer and Osei- Kofi write the following regarding employing these counter-hegemonic tools: “We turned, I would argue, towards the notion of slow scholarship, through a process where we honoured the role of contemplation and time for/in creation. Finally, I want to suggest that our collaboration, and shared multimodal knowledge construction across 174 Ashley Patterson et al., “Black Feminist Thought as Methodology: Examining Intergenerational Lived Experiences of Black Women,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3 (September 2016): 55–76. 175 Ashley Patterson et al., 62. 176 Latoya Owens, Erica Edwards and Sherell McArthur, “Black women researchers' path to breaking silence: Three scholars reflect on voicing oppression, self-reflexive speech, and talking back to elite discourses,” Western Journal of Black Studies 42, no. 3 (2018): 125-135. 67 different ways of knowing, represent a refusal of the constructed borders, hierarchies and mainstream assumptions of disciplines, and the notion of discipline itself, discipline as regulating.”177 To describe slow scholarship, Sawyer and Osei-Kofi draw on the work of Phillip G. Payne and Brian Wattchow who engage with slow pedagogy in their field of environmental outdoor education. Sawyer and Osei-Kofi use the description of slow scholarship which Payne and Wattachow refer to in the following manner: ‘‘[Slow scholarship] encourages meaning-makers to experientially and reflectively access and address their corporeality, intercorporeality, sensations, and perceptions of time, space and ... place.’’178 It is through the use of slow scholarship that I hope to create the conditions necessary to analyze alternative and unfamiliar senses, perceptions of time and perceptions of place to bring forward insight regarding my guiding research questions of how creative praxes allow us to sense beyond “Time” and further to sense how to “be” in the world differently. Beyond slow scholarship as a type of counter-hegemonic tool that is incorporated into my approach of a black feminist methodology, I also draw upon Sawyer and Osei-Kofi’s description of “multimodal knowledge” which reinforces the “multiple ways of knowing and expressing knowledge that are essential to Black feminism.”179 Sawyer and Osei-Kofi write: 177Lena Sawyer and Nana Osei-Kofi,“‘Listening’ with Gothenburg’s Iron Well: Engaging the Imperial Archive through Black Feminist Methodologies and Arts-Based Research,” Feminist Review 125, no. 1 (2020): 59. 178 Phillip Payne and Brian Wattchow, “Slow pedagogy and placing education in post-traditional outdoor education,” Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 12, no. 1 (April 2008): 15-32. 179 Erica R.Wallace et al., "The Black Feminist Mixtape: A Collective Black Feminist Autoethnography of Black Women's Existence in the Academy," Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 5 no. 3 (2020): 1-14. 68 “For me, I strongly identified our process with previous experiences I have had with arts-based research, and what I have come to think of as a set of refusals. I have written elsewhere (OseiKofi, 2013) about the freedom and joy I experienced in coming to understand that there are spaces, while small, within the academy where multiple ways of coming to know, outside of the narrow confines of research described as either quantitative or qualitative, can come to life. Work that refuses hegemonic notions of the only way of coming to know as a linear, objective and disengaged process.”180 It is through these various dimensions of engaging with research that my approach will seek to “destabili[ze] linear traditional ways of knowing and their dichotomies,”181 or in other words, as Katherine McKittrick describes and as was referred to in Chapter One, this approach will seek to move “with and through uneasy and uncomfortable temporalities, many entangled concepts and texts, and rigorous study…” with the hope of focusing on “how we know rather than incessantly listing what or who or why we know.”182 It is with this approach that I seek to consistently leave room for the possibility of open-ended interpretation. Further to this framing of black feminist methodology, my approach will be guided by a theoretical perspective of what Denise Ferreira da Silva describes as “the radical potential Blackness hosts” alongside what Tina Campt describes as “black feminist futurity.”183 The analysis of my research will be framed by Ferreira da Silva’s writing on blackness and will be grounded in the perspective that “ …beyond capital-and its colonial, national, and imperial architecture — Blackness signals the creative capacity, which is a quality only apparent 180 Lena Sawyer and Nana Osei-Kofi,“‘Listening’ with Gothenburg’s Iron Well,” 59. 181 Sawyer and Osei-Kofi, 58. 182 Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea,” 5. 183 Denise Ferreira da Silva “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 84, and Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 69 when one contemplates the World as Plenum and not as Universe.”184 Taking on this fundamental assumption would center my analysis on what Ferreira da Silva describes as “the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing”185 and would therefore be guided by the following: “Because neither Space nor Time, our fundamental descriptors of the World, seem to be immediately retrievable from universal reason's rather limited stance before the World, Blackness's capacity to signify otherwise-beyond universality and its particular arrangement of Space and Time, but also away from transcendentality (self determination)-invites a consideration of the possibility of knowing without modern categories.”186 In tandem with drawing on Ferreira da Silva’s work of opening up other ways of knowing and doing, beyond universality and its arrangement of Space and Time, I will also draw upon the work of Tina Campt in her description of “black feminist futurity” as referenced in Chapter One, to support the framing of my black feminist approach. Campt describes “the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be”187 which I consider as working alongside Ferreira da Silva’s description of “creative capacity.”188 in Listening to Images, Tina Campt writes: 184 Denise Ferreira da Silva “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 85. 185 Ferreira da Silva, 81. 186 Ferreira da Silva, 84. 187 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 119. 188 Denise Ferreira da Silva “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 85. 70 “The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now—as imperative rather than subjunctive—as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present.”189 Ultimately, my approach will be animated by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work regarding blackness and Tina Campt’s description of “black feminist futurity” as it will require an theoretical lens that leaves room for “opening up other ways of knowing and doing,”190 “to envision that which is not, but must be”191 and to read the research praxis through the lens of “refusal that exceeds the sayability of words.”192 It is through this lens where I hope to again bring focus to framing an open-ended question of how alternative conditions and options are generated that allow us to move outside the structures of modernity rather than adhering to an approach that seeks to determine finalized answers. Brathwaite’s Tidalectics Alongside my approach to practice-led research being grounded in a black feminist perspective, I also turn to Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of “tidalectics” and seek to employ it as an analytic lens. Similar to Tina Campt’s description of a “black feminist futurity,” and Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of “blackness,” I am interested in the ways in which Kamau Brathwaite’s 189 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 190 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 81. 191 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 192 Campt, 43. 71 work might allow us to engage with the world differently, leading to imagine different kinds of futures, rhythms, cycles and possibilities that haven’t been imagined before. The work of Bill Ashcroft in Archipelago of dreams: utopianism in Caribbean literature allows me to draw a clearer picture of Brathwaite’s “tidalectic” approach when he writes: “The ontological and historical transformation embodied in the term ‘tidalectics’ is the confident assertion of a different way of being, a becoming that will lead into different kinds of future…the concept of…a different way of understanding time offers a different and independent way of perceiving the future.”193 With this Ashcroft offers a view of “tidalectics” that will work in tandem with my approach to a black feminist theoretical lens and in connection, “black feminist futurity,”194 as each of these lenses will seek to draw on multiple temporalities and opens doors to other possible futures that might give room for other ways of knowing “beyond universality and its particular arrangement of Space and Time.”195 Further to this, my “tidalectic” approach will be grounded in a model of movement that does not reproduce “linear progress,” but rather seeks to engage in a research process where moments, information and insight return in cycles (through the process of action theoria and living inquiry) leading to a deepening in understanding of my research questions rather than, as previously stated, resulting in a finalized conclusion or answer. This approach to research analysis will be based again on Brathwaite’s tidalectics and the following notion: 193 Bill Ashcroft, “Archipelago of dreams,” 102. 194 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 195 Denise Ferreira da Silva,“Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 84. 72 “Tidalectics engage what Brathwaite calls an “alter/native” historiography to linear models of colonial progress. This “tidal dialectic” resists the synthesizing telos of Hegel’s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean. Tidalectics also foreground alter/native epistemologies to western colonialism and its linear and materialist biases.”196 Moving away from solely linear models of progress to invoke movement and rhythm in my practice-led research will be a guiding part of this project as using “tidalectices” as both a tool and lens will provide the analytic framework for exploring the “shifting entanglement”197 between elements such as “Time,” “transformation,” “praxis” and “research.” Utilizing Brathwaite’s work as an analytical method gives room for the “diverse temporalities of oceanic space”198 which also opens up room to engage with the diverse temporalities that emerge through praxis and engagement with materials such as clay. Through the “tidalectic” method which recognizes that the ocean can be understood as “simultaneously planetary as well as deeply local”199 there emerges the potential to also engage with clay as both planetary and local. This allows one “to consider the world from within rather than “reflecting on the world from outside.”200 To consider the world from within provides a similar approach to those previously mentioned, that is approaches that seek to undo the notion that “increased 196 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Islands literature, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 2. 197 DeLoughrey, 2. 198 Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (May 2020): 134. 199 DeLoughrey and Flores, 136. 200 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 88. 73 distance from the work allows for more objectivity and thus valid research”201 and rather provides “a kind of tidalectic immersion that demands accountability and praxis rather than distanced, neutral observation.”202 I would also like to contextualize the “tidalectic” approach with what Ashcroft offered as a clarification on the movement of the tides when he writes: “Although the ocean appears to be engaged in an endless repetition of the same back and forth movement at every moment, the tide is, in fact, never exactly the same nor does it retreat or return to the same spot of ‘origin.’ The beach is never a clear line, as anyone who lives near a beach would know; it is different every day. In contrast to the dialectic the tidal change is neither forward oriented nor perpendicular.”203 Through employing the lenses described in this chapter, I hope to engage with a different type of movement that can animate and frame my practice-led research, one that moves not simply as a repetition of movement in cycle, but rather as a cycle that leaves room for recurring moments that are “never exactly the same,” nor are they “returning to the same spot of ‘origin.’”204 My aim will be to employ a “tidalectic” approach, allowing for alternative means, contributions, insights and perspectives to the guiding questions. 201 Latoya Owens, Erica Edwards and Sherell McArthur, “Black women researchers' path to breaking silence,” 125-135. 202 Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, “Submerged Bodies,” 139. 203 Bill Ashcroft, “Archipelago of dreams,” 102-103. 204 Ashcroft, 102-103. 74 Creative Analytic Lens: Auto-ethnography and Living Inquiry To employ a creative lens, I not only focus on my own artistic praxis as a form of research but seek to analyze it through a focused connection to a web of Caribbean artistic work, thought and poetry that draw upon my familial ties to the Caribbean and in particular, St. Lucia. Further to this, I analyze my practice in connection to a selection of Indigenous artistic work, thought and poetry in Canada. These lines of analysis seek to take into account the familial ties which influence my creative praxis and the Indigenous lands on which my praxis takes place. This analytical creative lens will therefore serve as a generalized consideration that supports the varying elements and theoretical frameworks of this exegesis and will similarly support and frame my engagement with the praxis of vessel making. To carry out this work with consideration to my creative lens, a central focus of my approach is the completion of an auto-ethnographic journal. My approach to an auto-ethnographic methodology will be informed and contextualized within the two lines of analysis mentioned above (drawing upon creative and written work informed by my familial ties to the Caribbean and the Indigenous lands on which my praxis takes place) and will further include: reflections based on my own artistic practice and engagement; observations from public engagement with my artistic works; engagements and insights from artistic practices outside of my own that address interrelated subject matter such as “Time,” “rhythms and cycles” and “healing.” Further, my approach is based in the following assumptions of an auto-ethnography: ● Allows for “recognition of researcher’s presence in the scene of research”205 205 Malicki Oskay, “In the Close Encounter between Art Practice Autoethnography: The Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Art,” Turkish Online Journal of Design Art and Communication 9, no.4 (2019): 473–90. 75 ● “...[Produces] meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience”206 ● “Acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don't exist”207 ● Includes “layered accounts [which] often focus on the author's experience alongside data, abstract analysis, and relevant literature…”208 ● Acknowledges the importance of contingency and that memory is fallible, that it is impossible to recall or report on events in language that exactly represents how those events were lived and felt.209 ● Considers the questions: “who reads our work, how are they affected by it, and how does it keep a conversation going?”210 ● Includes “Tacit knowledge” or “knowing-in-action”211 ● Values a “reflective conversation with the materials”212 ● Acknowledges that “...these tacit activities are characteristically difficult to make verbally explicit but stated that through reflection, it is possible to surface and describe these intuitive understandings.”213 206 Carolyn Ellis, Tony Adams and Arthur Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1 (January 2011): 3, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101108. 207 Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 3. 208 Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 3. 209 Jillian Tullis Owen et al., “Truth Troubles,” Qualitative Inquiry 15, no. 1 (August 2008): 190-195. 210 Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 39. 211 Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge, 1967), and Donald Schön, Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987). 212 Donald Schön, “Designing as reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation,” Knowledge-Based Systems 5, no.1 (March: 1992), 5, https://doi.org/10.1016/0950-7051(92)90020-G. 213 Margot Duncan,“Autoethnography: Critical Appreciation of an Emerging Art,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3, no. 4 (2004): 28–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690400300403. 76 With these considerations in mind I seek to position my written reflections within the above outlined working description of auto-ethnography. These considerations will also be housed within the larger frame of a concept entitled “living inquiry,” outlined in A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text ,214 which describes practice-led research through art production as a form of living inquiry. “Living inquiry” in this sense is seen as “moving beyond existing criteria while simultaneously functioning as a mode of scholarly inquiry and representation.”215 It is through this process, therefore, that the focus is not simply on the art praxis itself or the text that articulates a particular research finding, but rather that “living inquiry” becomes focused on the possibility for creating new meaning of what is, what is not or what might be.216 “Living inquiry” is about the flexibility of “visual, aesthetic, and textual performances that dance and play alongside each other, reverberating in excess and as openings”217 that bring focus to the process and the “condition in which you might find yourself while doing work.”218 The adaptation of “living inquiry” in my process therefore entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria for qualitative research and engaging with a form of “aesthetic inquiry” that provides access to phenomena not otherwise attainable.219 Through adapting the approach of “living inquiry,” I seek to “rupture evaluative processes” so that this research might become a “passage to somewhere else.” Not only will it require the adaptation of a process beyond the use 214 Stephanie Springgal, Rita Irwin and Sylvia Wilson Kind “A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text,” In Qualitative Inquiry 6, no. 11 (2005): 41- 58. 215 Springgal, Irwin and Wilson Kind, 42. 216 Springgal, Irwin and Wilson Kind, 41- 58. 217 Springgal, Irwin and Wilson Kind, 52. 218 Peggy Phelan and Irit Rogoff, “‘Without’: A conversation,” Art Journal 60, no. 3 (May 2014): 34, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2001.10792075. 219 Springgal, Irwin and Wilson Kind, 53. 77 of existing criteria, it will also engage with the notion of how creative praxes make meaning, change meaning and understand meaning while contributing to a discourse on how to create the conditions for others to reflect on their own meaning-making practices.220 A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text asserts: “It is the desire to respond to the disappearance and appearance of signs, the impulse between what is known and what cannot be expressed, that gives new tension and vibration to the signifier. Research, thus, becomes an act of unsettling, an evocation that calls out, asking for a response, a living inquiry, transforming static moments into momentum, multiplying and metamorphosing.”221 It is through this notion of “living inquiry” and the intention to express, inquire, make meaning, change meaning and understand meaning, where I will ground my reflexive process in my auto-ethnographic approach and my engagement with the creative praxis itself as described in the coming sections. The frameworks mentioned in this chapter have offered several anchors through which I ground my approach to this critical exegesis. While these are the main and central perspectives that inform the approach to my own research and artistic praxis as detailed in Chapter Three, I emphasize here that each of these frameworks will primarily take a creative lens. That is, I place emphasis on the above mentioned frameworks and the ways in which they are already entangled with creative approaches and perspectives, with a focus, as mentioned, in connection to Caribbean and Indigenous creative works. 220 Springgal, Irwin and Wilson Kind, 48. 221 Springgal, Irwin and Wilson Kind, 51. 78 Part Two: Practice-Led Approach Framing My Practice-Led Approach To carry out this research project I utilize a practice-led approach. The practice-led approach is described in Practice as Research Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry in the following way: “the emergence of the discipline of practice-led research highlights the crucial interrelationship that exists between theory and practice and the relevance of theoretical and philosophical paradigms for the contemporary arts practitioner.”222 Further to this, Practice as Research Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry also describes the impact of “practice as research” as being set within the generative capacity of creative arts research to employ subjective, emergent and interdisciplinary approaches that offer up new paradigms for research strategy.223 Choosing a practice-led approach allows me to engage with the notions previously outlined in my selection of works that attend to a black feminist perspective. These notions include thinking across multiple sites and outside the familiar as described by McKittrick, engaging with possibilities that move outside what has been imagined before as described by Ferreira da Silva, and envisioning and imagining futures that have yet to happen as described by Campt. Through a practice-led approach I am able to engage in the critique of “Time” in modernity while focusing on creative praxes as avenues for research contributions. As will be referred to in later elaborations on my artistic approach, I engage with a process of interpretation that connects artworks to a theoretical context – giving room to explore the dynamic relationship between the various elements of my research,224 thereby allowing me to employ methodologies 222 Estelle Barrett, “Introduction,” in Practice as Research Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry eds., Estelle Barett and Barbara Bolt (New York: I.B. Tauris), 1. 223 Barrett, 3. 224 This is in reference to the work done by Maarit Mäkelä mentioned in later paragraphs. 79 that give room to explore a range of artistic and creative engagements that open up new and generative avenues for black feminist ideas through creative praxis. Two of the scholarly works that further contribute to the discourse on practice-led approaches in the arts and influenced the choice of methodologies I will employ in relation to my practice-led research are Interweaving in hybrid methodologies225 and From Art for Arts Sake to Art as Means of Knowing: A Rationale for Advancing Arts-Based Methods in Research, Practice and Pedagogy.226 In the work Interweaving in hybrid methodologies, Deborah Harty describes a methodology entitled “action theoria” which references the cyclical process between intention, action and review within the arts.227 This methodology interweaves research “through theory and practice” and “provides the flexibility to incorporate the responsiveness and transparency required for practitioner research.”228 Harty draws on the work of Nicholas Davy to support her description of the term “theoria,” which according to Davy, is an approach based on the notion that a subject matter can never be completely knowable, but both theory and practice can offer complementary perspectives that result in greater understanding. For Davy, the more perspectives that can be considered, the greater our understanding of the subject matter can be.229 While I will draw primarily from the concept of “action theoria” to support my approach to practice-led research, I also refer to Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in 225 Deborah Harty, “Interweaving Hybrid Methodologies,” Journal of Visual Arts Practice 1, no. 15 (2017): 30-40. 226 Sally Eaves,“From Art for Arts Sake to Art as Means of Knowing: A Rationale for Advancing Arts-Based Methods in Research” EJBRM 12, no. 2 (2014): 147-160. 227 Deborah Harty, “Interweaving Hybrid Methodologies,” 30-40. 228 Deborah Harty, “Interweaving Hybrid Methodologies,” 38. 229 Nicholas Davy, “Art and Theoria,” in Thinking through Art – reflections on art as research, eds., Katy Macleod, and Lin Holdridge (London: New York: Routledge) 20-39. 80 Practice-led Research to support my research and the insights gained through the process of “action theoria.” In Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practice-led Research, Maarit Mäkelä refers to practice-led research and states:“During the process of interpretation…the artefact230 has to be placed into a suitable theoretical context. In this process, the final products (the artefacts) can be seen as revealing their stories, i.e. the knowledge they embody.”231 For Mäkelä, “the artefacts translate messages between concrete objects and abstract requirements,” noting that there is a “dynamic relationship between the research context, question, method and audience.”232 Mäkelä’s approach marks one aspect of the methodological framework I utilize in my analysis as it offers a process of interpretation that connects artworks to a theoretical context and gives room to explore the dynamic relationship between the various elements of my research. Although I do not employ Mäkelä’s approach as my sole or main framework, I do, as Mäkelä describes, give theoretical context to the artistic works I create for this project and produce an analysis that considers the dynamic and various ways the elements of my process interact, engage, and amalgamate through my guiding research questions so that the ceramic pieces may, as Mäkelä states, “reveal their stories.”233 Lastly, in discussing her own work and using it as a case study, Mäkelä refers to her pieces themselves as “posing questions” in relation to the subject matter of praxis and notes that artistic works can be viewed as the primary “forum” of research.234 This will be the second perspective I borrow from Mäkelä in carrying out my practice-led approach as I treat my artistic works primarily as mediums or sites of research in 230 A term used by Mäkelä to describe an artistic work that has a central position in the research process. 231 Maarit Mäkelä, “Knowing through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practice-Led Research,” Knowledge Technology & Policy 20, no. 3 (2007): 157–63. 232 Mäkelä, 160. 233 Mäkelä, 157–63. 234 Mäkelä, 157–63. 81 themselves, and engage with a research process that opens up avenues for the artistic works to pose questions, or, in other words, for a network of questions to arise out of the praxis and creation of particular pieces.235 Research Design and Producing the Work As mentioned, my practice-led research is brought into focus through the use of three main frameworks: a black feminist perspective theoretical perspective that draws primarily upon the work of Tina Campt and Denise Ferreira da Silva; the analytic framework of the “tidalectic” formulated by Kamau Brathwaite; and the methodological strategy of auto-ethnography through “living inquiry” which will ultimately all be influenced by the creative analytical lens I have devised which is informed by Caribbean and Indigenous creative works. Using these selected frameworks, my practice-led research will therefore be designed to engage with the question of the potential that creative praxes hold for responding to “cycles of destruction initiated by colonial approaches to knowledge”;236 and alongside this, my practice-led research will be based on the intention of drawing together a body of research that outlines not only the methods employed through creative praxes that generate transformation, but also, as previously mentioned, will investigate how these creative praxes can, despite ongoing structures of harm, create conditions to imagine a world beyond "Time," opening up new possibilities and pathways to both justice and healing. In consideration of these theoretical, analytical and methodological frameworks, I will produce two lines of sculptural work that seek to speak to my aforementioned guiding research 235 Mäkelä, 157–63. 236 Cash Ahenakew, “Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing Onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination,” International Review of Qualitative Research 9, no. 3 (2016): 323–40. 82 questions. To carry this out, I use porcelain and earthenware clay-bodies and a combination of coil-building and slab building techniques to produce the ceramic vessels which will transform, crack or take on new shape either through handling and touch or through the heat of the kiln itself. The first line of sculptural work is one which will dissolve through touch, time or exposure to the elements as it will not be fired and vitrified to produce durability. This line will experiment with the idea of “transformation” through a set of vessels that will dissolve and ultimately return to the earth – drawing on the concept of “tidalectic” rhythm as the clay will not be simply extracted from the earth but return to its place in cycle, making itself available again in another moment or to take on new form. These sculptural vessels will be patterned on the surface with techniques that draw their inspiration from methods of dying and designing fabric in the Caribbean. The patterns will make use of similar dying methods used in batik fabric dying practices, relying on a “resist” and on water-soluble pigments which will be selected to match the dissolvability of the clay rather than using other pigment options such as acrylic paints or washes which are not dissolvable due to their plastic content. The second line of sculptural work will be one which is “over-fired” so that the clay takes on new form as the materiality of the clay goes into a state of “flux” (when the clay begins to meet its melting point and slowly begins to change state, taking on more liquid qualities). This line of sculptural work will experiment with the idea of “transformation” through heat and fluidity. Through intentionally over-firing my ceramic work so that the materiality of the clay will slump and take new form as the clay particles begin to “flux,” I will engage with the conceptual idea of transformation through heat. In this sense, the work will take on a completely new form that can’t be predetermined, known or controlled, transforming and taking on new 83 heights of fluidity, losing its previous shape perhaps only to come out of the kiln in some other iteration. This line of sculptural work will employ similar designs and processes as the first line of work, however in this line I will use underglaze pigment that gets fired with the clay instead of water-soluble pigment that will be applied on an unfired surface. I will fire the porcelain cone six clay-bodies to approximately cone seven and cone eight. Firing one to two cones above the recommended temperature will allow my clay-body to slump and “flux” with the heat as mentioned above, allowing engagement with a process that will provide insight into my guiding research questions. My analysis will therefore be based on the following: 1) ten sculptural works using slab-building methods, underglaze and over-fired clay (Moving in Flux, 2022 and Shifting Conversations, 2021); 2) five sculptural works using slab-building, watercolour pigment and unfired clay (Unravel, 2022 and Shifting Conversations, 2021); and 3) five sculptural works using coil building, slab-building, underglaze and over-fired clay (Dispersing Echoes, 2022). It is through the completion of these works and the insights that come through this praxis that I hope to offer my own reflections on engagement with artistic works, allowing the pieces to reveal their own stories.237 Ultimately, this practice-led work will engage with the following: a black feminist theoretical perspective drawing from Tina Campt’s “black feminist futurity”238 and the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva; and Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” as an analytical lens; alongside my own description of a creative analytic lens which includes the completion of an auto-ethnographic journal to detail my artistic praxis, decisions and affective insight. These theoretical, analytical and methodological approaches aim towards the following: offering a contextual analysis of 237 Mäkelä, 157–63. 238 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 84 creative works that attempt to expose the workings of “Time in modernity” in tandem with an analysis of my own creative praxis; offering an analysis of how my creative praxis engages with the concept of “cyclical transversion”239 through the materiality of the clay itself; and finally, offering an analysis of praxes that suggest other modes of engaging with the rhythm and cycles of life, outside the structures of harm stemming from Western modernity in order to create moments and possibilities for transformation. As mentioned, to carry out this practice-led research I will produce two lines of artistic sculptural work that will support an on-going inquiry into my guiding research questions with the aim of gaining insight into how artistic praxes create affective impact and further, to evaluate which of these practices create a sense of healing.240 Each line of artistic works will aim to support the exploration of how the theme of “Time” (and subsequent interrelated concepts such as “connection,” “linearity,” “transference,” “cycles,” “transversion,” “transformation” and “healing”) is woven within my artistic praxis. To support this aim my analysis will entail reading both lines of sculptural work alongside other artistic praxes with a primary focus being on Caribbean and Indigenous creative work. Engaging with the Work A major part of my research analysis orbits around reflections on the following forms of engagement: my own creative praxis and engagement with the materiality, process and work; observations from selected audience reflections and their engagement with the artworks; and 239 A term I use and elaborate on in Chapter Three to define the notion that energy turns across and into something else over and over again in cycles. 240 When framing my understanding of healing I draw from a definition described as “being in ‘orientation with’ non-human nature and each other rather than being in “distinction from” it. Karyna Do Monte, "Candomblé and Sacred Earth Healing in the Rio de Janeiro Carnival," Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 3 (2013): 404-409. 85 analysis of a broader web of creative praxes that consider concepts of “Time,” “rhythms and cycles” and “healing.” The analysis of engagement in these three areas is based on the following guiding questions: What elements of the artistic works connect to ideas, thoughts or possibilities of transformation?; What elements of the artistic works connect to ideas, thoughts or possibilities of healing?; What elements of the artistic work allow for a “slowing down” or moments of “quiet” to engage with varied temporalities?; What elements of the artistic works connect to ideas, thoughts or concepts of “rhythms and cycles” and “Time?” Reflections on engagement with the creative works will be framed in the context of how these engagements, and the insights that arise from them, offer pathways to sabotage modernity’s structures of harm, examples being the violence of capitalism, extraction, dispossession, settler colonialism and domination, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and anti-blackness.241 Simultaneously, I will explore what pathways might emerge towards creating conditions for healing from this harm. Healing in this regard will be referring to Karyna Do Monte and Kayrah Daniels’ description of “earth healing” which refers to being in orientation with the world and each other rather than in distinction from it, as well as the notion that disease is a rupture in the energies which constitute our bodies and the world. More specifically, for the purpose of this project, healing is framed as a transformation of the “rupture” described by Do Monte and Daniels. 241A reference in particular to the forms of violence listed in Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 10. 86 A Brief Outline of the Research Methodologies in Relation to my Artistic Works As previously mentioned, my analysis will involve the following: a) black feminist thought as a theoretical approach b) theoretical and contextual analysis within the framework of Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” and c) a creative analytical lens that involves completion of an auto-ethnographic journal and an approach informed by Caribbean and Indigenous creative works. In particular, I will select journal excerpts that reveal elements of my artistic praxis or thinking and elaborate on these excerpts by going into an analysis of surrounding themes and ideas that are present in my journal reflections. This journal and the excerpts slected will support my research goals by lending clarity to the elements present in my creative decision-making process regarding form, style, surface design and firing time. Further, this journal will provide a framework to analyze how my own praxis of using clay connects to my guiding research questions, and in particular how my engagement with clay offers insight into varied temporalities that will allow me to sense outside modernity’s space-time. My own affective responses when engaging with my praxis and the material itself will also be a focus for my reflective journal entries. The elements outlined in my auto-ethnographic journal will ultimately support my research goals in that they offer information regarding “multimodal” knowing that emerge through the arts along with affording an opportunity to analyze the ways in which artistic praxes allow for a sense of the rhythms and cycles of life beyond the “ticking time” of modernity, and ultimately, shedding light on the potential for creative praxes to generate a sense of transformation — lending support to my research questions regarding how artistic works and creative praxes generate alternate conditions to “be” in the world differently. Further, through employing black feminist thought and Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” as a theoretical and analytic lenses alongside an analysis to gain insight into the context through 87 which my own praxis emerges will allow me to gain insight into the ways in which these artistic praxes contribute to a growing understanding of social justice by taking into consideration the theoretical framework with which they are aligned, ultimately lending insight into one of my guiding research questions regarding what might create the conditions for innovative and new pathways within the field of social justice and the creative arts. By employing these appraoches, this project will seek to provide a cohesive undertaking of practice-led research to evaluate the ways in which creative works sabotage the harm of Western modernity with a particular focus on the implications of “Time.” Further, the project will analyze what the conditions are that generate moments of transformation through creative expression. In addition to this aim, this research project will seek to facilitate further understanding and openings regarding “transformation” and “healing” with the hope of contributing to the disintegration of colonial and oppressive frameworks. Limitations, Advantages and Considerations of the Research Project Choosing a practice-led approach, while allowing for flexibility, innovation and creativity with regards to the research design and process, also carries with it some limitations which might be worth considering when reflecting on the broader scope of the project. One of the main considerations I bring forward in relation to this research is that the concept of practice-led research projects are relatively “new” in the sense that the first practice-led research projects began taking shape in the 1990s. Mäkelä writes: “An art-based, practice-based or practice-led – which appears to be the established term in use in the United Kingdom today – approach to carrying out research projects began taking shape in Finnish art universities as early as the 88 1990s”242 While there could be some limitations in regards to this research approach being relatively “new” (such as it being challenging to find one clear consensus regarding practice-led research and what it entails — as a range of scholarly works draw upon different terminology and definitions to describe “practice-led research” and what it is associated with) it also offers in this same sense, a vast range of possibility and flexibility to engage with an emerging field of research that brought within its fold a variety of innovative projects that are opening up new avenues for thinking about contributions to discourse through artistic praxes — not confined perhaps by the rigidity of other research approaches that may by now be more firmly established. A similar consideration to bring forward which carries both limitations and advantages is the ways in which “tacit knowledge”243 might evade clear communication to the audience or reader as perhaps there is no language to describe this knowledge, or the knowledge exists solely in the form of the “artefact” and cannot ever be fully communicated through language alone. In an attempt to clarify practice-led research and develop clear means for communication of the knowledge produced through praxis, Kristina Niedderer and Seymour Roworth-Stokes write the following: “Niedderer has argued that practice is being used as a means of making tacit knowledge available to research, because it includes the experiential part of knowledge which evades conventional communication by verbal or textual means and which is otherwise neglected by research because of the prioritisation of propositional knowledge. While the need to use practice has become widely accepted, the problem of its role within research remains disputed. Related to the methodological problem is the problem of terminology. 242 Mäkelä, 159. 243 Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge, 1967). 89 A varied terminology is used to try and label different forms of using practice within research such as practice-based, practice-led, studio-based research, etc. This is problematic, because there are no clear guidelines for what these terms stand, and in due course adds to the confusion”244 While at times there might be some ambiguity on terminology or translation from “tacit knowledge” or “knowledge that evades conventional communication” to something that might be considered more legible in written form, engaging with a form of “knowing” that comes through the senses and through creative praxes also offers a range of possibilities to circumvent hierarchical and categorical approaches to research opening up new ways of engaging with knowledge that has not yet been previously explored or imagined. Lastly, while one of my main considerations of this research project is the subject of “Time,” it is challenging, even with careful attention, to not reproduce a discussion of “Time” that could, even in the smallest of ways, be considered as causing harm. One example of this would be when Walter Mignolo discusses “Time” and how it functioned in the 18th century as a category which distinguished “culture” from “nature.” In his work The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Mignolo writes: “‘Time,’ properly, is a category of reckoning, not a category of experiencing; it is a category belonging to culture, not to nature. In the second phase of modernity (in the eighteenth century), it became one of the central categories to distinguish culture from nature. However, this is not the occasion to survey the concept of “time in different 244 Kristina Niedderer and Seymour Roworth-Stokes, “The Role and use of Creative Practice in Research and its Contribution to Knowledge” (IASDR Conference: Emerging Trends in Design Research, November, 2007). 90 cultures,” since that would merely mean to reproduce precisely two of the distinctions that “time” contributed to: the distinction between nature and culture; and the distinction between modernity and tradition.”245 With this, Mignolo addressed the potential for his work to be read as a signal to the reader to survey “Time” as it exists “in different cultures” and clarified his words directly to inform the reader regarding the ways this action would reproduce the same harm which Mignolo was seeking to expose. It is with this in mind, that I further acknowledge notions of ancestral temporalities which can be viewed as always having disrupted the “Time” of modernity; however, I have not elaborated on this further given the frame of reference for this project. Taking into consideration these examples, it seems that in attempting to discuss the language and concepts that stem from Western modernity and the harm they enacted, it is a possibility that this project could signal towards a reproduction or re-enactment of the oppressive and harmful framework I am seeking to sabotage. While I may not be aware of the ways in which this project could unknowingly create conditions to retrace or reproduce the very harm I am seeking to expose, I bring forward this possibility as a consideration of the limitations of this work. This project is a first iteration of experiments in praxis, and just as my selected methodologies and framworks suggest, I seek to leave room for uncertainty and ever-shifting insights that avoid definite, resolved or finished solutions. 245 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, 151. 91 Conclusion Through delineating my methodological approaches in this chapter, my intention has been to give a cohesive overview of the framework and approaches which form my research design and approach to analysis. My intention has been to create and employ a framework which will be effective in supporting the research related to my guiding questions while also providing an open-endedness characteristic of my chosen methodological, analytical and theoretical approaches, making room for a type of movement that orbits my research questions without the necessity of moving towards definitive and final answers to my guiding research questions. In the following chapter I carry out the above outlined research methods through the work of the praxis itself and offer subsequent insight, interpretations and research contributions regarding the ways in which creative praxes address the concept of “Time.” I will seek to explore how "Time" has been deployed and implicated in creating structures of harm that continue to echo out in our world at present and will explore how creative praxes contribute to the disintegration of colonial oppressive frameworks and allow for generative moments of healing and transformation. Further, I will look at what creates the conditions for these moments to occur which open up new pathways for thinking about concepts such as “transformation,” “healing” and “time.” 92 Chapter Three: The Praxis Introduction When I feel the warmth emanating off of the kiln and slowly watch the interior glow of the structure move from a deep red to shades of orange, yellow and white, I am aware that the heat is changing the state of my sculptures and leaving its own imprint on the work. I cannot and do not choose to fully control the firing process, and it is this feeling of letting go of control – and allowing the heat to be, in some ways, a collaborator with the work – where I again am reminded of being in some form of conversation as I do not know nor can I fully determine how the material will respond during the firing process. In a similar sense, I also return to the notion of conversation through engaging with my unfired works that hold the possibility of completely dissolving as they wear away through the imprints of everything and everyone that interacts with it. It is through these expansive possibilities that clay holds wherein I have grounded my work and praxis as I see that this conversation with the material holds endless potentialities. To engage with the potentialities of clay, in part, I draw forward examples from my own praxis as mentioned, and delineate further that the work may become a part of the process of aesthetic co-creation as those who engage with it imbue their own meaning into the piece and are also left with a sense of ambiguity as to the sequence through which the work was produced – contributing to the possibilities to unsettle sequence and unsettle familiar notions that are enmeshed within “Time.” I also offer an engagement with the concept of “cyclical transversion”246 which I describe as energy moving and traversing through cycles, presenting 246 As described in later sections, I refer to “transversion” as energy turning into something else and paired with the word “cyclical”, I engage with this concept as a way to describe energy turning across and into something else over and over again in cycles. 93 itself in various forms.247 This description, which informs my analysis and is delineated in further detail throughout this chapter, is broadly related to the assumption that the earth is interlinked with all things and interlinked with myself as the artist. In Part One of this chapter I offer an analysis and discussion of my own praxis as it relates to the material (clay), the form (vase) and the surface (patterns) which I employ throughout the body of my sculptural work. To begin my initial overview of my own praxis, I draw upon the concept of the material as a means to disclose the assumptions I am making regarding the clay I work with in my praxis. When it comes to the form, I address my decisions and approach to the shape and design of my sculptural vessels. I frame these vessels not just in relation to the discourses of the vase, its shape and purpose as a functional or artistic object at different moments in “Time,” but also through the conceptual approach of seeing the vase as a conduit or carrier. I then move onto the surface design of my sculptural vessels and offer a brief overview of the decisions I have made regarding my choice of surface design. In moving through these elements, I offer a general description of the components that make up the artistic works. This allows me to move into a mapping and analysis of my praxis in particular, thereby offering focused insight into how I frame my praxis with regards to my analytical and theoretical approaches such as “tidalectics” and black feminist futurity, alongside concepts of “rhythms” and “cycles.” In Part Two of this chapter I offer further theoretical and speculative insights into my engagement with ceramic vessels and analyze my artistic praxis in relation to visual, poetic and written works with a primary focus on Indigenous and Caribbean lenses. My analysis will be placed alongside a selection of auto-ethnographic journal excerpts which serve as insights and 247 Influenced by the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and her description of Corpus Infinitum 94 glimpses into how I was thinking about my work and process along the way. While these journal excerpts are not always explicitly or overtly tied into my analysis, each journal excerpt was selected to mirror the concepts discussed in that particular section. This part of the chapter begins with a brief analysis of the roots of “Time” and the foundations that were laid leading up to the concept of “Time” currently held in the framework of Western modernity. I move from this into an analysis of what might be possible through engagement with creative works in terms of unsettling “Time,” engaging with “Time” differently and further offering possibilities to “be” in the world differently. I then give an overview of my own creative praxis and situate it within the discourse of other artists and writers who engage with the concepts of “Time,” cycles and transformation. I give focus to questions surrounding how we can sense “Time” and explore how, if we may sense “Time” differently through creative praxes, even if only momentarily, this might then offer a change in the conditions that have been created through Western modernity. With this in mind, I analyze the ways in which I see “cyclical transversion” occurring, particularly through the earth (clay) which I engage with in my own creative work. This leads into a discussion regarding how transformation occurs through “cyclical transversion”. I frame this analysis as tentative, flexible, ever-changing and only a “partial map”248 to what is possible through creative praxes and engagement with creative work which creates openings not just for transformation but also for healing. 248 Reference to “partial map”: Kei Miller, “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,” 45. 95 Part One: Creative Conditions The Material On this island things fidget. Even history. The landscape does not sit willingly as if behind an easel holding pose waiting on someone to pencil its lines, compose its best features or unruly contours. Landmarks shift, become unfixed by earthquake by landslide by utter spite. Whole places will slip out from your grip.249 249 Kei Miller, “On this island things fidget,” in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), 15. 96 -Kei Miller Working with the material of clay or, in other words, working with the earth through my artistic praxis has allowed a range of possibilities and complexities to emerge. With the aim of elaborating on my approach to clay in relation to my praxis, I highlight a selection of poetic and scholarly works which have influenced and framed my approach. The first work is an excerpt from a poetic piece by Kendel Hippolyte where he writes the following: Child, listen: Earth is language, a millioning of words that never needed our translation … A millioning of words that keeps on talking to you all the time. So child, whenever it is you wake up, listen: you may hear your name.”250 This piece by Hippolyte positions earth as something that one can engage with in conversation, or which shares its own language with the listener. Taking this approach to clay is a grounding point of my praxis as I do not seek to control or dominate the material but approach it rather as a conversation between myself and the material that leads to the release of creative expression. 250 Kendel Hippolyte, “Ovalea’s Bedtime Story to the Third Child,” in Night Vision: Poems, (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 58. 97 This grounding in relationship to clay is also informed by Indigenous relationality to earth and the Indigenous lands on which my praxis occurs as the last several years of my praxis I have lived, worked, and studied on the unceded, ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. In this regard, I think, for example, of Hippolyte’s poetic work in relation to the perspectives of the skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nation on whose land I currently live and carry out my studio praxis. I draw from the work of Joseph Leigh, Alain Cuerrier, and Darcy Mathews in Shifting narratives, recognizing resilience who describe a deep connection to land and note that: “Health and wellness from an skwxwú7mesh perspective is directly connected to the land…[and the] health of the land is integral to the health of the people who have been in relationship with the land over millennia.”251 This connection to land is further described in the following way: “Temíxw” is a skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) word that translates to land. This word carries embedded cultural meaning and is grounded in skwxwú7mesh cultural identity, worldview, language, ceremony, ancestral history, present, and futures. The skwxwú7mesh “temíxw” will persist and support the bodies, spirits, and lives of future generations.”252 The notion of being in relationship with the earth and the notion that the earth is connected to health and wellbeing, alongside the idea that earth is connected to all that existed 251 Joseph Leigh Alain Cuerrier and Darcy Mathews, "Shifting Narratives, Recognizing Resilience: New Anti-Oppressive and Decolonial Approaches to Ethnobotanical Research with Indigenous Communities in Canada" Botany 100, no. 2 (February 2022): 68. 252 Leigh, Cuerrier, and Mathews, 68. 98 before this moment and all that will echo into our collective futures, are notions that influence my creative praxis and frames the approach to my praxis where I sense the connectedness to the material. While I am not extracting the clay directly from the land on which I carry out my praxis, my creative expression is influenced by this notion of the inherent link that exists to the earth, and to the elements and minerals which have continuously moved in cycles. In thinking about the minerals which are present within the materials I use, I refer to silica as one example of a central mineral in many claybodies, and which is described in the following manner in Indigenous knowledge use of clay within an African context: possible documentation of entire clay properties?: “Indigenous knowledge of clay should be documented in order to explore and accord due respect to its explicit and “non-explicit ontologies.” The explicit ontologies consist for example, of “hydrated silicates of aluminum, regarded as the material from which the human body was formed.”253 While I am not attempting in my praxis to cover or explain the numerous explicit and “non-explicit ontologies” of the materiality of earth, I am grounding my work in the idea that in engaging with a ceramic praxis, the material itself is not separate from the artist, and that the elements and minerals which make up our world are linked one to another in ways that we may not always explicitly see. 253Moyra Keane, "Science Education and Worldview," Cultural Studies of Science Education 3, no. 3 (September 2008): 587-621, doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-007-9086-5. In Charles Akwe Masango, Georges Ivo Ekosse and Vhonani Netshandama,“Indigenous Knowledge Use of Clay Within an African Context: Possible Documentation of Entire Clay Properties?,” Southern African Journal for Folklore Studies 27, no. 1 (2017):96. https://doi.org/10.25159/1016-8427/2497. 99 While I attempt to engage, in a sense, in a conversation with earth as it releases a “millioning of words,”254 I bring to mind the following suggestion from Hippolyte where he notes that these words “never needed our translation.”255 I will therefore be offering an analysis of my creative praxis in the following sections while aiming to avoid any suggestion of a formulaic way of engaging with creative works. I will also avoid fully translating my creative pieces into words in an attempt to let them reveal their own stories rather than determining a set conclusion or meaning of the pieces.256 Ultimately, I take the approach that this praxis offers only a partial insight into the possibilities of engaging with the materiality of earth and frames my work through the concept of a “partial map” as Kei Miller writes in XX. In which the Cartographer tells off the Rastaman: The cartographer sucks his teeth and says – every language, even yours, is a partial map of this world – it is the man who never learnt the word ‘scrupe’ – sound of silk or chiffon moving against a floor – such a man would not know how to listen for the scrupe of his bride’s dress. And how much life is land to which we have no access? How much have we not seen or felt or heard 254 Kendel Hippolyte, “Ovalea’s Bedtime Story to the Third Child,” 58. 255 “Reveal their own stories,” Mäkelä, “Knowing through Making,” 157–63. 256 Mäkelä, 157–63. 100 because there was no word for it – at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.257 -Kei Miller In this regard, I am seeking to see my creative praxis with clay as one that is marked by being in connection and in conversation with the material, however I acknowledge that my language is limited and as I move through the following sections, what I hope to offer in relation to my praxis will be both a “partial map” of the possibilities of engaging with clay and a “partial map” of my own creative praxis. The Form Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral 257 Kei Miller, “‘XX In which the Cartographer tells off the Rastaman’” in The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), 45. 101 places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.258 -Derek Walcott The forms of the vessels I create through my creative praxis are either unraveling, dissolving or appear in fragments, as in the case of Figure 1 and Figure 2 which can return back to the earth if exposed to the elements, or, as in the case of Figure 3 and Figure 4 which engage with the form of a vase that has collapsed, slipped or been heated to the point of the material “fluxing” thereby taking on a new shape due to being over-fired. Figure 1 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Unravel, 2022. Figure 2 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Unravel, 2022. 258 Derek Walcott,“The Antilles, Fragments of Epic Memory: The 1992 Nobel Lecture,” World Literature Today 67, no. 2 (1993): 261–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/40149064. 102 The shape of the vases themselves are based loosely off of two forms of ceramic vessels. The first of these forms are the types of vases common in Western Europe during the 18th century. These vases were informed and influenced by a period of expansion and trade and to create these pieces, the artists would employ rare or sought after materials such as porcelain and gold lustre to emulate what they deemed as advances occurring in their nation. This was described in Aiming High: Porcelain, Sèvres and the Grand Vase as a period, in Europe and in particular in France, where the state attempted to show “greatness” in manufacturing processes in the 1770s and 1780s. Juliet Carey writes: “…at a time when the Government was increasingly reluctant to use privileges or patents to secure trading advantages, even for its own royal manufactories [sic], increasingly design became the means by which technological innovation was promoted as a selling point. The vase was no exception.”259 The vase was not only a means by which to propagate the idea of “greatness” and “technological innovation” through the state,260 but further in referencing the Medici Vase, Louis de Jaucourt described it as one of “the best-surviving demonstrations of classical achievement,”261 exemplifying the ways this sculptural form was employed to uphold characteristics of the classical period and as one of the many tools and attempts of the state to propagate notions of “greatness.” While I do not seek to reproduce these particular notions in 259 Juliet Carey, “Aiming High: Porcelain, Sèvres and the Grand Vase,” Art History 31, no. 5 (December 2008): 721-753, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00638. 260 Carey, 725. 261 Louis de Jaucourt, “Vase,” in Diderot and d’Alembert Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers XVI, (Neufchastel, 1765), 851. 103 referencing a style of vase common during the period of Enlightenment (which draws upon many characteristics of form from the classical period), I am informed and influenced by this type of vessel design and simultaneously its unraveling through my own approach to the altered, cracked and fragmented composition. The second form of ceramic vessel which I draw upon in my approach to shape and design is that of the coal pot, often used in Caribbean functional ware. The coal pot is described by Patricia Fay as having a hollow, cylindrical post that flares open at the top. At the bottom of the cylindrical post she describes an empty space where coals could be placed to heat the food. This pot is described as, like much of the functional ceramic ware in the Caribbean, being made through the technique of pinch pot or coil-building.262 I have employed this type of vessel building in my artistic praxis and also drawn upon the design of open ended and flat bottomed vessels that mirror the open endedness and flat bottom shape of the coal pot. The open endedness of the vessel ultimately renders the piece “non-functional” yet simultaneously draws upon a reference to functional vessels through the process of its making and through the reference to the form of a vase which is commonly seen as something which has the potential to “carry” or “hold.” 262 Patricia J. Fay, Creole Clay: Heritage Ceramics in the Contemporary Caribbean, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017). 104 I think of the vessels in my creative praxis as ones that alter my own perspective of what it means for functional ceramic ware to “carry and hold” and explore the concept of the vessels “function” being one that acts as a conduit to something else through its open endedness. I engage with these works, in a sense, as “transmitters” as the vessels have many points of entry beyond the open ended bottom, allowing entry wherever there is a break or space in the fragments of pieces that make up the form. Alongside this notion of the vessel which “transmits,” I am also interested in the parts of the vessel that can never be fully seen, or the parts of the surface design that become obscured and hidden through the firing process. It is with this approach that I hope to engage further with a black feminist methodology in my works as I contemplate through my praxis that which cannot be determined or known and that which is not explicitly legible but calls on other ways of knowing and “listening”263 to the pieces that engage 263 A reference to the exploration of the ways we “listen” to images in Tina Campt, Listening to Images. 105 with temporalities and senses we may not have yet imagined. The Surface Endless grieving each mistranslation Misunderstanding Misinterpretation Each seismic shift in time I'm inventing you Through a generation gone by And we sit in silence Seedlings of the same wizened tree I can imagine … But I do not know you I've composed you from Dress cotton Banana leaves Patchwork quilts of quiet smiles and stories That I could not understand In this land of lost language I am neither stranger nor native The weight of my wasted words cannot be translated.264 -Vanessa Kisuule 264 Vanessa Kisuule, ““JJAJJA’: Vanessa Kisuule - United Kingdom - Poetry International,” Poetry International, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/30432/auto/0/0/Vanessa-Kisuule/JJAJJA/en/nocache. 106 The surface patterns of the vessels that are produced through my creative praxis are patterned with designs that are influenced and inspired by a range of fabric pattern designs in the Caribbean and Western Europe. Primarily, I engage with a process that is akin to batik fabric dying alongside carving into the clay to reveal geometric, floral and foliage patterns (Figure 5). Both of these particular processes find their grounding in Caribbean artistic work as my surface design is influenced by fabric created through dying and wax resists which Edward Long describes further as designs and processes that were popular on the West African coast that later made its way to the Caribbean Islands.265 Long explains that many of the dyes used in the Caribbean were naturally derived from the environment to produce certain hues and, while I do not have access to this plant material, I have chosen to reproduce similar colours through the use of pigment. Long describes the following dyes as: “indigo-berry…[was used to stain] paper or linen with a fine blue colour. There was also the scarlet-seed, a shrubby tree found in the Red Hills and Spanish Town areas. The seeds were used to produce a scarlet colour which served for both dyer's and painter's use. The oil from the cashew nut was used to tinge linen to a rusty colour while the milky juice of the cashew tree trunk was used to stain linen to a permanent black.”266 265 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of Island: with reflections on its situation settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, comme laws and government. 3 vols. (London: T. Lownudes, 1774) and Steve O. Buckridge,“The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Slave Dress,” Caribbean Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2003): 61–73, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654410. Long describes fabric designs popular on the West African coast while Buckridge references dying and fabric in the Caribbean islands. 266 Buckridge, 63. 107 While utilizing these hues to the best of my ability on my surface design, I engage with pattern making through carving directly into the clay and filling the lines with a black stain. While for some this may appear to be a direct reference to the common ceramic technique known as sgraffito, where one applies layer of colour to the clay and then scratches a design into the surface of the clay to reveal different colours and patterns, this is not a technique with which I intentionally engage in my praxis. Rather, my approach to surface design in this regard is to engage with the act of “carving” into the material with simplicity of form and line. This act of “carving” has been influenced by the woodblock prints and wooden sculptures alongside the geometric patterns which I have been exposed to through my family and their grounding in the artistic processes commonly employed in St. Lucia. I bring in floral and vine patterns as a reference not only in part to the tropical foliage of the Caribbean but also as a method of combining and entangling this influence alongside the influence of the British Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century, characterized by floral patterns such as those of William Morris. I engage with some elements of Morris’ design such as a move away from static repetition and a favouring of imperfection and deviation in order to disarm the rush of modernity and cause the viewer to halt “Time” for primary, secondary and 108 tertiary engagements with the work.267 I work with patterns influenced by Morris’ work in particular as Morris’ artistic engagement was framed by “reconfiguring the dominant Victorian constructions of time and space.” Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne discuss the implications of Morris’ work when they write the following passage: “Modernity’s measures of progress - spatio-temporal ideals that privilege rapidity in industrial development and urban growth - must each yield to their respective contraries…[and] the rationalization of time and routine is superseded by an elastic structure of temporality, suited to the changing desires and constant needs of a community of co-operative individuals.”268 While I am not engaging with a type of surface design that seeks to exemplify Morris’ approach for a dialectical need to yield to “respective contraries,” I am engaging with Morris’ influence regarding pattern work that seeks to frame “Time” as beyond simply something that that privileges rapidity and instead engages with other more elastic forms of temporality. While the surface pattern of the vessels’ work may appear overall to be that of “patchwork” or to have been pieced together to form a whole, my intent in creating the surface design is not to position geometric, floral and foliage patterns as separate from one another. Rather, the purpose of this intentional surface patterning is that the vessel might offer some insight into how the patterns and designs combine together, engage with each other and are linked and repeated throughout the vessel and body of work. This approach is taken as a means, 267 Paul Leduc Browne and Michelle Weinroth, To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, (Québec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), 251. 268 Browne and Weinroth, 182. 109 in part, to engage with other temporalities, to offer a moment to slow down their engagement with the work, and to present patterns that are at times obscured and therefore cannot always be deciphered. Mapping My Ceramic Vessels To begin an analysis of my own creative praxis I offer a partial mapping and reading of my ceramic vessels.269 This reading will constitute a mapping of my own artistic work through focusing on a piece from the series Unravel as seen in Figure 9, alongside mapping the concepts and theories that shape my praxis such as black feminist futurity, tidalectics, rhythms and cycles. In the coming section of this chapter titled The Possibilities, I include many excerpts from my auto-ethnographic journal where I write, reflect and detail my artistic process. One excerpt that I will draw upon for this mapping is as follows: “I wonder if art can work as a gathering point for what is lost, or for memories and fragments of information translated through the material itself, for the artist’s intuition and for a connection to the living and the dead.270 With these thoughts in mind I often come back to thinking about the material -- the clay -- and question what possibilities the material holds in the process of creation.” Figure 9 offers a partial map for the many thoughts contained in this excerpt which I will delineate below as it connects to my own affective response to a sense of wonder regarding 269 Kei Miller, “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,” 45. 270 Manfred Kresmer, "Visiting Ancestors: St. Lucian Djine in Communion with their African Kin," Caribbean Quarterly 39, 3 (1993):82-99. 110 creative possibilities that arise as I work with the material. Further, this mapping offers an example of what frames artistic works as “gathering points.” As one looks at Figure 9, it becomes clear that there are many pieces held together through an unseen “glue.” Each edge of the fragmented piece is both jagged and raw, signaling to the notion that the fragments that make up this whole were at one point, a part of something else. Through these edges and the spaces between them, this vessel offers itself as a collection of pieces and fragments that once held other forms. While the surface of this piece (Figure 9) holds rhythmic patterns of geometric shapes, these shapes do not always align and at times the patterns are disrupted. This form of pattern making further maps a sense of rhythm created by the work itself as the patterns not only create their own rhythm – marked or disrupted through the overlapping layers of the clay – but further, the geometric rhythm on the surface of the vessel holds the potential to take on new patterns or moments of disruption as it is it continues to be handled and touched. Similar to the notion of something which “gathers” together overlapping ideas, moments or sites, as mentioned in Chapter One (and will be discussed further in the coming sections), this form of movement is also associated with the movement of the tides and Kamau Brathwaite’s description of the “tidalectic” as water gathers in the shallows and disperses again in continual 111 cycle. I read the sculptural works in the series Unravel through a tidalectic lens as, not only do these unfired works change, shift and potentially dissolve due to the fact that they are not vitrified271 – ultimately reflecting the movement of dispersion like the tides – but they also hold dispersion in their structure. At the top of the vase (Figure 9) one can see that there are cracks and holes which allow the viewer to see through the form. Seeing through the form and seeing moments where fragments could either be coming together or moving apart again signals to the act of gathering and dispersion that frames the “tidalectic” approach. When it comes to the question of what is made possible through creative work, I suggest that the process of the work itself opens avenues to think about this very question. That is, as I approach my creative praxis and touch the clay, I sense what is possible and what form the vessel will take – whether through the senses, intuition, reading the state of the clay or traversing through moments of imagination to see what could be made possible. When reading Figure 9 alongside the other Figures from the series Unravel, Shifting Conversations, Dispersing Echoes and Moving in Flux it is clear that each of these works take different shapes and none are replicated in the exact same form. Each work holds different potential and can be read in tandem with the idea that each piece engages new possibilities and signals towards what has yet to come. In the case of Figure 9, one could imagine but not be certain of how the work might evolve through handling and touch. To signal towards what has yet to come or yet to be imagined are two concepts that present themselves through the vessel making process as each work takes on a new iteration with overlapping fragments, surface patterns and changes in hues and shape. However, beyond the vessel itself signaling to these ideas through its form and design, the fragility of both the fired 271 Heating the clay so it is no longer permeable or malleable. 112 and unfired work also signal to varied potentialities to come; whether they break or crack or whether, like in Figure 9, they are unfired and potentially fully dissolve and return to the earth in cycle. While this vessel can also offer a partial mapping of some of the concepts I engage with in the coming chapters, it also frames in part how I engage with the materiality of clay itself. This framing is marked by continual change, shift and cyclic movement which connect the artistic works to many possible futures while also opening possibilities to wonder how the clay carries and transmits the echoes of all the cycles it moved through before taking on the form of the vase through my artistic praxis. Part Two: The Possibilities Disrupting Modernity’s Timescale “we are warm fragments from the substance of sun and meteoroid, the far flung star; still throbbing in the chest, muted, is the first pain still throbbing in the chest, muted, is the first pain of dark O splitting heaven-wide open, shattering into hot shouting light, all agonies ago, long before the first aeons, long before there was a time or Time”272 -Kendel Hippolyte 272 Kendel Hippolyte, “Origins,” in Night Vision: Poems, (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 48. 113 Roots of “Time” Through my intention to disrupt linearity and stretch beyond what has been imagined before by engaging with artistic work and praxis, I begin with a notion of “Time” attached to Greek philosophy. This framing highlights how “Time” was not only viewed as a linear system as described in earlier chapters, but more specifically how the notion of “Time” emerged through Greek philosophy into modernity and became inherently linked to “the mind”. In Greek philosophy, Heracleitus discussed the impermanence of things and their continual process of transformation from one form to another. Heraclitus suggested that there was a continual process of transformation among the elements (such as fire, earth, water and air) which he referred to as the changing circumstances of the living.273 In discussing the origins of “Time” as it relates to the concept of “change” through Greek epistemology, Philip Turetzky writes: 273 John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed. (London: A & C Black). 114 “As with most early cosmological notions, time was first personified as a mythological deity and its cosmological significance was given in origin stories. Later, time came to be treated as an aspect of the natural world…Heraclitus thought that time does not have a beginning; it has had an infinite duration. This seems to place him in opposition to his predecessors, who sought naturalistic cosmogonies while keeping the mythic form of an origin story…Time, which to some extent is independent of change, would have been, for Heraclitus, not itself subject to changes and hence closely allied to the rational principle of things. Without a beginning, time would be of an infinite duration and so itself a feature of the world that does not change. While every thing was in flux, on Heracleitus’ account, the timeless unchanging rule of the logos constrained and ordered the flux of things.”274 Further, we can see a discussion of change as it relates to “Time” within the ontological beliefs of the well known Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In a translated work of Aristotle we find the following, “[F]or even if it is dark and we are not subject to bodily sensations, but some sort of change occurs in the soul, it immediately seems that some time has also passed.”275 Through this illustration Aristotle suggests that perceiving change is sufficient for perceiving “Time,”276 which served, alongside the work of Heraclitus’, as a contribution to the discourse around the inseparability binding “change” and “Time” together. Turetzky elaborates on this further when he writes: 274 Philip Turetzky, Time, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 1998) 5-9. 275 Aristotle, Physics. trans. Robin Waterfield. (Oxford, England: Oxford Paperbacks,1996). In Tony Roark,“Why Aristotle Says There Is No Time Without Change,” Apeiron 37, no. 3 (2004). 276 Roark,“Why Aristotle Says There Is No Time Without Change.” 115 “To understand time, Aristotle tells us, we need not make a distinction between motion and change. Time is involved in any sort of change, including change of place, motion in the narrow sense, alteration in quality, as, for example, when a thing changes color, generation and destruction of substances, and increase and diminution in size. He presents a singular argument for the conclusion that time requires change. He argues to the conclusion that time depends on change from the premise that we cannot tell that time has passed if we are oblivious to change.”277 Aristotle therefore suggests that “Time” is subordinate to “change” and that the two concepts are inherently linked together. The discourses presented on “Time” from Greek philosophy in this sense, create the conditions for what emerges in terms of Western modernity’s conceptualization of “Time,” its importance and its connection to “change.” A key moment occurs when, during the period of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant reverses the “subordination of time to change”278 and instead change becomes subordinate to “Time” and “Time” becomes dependent on nothing but itself.279 Turetzky describes the effects of this moment further when he writes: “A major tendency in the philosophy of time culminates when, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant…completes the inversion in priority of movement [or change] over time. This inversion deeply influences western thought afterward, and not just 277 Philip Turetzky, Time, 19. 278 Gilles Deleuze,“Kant: Synthesis and Time,” lecture March 14 1978, trans. Melissa McMahon, https://www.webdeleuze.com. 279 Daniel W. Smith,“Temporality and Truth,” Deleuze Studies 7, no. 3 (2013): 382. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45331555. 116 thought about time. Time takes on an importance for philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that it did not have before Kant. Until Kant’s inversion other aspects of philosophy involved the philosophy of time, but afterward positions on the nature of time tend to shape whole philosophical orientations. While Newton privileged space over time, he prepared the ground for Kant’s overturning of this order of precedence by making time independent of change.”280 In this sense, Turetzky describes a process where, following from Kant, a shift occurred in the epistemology of modern philosophers who began to see “Time” completely independent of change and as the “pure and empty form… that is no longer dependent on either the extensive or intensive movements that fill time; instead….[it is the] the pure and immutable form of everything that moves and changes.”281 At the turn of the period of Enlightenment, when “Time” took this priority over change and every thing was configured as existing in “Time,” Kant positioned spatial and temporal juxtaposition as necessary parts of manifold sensation. For Kant, “the Self (the soul), the World (the cosmos) and God (the eternal) are all shown to be transcendent illusions of reason that are derived from our new position in time.”282 “Time,” therefore becomes that which is enduring and permanent, exerting both its dominance and the unfolding of logical motion and is intimately interlinked with Subjecthood. In Critique of Pure Reason we find that Kant writes: 280 Philip Turetzky, Time, 85. 281 Daniel W. Smith,“Temporality and Truth,” 382. 282 Smith, 382. 117 “Every intuition contains in itself a manifold which can be represented as a manifold only in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another; for each representation, in so far as it is contained in a single moment, can never be anything but absolute unity.”283 With this, Kant made the claim that manifoldness284 can only be grasped as spread out in “Time,”285 which is an a priori intuition of the sensing Subject. This ultimately linked Subjecthood with a particular organization of “Time” and “the mind”. Therefore, when it comes to the notion of “Time” in the philosophies of modernity we can see that this philosophical standpoint was formulated on the acceptance of the unfolding of “Time” as a linear system and positioned as inherently linked to “the mind.” This formulation of “Time” opens up the possibility for the interiority of a linear hierarchical vision of a single History that would run its unique course while simultaneously marking the nucleus and boundaries of “Subjecthood.”286 Though this is simply a brief sketch to outline some portion of the discourse around “Time” as it has emerged and shifted from Greek philosophy, I consider these unfoldings mainly as a “partial map”287 to arriving at a notion of “Time” that was created during the period of Enlightenment and delineates the “sequence of one impression upon another” as a demarcation of Kantian Subjecthood. 283 Kant in James O'Shea, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction 1st ed. (London:Routledge, 2012), 135. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315730097 284 Kasra Seirafi, Organizational Epistemology Understanding Knowledge in Organizations, (Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013), 18. Described as “unordered flux of chaos which has to be arranged, structured, organized, and made sense of.” 285 Lawrence Friedman, "Kant's Theory of Time," The Review of Metaphysics 7, no. 3 (1954): 379-88, www.jstor.org/stable/20123384. 286 Édouard Glissant and J. Michael Dash, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 66. 287 Kei Miller, “XX. In which the Cartographer tells off the Rastaman,” 45. 118 I further associate this description of Subjecthood with what Walter Mignolo delineates as the European system of knowledge that was built on the premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and was therefore translated into the privileging of the secular mind over the body which led to philosophies of science and scientific thought as crafted in modernity, positioning itself as the only valid way to produce knowledge.288 With this, instead of the rhythm of everyday life being grounded in a “cosmic rhythm or a spiritual harmony” that allowed for everydayness to be suspended “in order to accede to something that was not everyday, namely, a meditation on the eternal,”289 the “Time” of everydayness found new grounding in the abstract time of capitalism where we find the dictum “Time” is money.290 One can see that there are many implications that attend to this particular formulation of “Time” and the epistemological hegemony that created the conditions for a few to believe they possessed and controlled knowledge over “the rest” of the world. With this in mind, what I hope to offer in the following sections is a brief outline of how some “options”291 could emerge to unsettle the notion of “Time” as a succession of moments within linear unfolding and what might become more possible if these “options,” even if only momentarily, shake up our sense of “Time.” Opening up ways to sense beyond “Time” With the purpose of my practice-led research being in part to offer an analysis of the methods employed through creative praxes that allow for generative moments of transformation and healing, I consider what creates the conditions for these moments to occur. Given the 288 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 81. 289 Daniel W. Smith,“Temporality and Truth,” 381. 290 Smith. 291 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 83. A reference to Mignolo’s description of potential ways to undermine global linear thinking when he writes: “...the imperialism of time in linear historical narratives is undermined and its control of time is shaken up by the emergence of coexisting options…” 119 aforementioned control of “Time” and the implications that come with it, opening up ways or possible options to sense beyond “Time” and the oppressive frameworks and systems that attend to it, seem to be a critical condition to consider. In the series Shifting Conversations (selection of pieces from this series seen in Figure 6 and Figure 7) it has been read by some art writers and journalists that these works were made, shattered and then finally re-pieced together.292 In observing these engagements with the pieces, I see that in some sense these viewers have unsettled “Time” and become active participants in a process of aesthetic co-creation with my praxis. In referring to the work of Jacques Rancière, Joseph Tanke describes this process of co-creation further when he writes: “Artistic works inaugurate a more indeterminate space-time, wherein the meanings of sensible productions are not immediately apparent. They are a breach between the sense 292An example of this can be seen in Janet Smith, “VAG’s Vast Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo Exhibition Amplifies Diverse New Voices on the Local Scene,” Stir. June 3, 2021. https://www.createastir.ca/articles/vag-vancouver-special-disorientations-and-echo. 120 or meaning habitually given to sense. It is this gap between sense and meaning that enables viewers to become active, and to participate in a process of aesthetic co-creation.”293 I see this process occurring for example, when in Create a Stir, Janet Smith describes my pieces as: “ceramic vessels that have been broken and then glued meticulously back together again.”294 This provided insight into how viewers might not only co-create meaning with the artist, but also how these impressions and assumptions regarding the sequence of how the work was made simultaneously unsettles “Time” through the ambiguity of the works unfolding, as unbeknownst to the audience who engaged with these sculptures, they did not unfold in the manner described by Smith. This moment of co-creation stood out to me as the meaning of the artistic works was not immediately apparent to the viewer and therefore those who engaged with the work became a part of the process of aesthetic co-creation by imbuing meaning into the work through impressions of how the pieces were produced.295 With this I see the possibility of co-creation to allow for the introduction of an indeterminate space-time as described by Tanke. If artistic works allow for a breach between the sense and meaning normally given to sense, allowing viewers to be active in this co-creation, how could this breach expand and allow viewers to traverse into new possibilities? How could artistic works make further room for co-creation? 293 Joseph J. Tanke, “Which Politics of Aesthetics?,” Distributions of the Sensible (2019): 90. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjdzcrf.9. 294Janet Smith, “VAG’s Vast Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo Exhibition Amplifies Diverse New Voices on the Local Scene.” 295Joseph J. Tanke, “Which Politics of Aesthetics?,” 90. 121 Beyond attempts to unsettle “Time” through my approach in my own artistic praxis, art theorist Rosalind Krauss describes the way in which sculpture itself inherently holds the potential to open up ways to engage with “Time” differently.296 Krauss states: “The history of modern sculpture is incomplete without discussion of the temporal consequences of a particular arrangement of form. Indeed, the history of modern sculpture coincides with the development of two bodies of thought, phenomenology and structural linguistics, in which meaning is understood to depend on the way that any form of being contains the latent experience of its opposite: simultaneity always containing an implicit experience of sequence. One of the striking aspects of modern sculpture is the way in which it manifests its makers’ growing awareness that sculpture is a medium peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. From this tension, which defines the very condition of sculpture, comes its enormous expressive power.”297 Krauss opens up a possibility for “Time” to exist through art and not simply to exist through a sequence of impressions but rather as it becomes a juncture between stillness and motion through aesthetics. This weaves in a different possibility where “Time” is not recognized as an integral dimension of the viewing subject -- one whose embodied experience requires the sequential unfolding of “Time” -- but rather as a “juncture” that is suspended outside of “Time.”298 296 Differently refers to other than the forward march of linear “Time.” 297 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 4. 298 Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 44. 122 If “Time” opens up in this way, perhaps there is also the possibility for what Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers notes as “marking time” through activity -- or “marking time” through art. Brettkelly-Chalmers suggests that artwork can be a process that “takes time” rather than focusing on an optical apprehension of the “Time” absorbed.299 For Brettkelly-Chalmers, “time is variously instantiated” within the observations of the work itself giving rise to aesthetic possibilities that draw together various temporal registers which allow time to “play out” in more than one way.300 Thinking along the lines of Brettkelly-Chalmers, I wonder if there is a possibility to think about aesthetics and art making as something that “gives time.” I wonder if there is something about art making and aesthetic co-creation that helps us dissolve what Brettkelly-Chalmers terms as “the reductionist legacy of Enlightenment determinism” or the consequences of “Time” becoming an entity in itself, conceived within the “colonial matrix of power” as described by Walter Mignolo.301 Here, might there be a way to open up a possibility for us to give way to the many “options” or layers of rhythms and cycles simultaneously playing out in various ways?302 299 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 118 - 133. 300 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 104 - 118. 301 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, 2 and Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. 302 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Referring to Mignolo’s use of the term “options.” 123 With these questions in mind, I returned to the idea of cycles through Brettkelly-Chalmers’ observations of Mircea Eliade’s scholarship and the Māori concept of “Te Kore.” Brettkelly-Chalmers notes that in the Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade describes that a “cyclical direction upon time annuls its irreversibility.” Stating that “everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final…Time but makes possible the appearance and existence of things. It has no final influence upon their existence, since it is itself constantly regenerated.”303 Further, to the concept of what is continually is regenerated in cycle, Anne Salmond’s response to Lisa Reihana artwork is also contextualized within Brettkelly-Chalmers’ discussion of space-time in the following excerpt: “[In] Māori cosmological ideas, space-time is a spiral, a vortex. Standing in the present, one can spin back to Te Kore…and then back again to the ancestral source. In this circular movement, the artist is said to hold both the ability and the mandate to absorb ancestral sources in the present and project them into the future.”304 303 Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans.,Willard R. Trask Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955) in Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 204. 304 Anne Salmond quoted in Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 204. 124 Given that Brettkelly-Chalmers is an art historian and curator whose praxis occurs on Māori land, her contextualization of Myth of the Eternal Return in relation to Māori cosmological ideas offers insight in regards to how Brettkelly frames her work beyond Western modernity’s “Time.” This example of moving beyond “Time” gives way to the potential of the arts to frame the rhythms and cycles not simply as “Time” that marches on but rather as another type of time that “gives” even while being “absorbed”; time that regenerates even if we feel it diminish; and time that exists in cycles, spirals or as echoes despite the many structures and institutions training us to be in “Time” through its solely sequential unfolding. In thinking about the example of the Maori “Te Kore” in which space-time is a spiral, and standing in the present, one can spin back to “Te Kore” and then back again to the ancestral source,305 I also return to similarities in praxes based in the Caribbean, such as Kamau Brathwaite’s description of the “tidalectic” as described in previous chapters. When Brathwaite writes: “Instead of the notion of one-two-three Hegelian, I am now more interested in the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic, I suppose, motion, rather than linear,”306 this can also be read as an unravelling or dissolving of “Time” which he carries out primarily in his poetic praxis. Brathwaite writes: “Like our grandmother’s – our nanna’s – action...like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.”307 305 Salmond in Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 204. 306 Silvio Torres-Saillant,“The Trials of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” 697. 307 Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures,” 2. 125 In discussing Barthwaite’s work, Anna Reckin writes that his poetic reference to movement “presents a kind of recursive movement-in-stasis” which seems to offer us another possibility to see motion and stillness at once as described by Krauss,308 or as an option to sense “Time” differently through for example the concept of the “Te Kore” where standing in stillness in the present can also create the conditions for the artist to be in motion, even if this motion is not explicit.309 For “Time” to exist differently through art brings in alternative pathways that move beyond modernity’s “Time” as a sequence of impressions or as an integral dimension of the viewing subject whose embodied experience requires its sequential unfolding.310 In this, we can also see the possibility of what might open up through our engagement with artistic praxes. Again, it is in this opening where it seems possible for new worlds to emerge and be imagined against or in spite of anti-blackness and colonialism,311 possibly releasing ourselves from being stuck in the linearity of the modern allowing for the option to push back against the notion of “Time” that is continually exerting both its dominance and the unfolding of logical 308 Reckin, 2. 309 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 204. 310 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 104. 311 Leanne Simpson, “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between time and space.” 126 motion312 within the dominant colonial framework. If “Time” were to unravel and open up anew, it is here where I see a possibility to strengthen the conditions for sensing various rhythms, cycles or layers, or for allowing time to be variously instantiated within the observations of the work itself.313 Ultimately, this gives rise to aesthetic possibilities that draw together various temporal registers which allow time to play out in more than one way.314 In thinking about art “giving time” or “opening up” new ways of being beyond “Time,” I return to thinking about that which allows for sensing time given – that is in a moment of stillness, there is potential to traverse through layers and cycles of time which then mark time as expansive rather than counting “Time” that is continuously “lost.” It is through this process of drawing together various temporalities where I also see a similar and interwoven process in aesthetic or creative processes that draw from and across various shifting sites of creativity and learning in order to come to know new and shifting worlds and ideas. Katherine McKittrick describes this idea when she writes: “The practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.”315 312 In Critique of Pure Reason we find that the philosophy of time is intimately interlinked with subjecthood. Kant states: “Every intuition contains in itself a manifold which can be represented as a manifold only in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another; for each representation, in so far as it is contained in a single moment, can never be anything but absolute unity.” 313 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 118. 314 Brettkelly-Chalmers, 104. 315 Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April,” 5. 127 To engage in an aesthetic praxis that opens up alternative options to sensing “Time” differently, also creates the conditions to traverse across various sites and modes of engaging with the world – accepting that what we come to know through this process is constantly shifting and being made anew. Dionne Brand, in a similar way to Leanne Simpson (as referenced in the excerpts from my auto-ethnographic journal) describes the emergence of new worlds. Brand suggests that creative inspiration is found through some form of “traversing” when she writes that creative inspiration is found “in another place, not here.”316 Further, in discussing Brand’s work, Bina Toledo Freiwald suggests that the “weight of place and the burden of history”317 are constituted through the narratives that reify, reproduce and maintain conventions founded in patriarchy and heternorms.318 It is this envisioned escape from the norms of violence and the stories that traverse time and place and “seek refuge” from the weight of violence -- that we are offered a glimpse of somewhere else we have yet to imagine, or as Brand writes, “not Toronto, not the Caribbean, not here.”319 316 Dionne Brand in Veronica Jane Strong-Boag, Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 107. 317 Bina Toledo Friewald, "Cartographies of Be/longing: Dionn In Another Place, Not Here" in Mapping Canadian Cultural Spa on Canadian Literature, ed. Danielle Schaub (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000), 37-53. 318Kristina Quynn, “Elsewheres of Diaspora: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 48, no. 1 (2015): 132. https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2015.0003. 319Dionne Brand in Kristina Quynn, “Elsewheres of Diaspora,” 132. 128 Cyclical Transversion “Deep I Cariwoma have always carried deep these islands, this piece of Atlantic coastland inside me. Sky-deep Sea-deep As star is to stone As tide is to shore Is just so I hold these islands to my coral bones. And long before hurricane strike, some little butterfly some little blue messenger of the soul will ride the wind to bring first news to my door.”320 -Grace Nichols 320 Grace Nichols, “To My Coral Bones,” The Poetry Archive, https://poetryarchive.org/poem/my-coral-bones. 129 Unfired Work In thinking through my artistic praxis and its relationship to my research questions, a central touchstone which frames my analysis is the work of Otobong Nkanga and her approach to engaging with material and putting it back into circulation which could also be read as undoing the logic of accumulation.321 Nkanga’s willingness to “converse with the material” which she exhibits through for example, singing and listening to the material through her performative art, opens up, according to Yvette Mutumba, other understandings of worldly relations – as if body and object are coalescing.322 Putting things back into circulation, or back into cycle, is a concept I engage with throughout my praxis. In a more overt way, I find the sculptures that do not get fired and therefore will dissolve through each handling of the object (Figure 8), to be an engagement with 321 Monika Szewczyk, "Exchange and Some Change: The Imaginative Economies of Otobong Nkanga," Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 37 (Autumn/Winter 2014): 38-51. 322 Yvette Mutumba, “Otobong Nkanga: Nothing Is Like It Seems, Everything Is Evidence,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 37 (2014): 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/679376. 130 the idea of circulation. Through my praxis and the pieces which do not get fired, I experiment with the idea of transformation through cycles. Through these pieces, I am able to contemplate what I term “cyclical transversion,” where energy moves and transverses through cycles, presenting itself in various forms such as that of earth or clay. Transversion is defined as “a turning across, or into, something else”323 and paired with the word “cyclical,” I view this as a terminology that can define the way energy turns across and into something else over and over again in cycles. As I contemplate the idea of energy transerversing through cycles, presenting itself in forms such as mineral, plants, or the human body, I return to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work of seeing the world as Plenum (as described by Leibniz), that is, being linked amongst all that exists.324 To configure the world in this way frames my artistic works (Figure 10) as ones that will not be preserved throughout “Time,” towards the final destination of humanity’s progress but rather as works that dissolve or take new form, continually being regenerated again.325 323 As described in Collins Dictionary. 324 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 85. 325 David Garneau, “Marginalized by Design,” Reference to preserving art. 131 Working with clay in my creative praxis has not only brought forward the notion that everything is interlinked and that as the artist I am interlinked with the minerals which make up the material I work with, it has also allowed me to pose questions regarding how this perspective of being interlinked with the material allows me to move beyond “Time” as is described in the previous section. To reconcile how “Time” and notions such as the “Plenum” are intertwined, I again return to the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva where she writes: “Ending the grip of Time restores the World anew, from the position Blackness registers-that is, the halted temporality that preempts recognition and opens the World as Plenum, becomes a Canvas lnfinita, where the Subject figures without Time, stuck in the endless play of expression, with the rest of us.”326 In reading Ferreira da Silva’s work alongside my creative praxis, I am left to wonder how creative praxes might open up doors for us to sense the links between all that is, between the artist, material and environment. In this light, David Garneau’s work also offers insight into thinking along the lines of “cyclical transversion” when he writes: “For Indigenous people, human-made things are forms of embodied knowledge awakened by handling and discourse. Information resides in the object and the person who made it. The handmade thing and its maker are both knowledge carriers. The object carries the secrets of its making, and the keeper carries the stories, the object’s meanings. Knowledge is passed through and from object to object—for example, through and from drum to drum—but also through and from each master maker to apprentice...They are all members of a circuit of making, meaning and being. To tease out any one, to isolate the 326 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics, The Black Scholar, 90. 132 drum in a glass cabinet... is an absurd violence—a colonial thing—from an Indigenous point of view.”327 While my reference to Garneau’s work is not an attempt to adopt it into a definition of cyclical transversion, I am referencing it as a touchstone to give insight into configuring the ways in which creative processes exist as part of a cycle, or in Garneau’s words, as part of a circuit of “making, meaning and being.”328 Perhaps engaging with clay or engaging with the earth not only allows us to sense the world differently, outside the systems of Western modernity and the harm that accompanies its structures, but it also allows through the nature of the linkage which has always existed, a form of communication or transmittance of energy that comes through an engagement with the material. If we follow Nkanga’s proposal that the material holds the power of narration,329 I then wonder what is being narrated through the materiality of clay, made up of components that have been intimately attached with our Earth’s cycles. While this form of narration might not be explicit, I have found that listening and stillness while engaging with creative works allow not only for an experience of the “layers of time” as described by Brettkelly-Chalmers, or “echoic time” as described by Derik Smith in reference to the work of Robert Hayden, but further allow for a sense of that which accompanies a release from “Time,” which is for example, a sensing of a different way of “being” in the world – a way of “being” that as characterized by the linkage 327 David Garneau, “Marginalized by Design,” 65. 328 Garneau, 65. 329 Otobong Nkanga, “To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again.” Referring to Otobong Nkanga’s description of materials holding the power of narration. 133 amongst all things rather than the separability introduced by Western modernity and the assumptions that accompany it’s “Subjecthood.”330 When I think about my artistic praxis in particular, I find that in working with the materiality of earth itself and having an engagement with the material, creates one avenue to begin to sense or imagine the world anew outside the violence of “Time” and the modern categories which reproduce conditions for separation.331 Clare Twomey’s remarks in relation to the work of Phoebe Cummings frame further my own praxis in relation to my unfired work (Figure 9). In reference to Cumming’s unfired clay pieces, Twomey writes: “Unfired and uncaring of this state, the work is fragile and alive, seeking a dialogue of the precious and the vulnerable…The work absorbs all it encounters and does it with little regard for permanence and sentimentality toward preservation of the object.”332 330 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability," Catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial - Incerteza viva (Living Uncertainty), 2016. A reference to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of separability alongside her discussion of Corpus Infinitum. 331 Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics.” 332 Robert Preece, “Material Performance: A Conversation with Phoebe Cummings,” Sculpture Magazine 32, no. 10: (December 2013). 134 The notion of work which “absorbs all it encounters” is something I consider in my artistic praxis as a method of creating artistic work that allows for a release from separability and the attendant systems such as “Time,”333 which contribute to possessing, containing and controlling that which we encounter. In a similar way, Cummings described the aim of “possess[ing] and contain[ing]” that exists within Western modernity’s systems, and the potential for clay to subvert this as it absorbs all it encounters and holds the possibility for change and its endless remaking – never allowing for the type of control that is characteristic of Western modernity’s systems.334 This absorption of all that the material encounters and the possibilities of its endless remaking again make reference to the “conversational” aspect of working with clay. Or, as Cumming suggests, the artistic practice of working with clay also holds within it a “transference of energy.”335 In discussing her unfired ceramic work Cella, Cumming’s stated: “The piece was made over three weeks with the help of students from the University of Hawaii. It was a new experience to work like that, to not be in control of the whole making process... It was incredibly labor intensive, and the time involved created an additional sense of weight, a kind of transference of energy.”336 It is through Cummings description of “endless remaking,” her willingness to engage with an artistic praxis that releases control of determining the outcome, and her description of a “transference of energy,” that I draw upon to frame my own artistic praxis and engagement with 333 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability." 334 Robert Preece, “Material Performance.” 335 Robert Preece, “Material Performance.” 336 Robert Preece, “Material Performance.” 135 clay. When writing in my auto-ethnographic journal that “engaging with the earth offers possibilities to imagine ways of knowing and other worlds,” I also read this in relationship to the work of Kamau Brathwaite, as having “access to something beyond.”337 Anna Reckin describes this as a fantastical layering of new, older and other worlds as Brathwaite’s creative praxis creates the possibility for us to engage with “hearing through” and between layers, times and places.338 To “hear through” layers, times, places, new and old worlds, is not only a theoretical artistic praxis, but also presents itself tangibly through the ways we recycle demarcations of the human and the accompanying violence. In referencing landscape and accessing the layering of “older” worlds, the work of Katherine McKittrick gives further insight into the ways in which these layers present themselves and leak into the future: “...our present landscape is both haunted and developed by old and new hierarchies of humanness. If past human categorization was spatialized, in ships and on plantations, in homes, communities, nations, islands, and regions, it also evidences the ways in which some of the impression of transatlantic slavery leak into the future, in essence recycling the displacement of difference.”339 How to attend not only to the possibility of imagining “new worlds” but also to the ways in which the layering of “old worlds” and the accompanying violence leak into the future is a question that has arisen through my artistic praxis. Through creating unfired ceramic sculptures 337 Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures,” 5. 338 Reckin, 5. 339 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 17. 136 (Figure 10) and reading these pieces alongside the writing, praxis and poetry of others involved in this discourse, I seek to engage in a conversation regarding this question and the ideas referenced earlier in this chapter that attend to cycles, separability and traversing and transversion.340 The questions surrounding the layering of old and new worlds and the ways that this layering connects to concepts of cycles and relationality can be further framed by Leanne Simpson’s description of Nishnaabeg ethics in connection to cycles and living in a deeply relational way: “I was trying to think this through within Nishnaabeg ethics and philosophy and I was thinking that if I am living in a deeply relational way, my body is a hub of networks cycling through time and space and a very living, organic mechanism that extends beyond my physicality.”341 340 Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability" and “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics.” 341 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between Time and Space,” interview by CBC, April 11, 2018. 137 Framing my praxis in regards to what Simpson calls “living in a deeply relational way” where there exists “networks that cycle through time and space” and extend beyond physicality,342 I am given room to think about unfired clay and artistic praxis as a means of engaging with “cyclical transversion” as a process that holds the potential for a transference of energy or an absorption of information that works beyond “physicality” where the material itself stretches beyond what we can “possess and contain”343 allowing for “endless remaking”344 through cycles. 342 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Dionne Brand, “Temporary spaces of joy and freedom: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Dionne Brand,” Literary Review of Canada (June 2018). 343 Simpson and Brand, “Temporary spaces of joy and freedom.” 344 Robert Preece, “Material Performance” 138 Simpson’s description of beyond physicality,345 which breaches from the sequentiality of Western modernity,346 could be viewed, in a sense, in conversation with Joseph Tanke’s comments on indeterminacy (which I referred to in earlier sections) as he describes that artistic works inaugurate a more “indeterminate space-time,”347 which creates the conditions for those who are engaged with the work, to participate in a process of aesthetic co-creation.”348 This co-creation and absorption of all who come into contact with the work is what I contemplate in relation to my artistic praxis. In allowing the work to be handled and touched, possibly breaking or transforming the work all together, the work will “absorb” all the moments of aesthetic co-creation or touch that it encounters, ultimately transforming and introducing an “indeterminate space-time” where the artwork evades being fully known, controlled or determined. Fired Work In a similar sense, although perhaps not as overt, I see my fired work ( Figures 3 - 7 and Figures 11 - 17) also inviting an engagement with “cyclical transversion” and the possibility to sense beyond “Time.” Although these works do not dissolve and return to the earth in a cycle as is possible with unfired material, they are still vulnerable to touch, to breaks, and to cracks through the interaction created by handling and touch as previously mentioned. In addition, it is intended that in the firing process, which goes beyond the allotted temperature for the clay, these 345 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Dionne Brand, “Temporary spaces of joy and freedom: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation with Dionne Brand.” 346 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability." A reference to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of Sequentiality. 347 Joseph J. Tanke, “Which Politics of Aesthetics?,” 90. 348 Tanke, 90. 139 works will also be altered due to becoming more liquid or “fluxing” as they are overheated. An example of this can be seen in Figure 3 and Figure 4 where the vessels were once fully formed and standing upright, but, due to the high temperature of the firing process itself, the material of one vessel fluxed to the point that the vessel vitrified on its side (Figure 3), and another vessel broke in half completely and vitrified in two parts (Figure 4), each vessel taking on an entirely new shape than their starting point. With the firing process I expect to see the unexpected; changes which are unpredictable and may or may not add significant aspects of change to the piece. It is through this artistic praxis where I further release control of the material and allow the heat of the kiln to release my praxis from any of my personal attempts towards control or predetermined outcomes. When thinking about the unpredictable, or loss of control, I find Blair Stonechild’s description of control in “Loss of Indigenous Eden” to be pertinent to the idea of a “conversation with the material” or, as mentioned in Chapter Two, allowing the artistic works to “[reveal] their stories, i.e. the knowledge they embody,” rather than attempting to dominate and control the material solely towards the aims of the story the artist would like to tell. Stonechild writes, “Rationalism provided a readily accessible method of manipulating the physical world. Tangible rewards could be had without the need to dabble in the murky waters of mysticism”.349 He goes on to write: “It is an error to think that the only way humans can thrive on Earth is through controlling all forms of life.”350 Through Stonechild’s description of control, I read artistic praxes as having the potential to release the artist and viewer from a concept of control, which is intertwined and embedded within “Time.” An example of this can be seen when Walter Mignolo 349 Blair Stonechild, Loss of Indigenous Eden and the Fall of Spirituality (Saskatchewan : University of Regina Press, 2020), 166. 350 Stonechild, 166. 140 writes: “Once you control (the idea of) “time,” you can control subjectivity and make the many march to the rhythm of your own time.” In a similar elaboration on how “Time” is connected to the concept of “control,” Brettkelly-Chalmers notes the certainty of control that came through Enlightenment when she comments on Vija Celmin’s depiction of stars in her artwork Constellation-Uccello. Brettkelly-Chalmers writes: “Vija Celmins’s field of stars suggests the temporal-spatial certitude of the Enlightenment: a world of rational forces, known properties and physical laws that could predict and therefore control the wayward vicissitudes of natural phenomena.”351 Stonechild furthers his discussion on control in Loss of Indigenous Eden when he goes on to write “Modern university disciplines promote rationality, science, and technology as the solutions to contemporary society’s challenges. Others realise that universities are in desperate need of a new paradigm.”352 It is in this break from the modern and the attending violence of certain intellectual protocols that have eradicated conditions to engage with knowing outside the structures of Western modernity, where I further reflect on the work of Cash Ahenkew in thinking through and about the ways in which this violence occurs. In “Grafting” Ahenkew writes: “In this context, Indigenous logics are only welcome when they do not effectively threaten to change the status quo, when it is made the ‘same’. In this sense, Indigenous knowledges and methodologies can be either incorporated as a colourful (but insignificant) alternative to what is considered ‘normal’, which confirms the benevolence of the proponent of inclusion, or perceived as something that is already integral to the 351 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 226. 352 Blair Stonechild, Loss of Indigenous Eden and the Fall of Spirituality (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada: University of Regina Press, 2020), 168. 141 dominant logic and therefore also insignificant, given that it offers nothing new. The all-too-common resistance to Indigenous difference is based precisely on a desire for the security of ‘remaining the same’ and keeping power (the universalization of one type of knowing and the subordinate position of certain knowers) flowing in ways that are ‘safe’ to those in a position to choose to ‘tolerate’, ‘include’, or ‘integrate’ Others.”353 It is in the making of creative works despite the “protocols” of the modern where I find both the possibility for new worlds to emerge and the possibility to engage beyond the structures of modernity which involve concepts of “Time”354 and “control.” I find the potential to do this work through creating pieces that are concerned with a connection to all those who came before us, with each other, with all those who will come after, and with the earth we live in — but in this sense it’s not the kind of “honoring and recuperating that memorializes people in stone”355 or one that seeks to “control the outcome.” Rather, when I think of my artistic pieces I think along the lines of what Sadiya Hartman expresses as the “anti-monument” which she describes as something that “can’t be fixed.”356 or preserved while simultaneously being created alongside the notion that not everything can be described and language, at times, falls short.357 Artistic praxes can therefore be seen as attending to the “unknowable”358; making room for ambiguity; opening up a place for what can’t be known or determined through the structure 353 Cash Ahenakew, “Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing Onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being,” 336. 354 Leanne Simpson, “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on how poetry exists between time and space.” A reference to Leanne Simpson’s discussion of new worlds and poetry holding space for other worlds. 355 Patricia J. Saunders, “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman,” Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2008): 7. 356 Saunders, 7. 357 Saunders, 7. 358 Saunders, 3. Referencing the following citation: “However, it seems to me that you are both concerned with the “unknowable” the “unspeakable,” rather than the desire to possess or have knowledge of (in this case) the enslaved subject imprisoned, so to speak, in the archive.” 142 of “Time”; and acting as a form of expression for what we do not yet have the language to explain. It is through an engagement with artistic work that it seems that something can be imagined or created against the “narrativization that has been produced with the very instruments (or categories) that we study with,”359 in ways that might release us from being “trapped in a knowledge system that fails to notice that the stories of what it means to be Human… are, in fact, narratively constructed.”360 It is through this that I hope to have offered a “partial map”361 to the release from the grip of “Time” and the modern categories that accompany it,362 contributing to the conditions that allow us to imagine outside “Time” and outside the separability363 that is entangled with it. With this release, it seems possible that some form of transformation could occur, or that avenues towards transformation and justice that are necessary to end harm become more possible if we are able to engage with artistic works which allow us to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not yet here.364 Transformation “Because you do not heed the voices of Imagination, neither the tongues of trees nor the voices of poets, earth will erupt in a conspiracy of poetry and nature. Earthquake and landslide will snap and grind to rubble 359 Walter D. Mignolo, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?," 107. 360 Mignolo, 107. 361 Kei Miller, “The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,” 45. 362 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 81-97. 363 Ferreira Da Silva, 81-97. 364 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. A reference to Tina Campt’s discussion of envisioning that which is not yet here but must be. 143 your Baal-high idols of concrete and metal. … And when the earth has had her say and retribution, afterward, in the green time of healing there will be other words, given to other poets. They will be precious stones with healing properties; mixed with dirt, folded in leaves and used as poultices, they will protect the children who recite them. But these words now – are for you, David-stones, found at the river of reflection and gathered in a poem, ready. Come, fascioners of progress, come. You hold the steel cuffs of the law, the silver coins of bribery, the gun. But when you see a poet writing poems, run.”365 -Kendel Hippolyte 365 Kendel Hippolyte, “Fascioners of Progress,” Lyrik Line, n.d. https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/fascioners-progress-14499. 144 Ongoing Process When it comes to transformation in connection with my artistic praxis, I see this praxis as part of an ongoing process where I do not pose a particular solution or “end”. Rather, I frame this process as one which seeks to move through the systems of knowledge within modernity that draw lines in land, sea and race.366 When thinking about this process of transformation as one that is “ongoing” I refer again to Kamau Brathwaite and the “tidalectic.” Brathwaite defined the “tidalectic” as creative in the sense that it worked as a way of gathering various texts, struggles and experiences together to create new ones therefore becoming a process which “gathers” and creates new possibilities through its continual motion.367 To further frame this notion of an “ongoing process” I draw upon the work of Katherine McKittrick’s reference to black aesthetics underwritten by ideas that are “fleeting, flexible, new and old”. McKittrick writes: “Black aesthetics oscillate between clarity and opacity and are underwritten by stories and ideas that are fleeting, flexible, new, and old; these stories and ideas teach us how to 366Walter D. Mignolo, 2015. "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?", Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Katherine McKittrick, 111. 367 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals, 8. 145 navigate infrastructures of harm, these stories and ideas reside within, across, and outside prevailing knowledge systems. Black aesthetics generate a deciphering practice and this deciphering practice contextualises black worlds as painfully contradictory and thick with meaning. The painful contradiction is not a site of representation that demands resolution but instead elicits the rebellious potential of black aesthetics—stories, music, poetry, visual art, the beautiful ways of being black that are unarchived yet tell us something about how we can and do and might live the world differently.”368 With this, I read McKittrick’s work as an outlining of a process that does not demand resolution but rather is, in a similar way to what Brathwaite describes, a process of gathering which is continually in oscillation. This process is marked by traversing across sites of creativity, stories, ideas and potentials that are flexible, fleeting, new and old — making room for how we might “live the world differently” outside the prevailing structures of harm and subjugation rather than positing a fixed and definitive answer as to what “living the world differently” exactly is.369 368 Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April,” 10. 369 Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat, “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture 9, no. 4 (November 2006): 365–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331206292503. 146 In this release from the modern project of subjugation and the attendant knowledge systems and violence that accompany it there exists a possibility to engage with a praxis or artistic encounter that can always be something else and cannot be known in advance and one in which we resist the temptation for certainty, 370 keeping the artistic engagement contextual, contingent, tentative and ever-changing.371 It is in this engagement that we might also contribute to the “on-going answer” of how this release occurs, rather than posing a certainty of resolution.372 In engaging with the concept of an “on-going” answer, I return to my ceramic pieces and conceive of them as ones which are never fully “resolved”; rather, they are continually in the 370 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals, 8. In reference to Lethabo’s description of the shoal as a metaphor, which cannot be reduced to the ocean, the shore, or an island and always has the potential to be something else that cannot be known in advance. 371 Cash Ahenakew, “Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing Onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being,” 333. 372 Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures” 1-16. 147 process of “being made” through the interactions and engagements with all those who come into contact with the piece during an ongoing process of its creation. It is in this continual making where I see “cyclical transversion” occurring as energy is transmitted and absorbed through all those who encounter the work, which is ultimately a part of a cycle of engagement that we share with each other and the earth. When framing what it means to be a part of an ongoing cycle, I refer to Brettkelly-Chalmer’s description of Mircea Eliade’s scholarship when she writes: “Mircea Eliade’s scholarship attends to the myth of the eternal combustion (ekpyrosis)—the idea that the universe will be periodically destroyed and created anew in an eternal cycle. This was prevalent across a wide number of early mythologies including those of the Roman-Oriental world, India and Iran, the Mayas and Aztecs of South and Central America.”373 While my intention is not to align my artistic praxis with the notion that all artistic works need to be intentionally destroyed to re-enter some form of “cycle,” I am interested in framing my work through a notion of the “ongoing” or “eternal cycle” which creates the conditions to conceive of artistic works as having the potential to be “made anew” and to create possibilities to move beyond a solely linear unfolding, to sense the echoes that are moving out into our collective future. 373 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 204. 148 Change in Conditions In thinking about how artistic praxes might contribute in some part to transformation or as I referenced in my auto-ethnographic excerpt, to a “radical change in conditions” (that might not be instantaneous but rather could be marked by small, subtle shifts that cannot always be seen) the analysis by Carter Mathes referenced in Chapter One of free jazz musician Marion Brown is relevant to consider. Carter Mathes discusses how the creative sonic work of Brown creates the potential to summon sensations “outside the range of familiarity”374 in order to access the “the unreal quality of imagination.”375 Summoning sensations outside the range of familiarity moves down a similar avenue of thought as that of Julius Fleming, also referenced in Chapter One, when he suggests that there exists generative possibilities of creative praxis in loosening Western modernity’s grasp on “Time” and offering radical possibilities to forge (or remember) new (or already existing) relationships to time, space, the world and each other.376 Although I cannot delineate the full or exact conditions which, when radically changed, would be 374 Carter Mathes, Imagine the Sound, 51. 375 Mathes, 35. 376 Fleming, "Sound, Aesthetics, and Black Time Studies," 284. 149 synonymous with a transformation that releases us from the harm stemming from the structures of Western modernity, “Time” is one aspect of the conditions that produce harm which I believe needs to be addressed. Many of the thinkers referenced in earlier chapters discuss the explicit implications of “Time” in regulating, controlling and preventing new possibilities from emerging beyond what was imagined before as “Time” is seen in part as “a disenchanted succession of essentially homogeneous now-points… each of which has a similar weight, leading in a linear direction from a past that is gone forever to a not yet actualized future”377 which prevents varied temporal formations that “have their own rhythms—patterns of consistency and transformation.”378 To engage with “Time” differently would not only allow for the possibility of radical change, but also perhaps, would call on us to attune ourselves to what Mbembe describes as “radical changes [going] hand in hand with various other gradual and subtle shifts that are almost imperceptible.379 To conceive of transformation as a radical change in conditions alongside the attunement towards the shifts which are “almost imperceptible” again seems to return to considerations of creative praxes. If we can sense “Time” differently through creative praxes, 377 Espen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory, 2-3. 378 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 2. 379 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 28. 150 even if only momentarily, then it seems this would constitute a radical change in the conditions that have been created through Western modernity. When thinking about the possibilities of artistic or creative praxes as they relate to the conditions for transformation, I think about the comments of Leanne Simpson when she references how the space between words in poetry allows for the emerging of new worlds. She notes: “Worlds that exist despite and in spite of the tremendous violence of colonialism or anti-Blackness. Imagined, realized, birthed even temporarily, poetry allows us to feel and taste and breath freedom.”380 It is through this “space” between words, which opens up both stillness and motion simultaneously through the stillness of the break (or space between words), and the motion and creation of new worlds in that same moment that I see an example of engaging with “Time” differently. Not as “a disenchanted succession of essentially homogeneous now-points,”381 but rather as an experience of varied temporal registers that allow for both stillness and the movement of traversing and birthing new worlds. This is one example of how creative 380“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between Time and Space.” 381 Espen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory, 2. 151 praxis generates the possibility to shift “Time” and “breathe a breath of freedom”382 against the conditions which produce worlds of harm, anti-Blackness and colonialism.383 While simultaneously, in the words of Katherine McKittrick, “subvert[ing] prevailing colonial and imperial knowledge systems.”384 To lend clarity to this framing, I consider freedom in this reference to be a relief or breach, no matter how brief, from existence marked by what Denise Ferreira da Silva describes as “the significance – the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual pains-of existing in bodies that have not delinked from the plenum,”385 and further to this, a relief no matter how brief, from existence “marked by the determinations of capital, raciality, and heteropatriarchy.”386 382 Leanne Simpon,“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between Time and Space.” 383 Leanne Simpon,“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on How Poetry Exists between Time and Space.” 384 A reference to a quote by Katherine McKittrick where she writes: “Put differently, one of the many ways race and racism are manifested is through colonial and imperial knowledge systems that express and normalise discipline-based and place-based classifications that hierarchically organise (according to race, place) our epistemologies. Within black studies and anti-colonial studies, one can observe an ongoing method of gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives,fictions, whispers, songs, grooves; these narratives push up against and subvert prevailing colonial and imperial knowledge systems by centring and legitimising other (black) ways of knowing. What is meaningful, then, are the ways in which black people are interdisciplinary actors, continually entangling and disentangling varying narratives and tempos and hues that, together, invent and reinvent knowledge.” Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April,” 5. 385 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 93. A reference to her discussion of the work of Octavia Butler. 386 Ferreira da Silva, 93. 152 To further frame a notion of “a change in conditions” which I see as characteristic of the the type of transformation with which I engage in my praxis, I refer to Wanda McCaslin’s and Denise Breton’s discussion of transformation in relation to the cycles of the seasons in their work Justice as Healing: Going Outside the Colonizers' Cage: “As with individuals, the community members explained, communities also heal through stages, which some First Nation community members compared to the four seasons— ‘the seasons of healing.’ The healing journey of communities begins with winter, when community members confront how bad things really are and realize that it is not okay to let things slide unchanged…The springtime of community healing feels like a thaw, as energies for positive change gather momentum…Yet as the healing work progresses, communities come to a stage that feels like hitting the wall. This is the long, hot summer; the honeymoon stage is over, as people realize that the scope of change needed takes 153 more than good will and good intentions...The only way to continue is to make a deep shift from healing to transformation. This critical next step is fall, which pares away all but the most essential structures…The fourth season of community transformation demands that we confront these realities. The challenge of the fourth stage is to address the deeper structures that give rise to harm, so that healing and transformation can continue down to the roots of what is causing imbalance and disharmony.”387 McCaslin and Breton describe a process of transformation and healing that speaks to the roots of the structures they seek to address as these roots give rise to harm and cause “imbalance and disharmony” in a community. While McCaslin and Breton offer a way of seeing transformation that moves in a similar way to the cycles of the seasons, they also describe a process which is characterized by deep shifts, or what I would characterize as a “radical change in conditions” in order to create space for both transformation and healing. Healing While the intention of my artistic praxis and research is not to offer a full mapping of what might come through a radical change in conditions, I would like to offer a partial mapping of the possibilities for healing as linked with transformation or as a process which moves alongside it. McCaslin and Breton describe healing and transformation as a process that addresses “imbalance and disharmony.” In a similar sense, Karyna Do Monte and Kyrah Malika Daniels 387 Wanda D. McCaslin and Denise C. Breton, "Justice as Healing: Going Outside the Colonizers' Cage," in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, eds., Norman Denzin et al. (California: Sage Publications,, 2008), 9-10. 154 propose that healing is considered a balance which in turn is considered the norm while imbalance is considered disease. For Do Monte and Daniels, this is seen as “indicative of a rupture between the materials and energies that constitute our bodies and our world.”388 From this perspective, affliction, whether personal or communal, symbolizes a negation of what Umar Habila Dadem Danfulani referred to as natural principles or normal relationship patterns,389 where as healing occurs when harmony is facilitated between the “individual, society and future events.”390 In this regard, I frame the state of healing as one that is made possible through opening the World as Plenum which Ferreira da Silva describes as when the “Subject figures without Time, stuck in the endless play of expression, with the rest of us.”391 That is, I frame “disharmony” or the “rupture between the materials and energies that constitute our bodies and our world” as a rupture that occurs, in part, through delinking from the Plenum392 and as the configuration of the Subject both in “Time” and as separate from the world and the “rest of us”.393 To further frame the possibility of healing and transforming from the “ruptures” that move through Western modernity, I rely on the work of Karyna Do Monte who engages with the concept of “earth healing”. Do Monte describes this as a shift in consciousness toward an understanding of human “orientation with” rather than “distinction from” nonhuman nature.394 In this regard, I see being in “orientation with” nonhuman nature as a process that is linked to 388 Funlayo E. Wood, ed.“Sacred Healing and Wholeness in Africa and the Americas,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 3 (July 2013): 376, https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.1.3.0376. 389 Umar Habila Dadem Danfulani, Pa divination:ritual performance and symbolism among the Ngas, Mupun and Mwaghavul of the Jos Plateau, Nigeria in Olupọna Jacob Obafẹmi Kẹhinde, African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions (New York, New York: Crossroad, 2000). 390 Funlayo E. Wood,“Sacred Healing and Wholeness in Africa and the Americas,” 376. 391 Wood, 91. 392 Denise Ferreira da Silva,“Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 93. 393 Denise Ferreira da Silva,“Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 91 -93. 394 Karyna Do Monte, "Candomblé and Sacred Earth Healing in the Rio de Janeiro Carnival," Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 3 (2013): 404-409. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/511834. 155 transformation. Through the lens of healing, how do we contemplate the world as Plenum rather than Universe,395 and take alongside it the interdependence of all things on earth and amongst “the cosmos”396 ? While again I attempt to offer only a partial mapping of this question, one element I return to is the engagement with creative praxis. Engaging with artistic works and in particular engaging with the process or possibilities of “cyclical transversion” – that is, a sense of transferring energy through various forms and layers of time as discussed in previous chapters – facilitates a sense of linkage amongst the artist, the viewer, the earth and the various rhythms of time. This ultimately allows for a transformation from any sense of “rupture” into a sense of “linkage” that then creates the conditions to be “in orientation with” each other and the earth, or in other words, creates the conditions for healing.397 If artistic praxis creates the conditions that allow us to sense outside the range of familiarity as described by Mathes, and in taking the example of working with clay, to sense that 395 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Black Feminist Poethics, 85. Ferreira da Silva also makes the distinction here of Leibniz description of the universe which Ferreira da Silva references as “deeply interconnected assemblage of things” and Newton's description which Ferreira da Silva references as “constituted by solid and moving things (bodies) subjected to the abstract rules (laws of motion).” 396Kelly Wisecup, “‘All Apollo’s Arts’: Divine Cures, Afro-Caribbean Knowledge, and Healing Poetry in the British West Indies,” Literature and Medicine 32, no. 2 (2014): 302. This is in reference to Kelly Wisecup’s discussion of the connection of all things amongst the cosmos and is in particular a reference to the following excerpt: “German-Swiss physician Paracelsus, for example, founded his theories of illness on the macrocosm-microcosm theory, the idea that there was an “assumed active commerce between the firmament and humans or other living organisms.”11 This “commerce” meant that bodies were connected to the cosmos “by a complex network of congruities, which constituted the hidden causes of all manner of phenomena, including health and disease,” 302. 397 When I think about layers of time, I have thought on the one hand about how time can exist in different ways, both in the space-time dimension and outside of it. I have, on the other hand, also thought about time as cyclical -- as Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return writes regarding time, “everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final….Time but makes possible the appearance and existence of things. It has no final influence upon their existence, since it is itself constantly regenerated.” Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, 88. 156 which has been absorbed or encountered by the material and being inter-linked to it, an artistic praxis in this regard also offers insight into a departure from the systems and “matrix of knowledge” that attends modernity,398 leaving room to consider a place for healing against or despite the colonial systems in which knowledge is conceived, narrated, and practiced in linear fashion.399 It is through a departure from these violent demarcations which traced the lines in land, sea and race alongside the demarcations of the human,400 where we might be able to engage with the transformation of what leaks into the future, the emergence of new worlds, and to imagine otherwise through the possibilities that arise from our sentient recollection of connectedness401. 398 Walter D. Mignolo, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?," 117. 399 Mignolo, 117. 400 Mignolo, 111. 401 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 73- 74. Particularly referencing the following quotation: “It is a sentient recollection of connectednes experienced at the site of rupture, where the very consciousness of disconnectedness acts as mode of testimony and memory, The recognition of loss is a crucial element in redressing the breach introduced by slavery. This recognition entails a remembering of the pained body, not by way of a simulated wholeness but precisely through the recognition of the amputated body in its amputatednesst in the insistent recognition of the violated body as human flesh, in the cognition of its needs, and in th eanticipation of its liberty.In other words,it is the ravished body that holds out the possibility of restitution, not the invocation of an illusory wholeness or the desired return to an originary plentitude.” 73-74. Also a reference to Katherine McKittrick when describing what leaks into the future. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 17. 157 Cultivating a sense of “connectedness” brings to mind more distinct examples of being in “orientation with” such as Garneau’s description of human-made things being forms of embodied knowledge awakened by handling and discourse and his description of the circuit of “making meaning and being” where he describes the object being part of this circuit that is never more important than a person, and neither are more important than the knowledge, which passes through but exceeds them.402 Garneau’s description also serves as a reminder of how the “cyclical” works through time and space by using the imagery of a circuit where no part can be isolated or viewed as separate from the others. 402 David Garneau, “Marginalized by Design,” 65. 158 Kamau Brathwaite’s work regarding the tidalectic again offers insight into thinking through what might allow for a radical change in conditions, no matter how subtle or unquantifiable the shift. Anna Reckin describes Brathwaite’s poetry as revealing trans-oceanic relation through rhyme and rhythm and brings the living and the dead into our presence through sound manifested in the calypso rhythm of the skipping stone that skids arcs and blooms into islands.403 Reckin makes a commentary that Barthwaite’s work has access to something "beyond;" a fantastical layering of new, old, and other worlds which are connected to "hearing through" and between layers, and between times and places.404 The “revealing” which is 403 Anna Reckin, “Tidalectic Lectures,” 3. 404 Reckin, 3. 159 described by Reckin attends, in part, to both addressing and preventing ruptures in the energies of our bodies and the world by sensing through and beyond the sequential unfolding of “Time” and revealing to us our connectedness.405 Sabotaging “Time” through artistic work in order to radically transform how we engage with the world, even if only in small ways or momentarily, is where again I return to as a process that moves alongside healing despite the worlds of violence in which we live, where the structures of the “West” produce a harmful conviction of moral obligation to correct, discipline, and keep in line those who are evicted from the universal, civilization and progress.406 If we engage with the possibility of “hearing through” and between layers, times and places, with “networks of cycles” that exist “beyond physicality” and with a creative work which “absorbs all it encounters”, allowing our artistic work or pieces to dissolve or be constantly re-made407 in connection with each other -- might we also give room not only for a release from “Time” but also to generate conditions which do not allow for ruptures such as systems that demarcate those who are evicted from the universal?408 405 Funlayo E. Wood, “Sacred Healing and Wholeness in Africa and the Americas,” 376. Reference to ruptures in the energies of our bodies and the world. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 73-74. Reference to sentient recollection of connectedness. 406 Sherene Razack, Casting out: the Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, (Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 407 Robert Preece, “Material Performance.” 408 Sherene Razack, Casting out, 2011. A reference in particular to the following quotation: “There is a disturbing spatializing of morality that occurs in the story of pre-modern peoples versus modern ones. We have reason; they do not. We are located in modernity, they are not. Significantly, because they have not advanced as we have, it is our moral obligation to correct, discipline, and keep them in line and to defend ourselves against their irrational excesses. In doing all of these things, the West has often denied the benefits of modernity to those it considers to be outside of it. Evicted from the universal, and thus from civilization and progress, the non-West occupies a zone outside the law. Violence may be directed at it with impunity.” 10 160 Taking into consideration artistic praxes that are changed, re-made or lost all together to be replaced in another moment by another incarnation or interpretation,409 gives rise to the possibilities of sensing what does not yet exist but must and offers us the possibility to contribute, in part, to the radical change in conditions that moves alongside healing.410 Conclusion In the above sections I have offered insight into my artistic praxis and framed my approach to working with clay, working with the shape of the vessel and my approach to surface design and pattern making. After a brief outline of my approach to the work, I then moved into my theoretical and speculative contributions to the discourse around creative praxes. While my main point of departure was my own creative praxis and working with clay, I brought in many other creative works and praxes that could be read alongside and in conversation with my own pieces. My theoretical and speculative approaches to working with clay were framed in relation to “Time” and its workings in Western modernity. Through observations from my creative praxis and analysis I have proposed that a release from “Time” might allow us to sense through the many layers, cycles and rhythms of “Time” — allowing us to “be” in the world differently and to have a breach, even if momentarily, from the worlds of harm and violence associated with the systems and structures that attend to the linear sequential unfolding of “Time.” It is through creative praxes where this breach and the possibility to imagine, create or sense the unfamiliar arises. It is through my own creative praxes and those of other poets, writers, and artists who engage in creative praxis that attend, in some way or another, to the 409 David Garneau, “Marginalized by Design,” 65. 410 Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. A reference to sensing what does not yet exist but must. 161 question of “Time,” where I see the possibility for “cyclical transversion” (that is, the possibility that energy transfers through cycles of time, continually being regenerated and made anew while linking together all that is) to exist and make possible a release, even if momentarily or in small subtle shifts, from the systems that generate and cause harm in Western modernity. While I again offer only what I see as a “partial map” to what might be possible through a release from “Time,” I end this chapter by remarking that this release from “Time” has the potential to create the conditions for transformation. As I end by suggesting that it is challenging to determine what exactly this transformation might look like, I do offer a framing of transformation as a radical change in conditions that is also a part of an ongoing process. I again do not offer a determined outcome of what might occur through or alongside this type of transformation, but rest on the point that healing and wellbeing is interlinked with and alongside the process of transformation which is made possible through praxis and engagement with creative work. 162 Concluding Chapter “we agree on the rising heat and weight of worry the global pace is quickening to spin-out all our tomorrows we recognise this fight-flight tremor on the verge feel the gravitational pull transforming every cell in every living thing our body we are running somewhere between dogged resolve trepidation and fatigue and like all the grandmothers before us who created everything from nothing we know there is so much work to do so much to do so Yes we finally say let’s think about the moon” - Natalie Harkin and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Whether we transport ourselves into other worlds through works of art, engage other senses to imagine beyond the familiar, or slow down in moments of stillness in order to move beyond quotidien life, engagements with artistic work can offer us the opportunity for a release from the steady constraints which adhere and reproduce modernity’s structuring. While it may seem hard to imagine outside the familiar, to imagine a world outside “Time,” where the structures of old worlds lose their grip, what artistic works offer is the possibility, even if only for a fleeting moment, to imagine what is not yet here but must be;411 in other words to imagine possibilities to transform the structures of harm and violence in which we live. To engage with “Time” differently, I began by outlining some of the ways in which “Time” functions within the systems of Western modernity. This included a brief overview of 411Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 163 how “Time” is associated with the formulation of the West and located “the rest”, or everyone and everything not of the West, as “primitive” and therefore backwards upon the linear line of “Time”. This temporal register laid the groundwork for the translation of geography into chronology, serving to justify a particular ideology of progress as it related to the notion of “development and underdevelopment”412 in the 20th century and contributed to the conditions that led to the interiority of a linear hierarchical vision of History.413 One can see that there are many implications that attend to this particular formulation of “Time” and the epistemological hegemony that created the conditions for a few to believe they possessed and controlled knowledge over “the rest” of the world and who in the estimation of the West, must then exist under the conditions of a singular temporal dominance.414 It is through this structuring of “Time” and the systems that attend to it where Mignolo fittingly described that through the control of the idea of “Time,” “you can control subjectivity and make the many march to the rhythm of your own time,”415 leading to an acceleration of “Time” seen in the “postmodern era” where to fall behind means to lose and, simultaneously, to go faster is to win – while accepting that winning is the name of the game.416 Moving from an initial overview of the discourses that surround “Time” and what has led to a notion of “Time” that is familiar in the West today, I then engaged with the possibilities to sense “Time” differently through creative praxes. That is, I have explored how, through visuals, touch, sound, poetics, and rhythm, creative praxes expose options that allow us to re-articulate temporality, engage our senses differently, and disrupt conditions, assumptions and conceptions 412 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 151. 413 Édouard Glissant and Michael Dash, Caribbean Discourse, 66. 414 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 2. 415 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 177. 416 Mignolo, 177. 164 that sustain structures of harm. This initial overview of the discourse set the foundation for Chapter Two where I described my practice-led research approach. This approach drew primarily from black feminist perspectives and was framed by the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and Tina Campt. These perspectives framed and engaged with black feminist perspectives that create the conditions to imagine creative possibilities, to engage with the potential blackness hosts, and to imagine what hasn’t yet happened but must – ultimately describing conditions required to bring about radical and transformative possibilities. I engaged these perspectives alongside the work of Kamau Brathwaite and his theory of the “tidalectic” which was described as engaging with the world in recursive movement, cycles and gathering points417 rather than adhering to a strictly linear unfolding. This perspective sought to frame a research process which allowed for moments, information and insight to return in cycles leading to a deepening in understanding of my guiding research questions rather than resulting in a clear conclusion or answer. It is through these works that I began to map in these chapters the possibilities that exist through engaging with creative praxes, and in particular I focused on my own praxis of vessel making and the use of clay. In this engagement I suggested that through creative praxis, and in particular through my engagement with clay, possibilities have and continue to be generated to sense “Time” as playing out in more than one way. While the purpose of my practice-led research in part was to offer an analysis of the methods employed through creative praxes that allow for generative moments of transformation and healing, I also considered what creates the conditions for these moments to occur. Given the aforementioned control of “Time” and the implications that come with it, opening up ways or 417 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals, 8. 165 possible options to sense beyond “Time” and the oppressive frameworks and systems that attend to it has emerged as one of these critical conditions to consider. While I did not give a complete and determined end to my interpretation of how sensing “Time” differently might allow for transformation, I proposed that “cyclical transversion”418 is one theoretical consideration that would allow us to sense “Time” differently – that is to imagine the world outside the formulation of “Time” as conceived in modernity, to sense temporality’s textures, rhythms and cycles, and further to allow for the possibility to disrupt the ontological assumptions of modernity and dissolve the structures that hold the modern Subject.419 That is, I formulated cyclical transversion as a process wherein all things exist in cycle and that through engagement with artistic works we may in some way sense beyond the unfolding of homogenous now points or the configuration of “Time” in which we either fall behind or get ahead, and instead, we are able to engage with the various layers, textures and cycles that play out in more than one way – linking us to our collective pasts and futures, to the earth and to each other. This formulation of cyclical transversion appeared in my unfired work in that the clay was never “fixed” through the firing process but rather was open to touch and exposure to the elements which therefore allowed it to absorb420 what it encountered and opened the door to possibilities of its endless remaking until it eventually dissolves its form and returns to the earth. In allowing the work to be handled and touched, possibly breaking or transforming the work all together, I suggested that the sculptural piece which is ultimately open to continual transformation introduced an indeterminate form where the work evades being fully known, 418 A concept which I define as energy held within any given material turning across or into something else, moving endlessly in cycles - a concept influenced by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of the Plenum and her articulation of Corpus Infinitum. 419 Sarah El-Taki, Emil Elg and Nina Cramer, “The Value and Uses of Blackness. A Conversation With Denise Ferreira Da Silva,” 117. 420Robert Preece, “Material Performance.” 166 controlled or determined and rather holds the potential to be viewed as both a conduit for passing on all that it has absorbed until the moment of interaction with an audience or viewer, and further, as an artistic work that exists in continuous movement through cycles. The concept of cyclical transversion further appeared in my fired work not as pieces that dissolved and return to the earth in a cycle as is possible with unfired material, but as fired works which have fragility – these works were and continue to be vulnerable to touch, to breaks, and to cracks through the interaction created by handling and touch. Further, as the firing process went beyond the allotted temperature for the clay, these works also “fluxed” as they became closer to a state of liquid when overheated, taking on an entirely new shape. It is through this method that I engaged with both a release of control, and similar to my unfired works, I allowed these vessels to be changed, shifted and broken through their various encounters. Allowing work to move in cycle and to be released from a type of control that seeks to memorialize work in stone,421 I moved towards creative works that are being released from that which is fixed – creating conditions where it is more possible to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not yet here,422 even if we do not always have the language for it, or this language, at times, falls short.423 It is in this opening of that which is not yet here, that which is not fixed or where language falls short, where I described that there seems to be a possibility for new worlds to emerge and be imagined and for the option to subvert the notion of “Time” that is continually exerting both its dominance and the unfolding of logical motion within the colonial framework. Through questioning what would happen if “Time” were to unravel and open up anew, I saw the 421 Patricia J. Saunders, “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora,” Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2008): 7. A reference to Sadiya Hartman’s description of the anti-monument. 422Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 17. 423 Patricia J. Saunders, “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora,” 7. 167 possibility to strengthen the conditions for sensing various rhythms, cycles or layers, or for allowing an alternative understanding of “Time” which draws together various temporal registers to exist – therefore allowing time to play out in more than one way.424 As mentioned in earlier sections, Dionne Brand suggests that creative inspiration is found through some form of “traversing” when she notes that this inspiration can be found “in another place, not here”425. What I have suggested in this exegesis is that creative praxis creates the potential to breach, no matter how momentarily, from “Time” and the norms of violence that attend to it through traversing through varied temporalities and to places that are not here or have yet to be imagined. I have suggested that this traversing and “opening” occurs through our engagement with artistic works and our interaction with all that the work absorbs.426 This exegesis has further posited that it is in this breach from the structure of “Time” and what attends to it that we may expose and be reminded of the linkage that exists amongst all things as we traverse and breath away from the weight of violence -- and are offered a glimpse of somewhere else we have yet to imagine, a world in the making, or as Brand describes, somewhere not here.427 While my limited and partial map of the possibilities to imagine what is not here – or at least not yet – has led me to thinking of “Time” differently. I take this as only one element of the many questions which arise when attending to harm and injustice in our global world. In this case, my analysis has centered around the potential for transformation, and alongside it, healing, as I proposed that to engage with “Time” differently would not only allow us to “be” in the 424 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Beyond the Clock, 104. 425 Dionne Brand in Veronica Jane Strong-Boag, Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 107. 426 Robert Preece, “Material Performance.” 427 Dionne Brand in Kristina Quynn, “Elsewheres of Diaspora: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here,” 132. 168 world differently, but would further create the conditions necessary for the transformation of worlds of harm. These worlds, which are “marked by the determinations of capital, raciality, and heteropatriarchy,”428 are ones which we might find relief from, even if only fleetingly. My engagement with the concept of “Time” as a structure that has caused and sustained harm – such as the markings of the determinations mentioned above or the drawing of “lines in land, sea and race”429 – is a speculative and theoretical engagement that has sought to configure our engagement with artistic works as allowing us to move outside the structures which sustain conditions that allow for these harms and, instead, allow us to sense the links between one another and to the earth outside the particular and crafted configuration of space-time that emerged during the period of Enlightenment and that we see in modernity today. Through creating both unfired and fired ceramic sculptures and reading these pieces alongside the writing, praxis and poetry of others involved in this discourse, I have sought to engage in a conversation regarding the ideas referenced in earlier chapters that attend to cycles, separability,430 traversing and transversion outside the structures of “Time” as configured within the ontological assumptions of Western modernity.431 I propose that creative praxis allows for attending not only to the possibility of imagining “new worlds” but further allows us to attend to the ways in which the layering of “old worlds” and the accompanying violence leak into the future.432 This theoretical and creative exegesis has therefore sought to provide a body of work that can be seen as an ongoing process, a process which does not determine finalized ends but, 428 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,” 93. 429 Walter D. Mignolo, "Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?," 111. 430 Denise Ferreira da Silva "On Difference Without Separability." 431 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics.” 432 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 17. 169 through unsettling “Time,”seeks to offer possibilities for revealing openings and avenues towards worlds we wish to see that have yet to arrive – worlds that are not marked by harm. As artistic praxes in our global world continue to move, unfold and contribute to creative possibilities, I see that potentialities are ever increasing for these praxes to create and contribute to conditions for world making, transformation, and alongside it, for healing. 170 Figures Figure 1 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Unravel, 2022. 171 Figure 2 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Unravel, 2022 172 Figure 3 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Moving in Flux, 2022. 173 Figure 4 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Moving in Flux, 2022. 174 Figure 5 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Shifting Conversations, 2021. 175 Figure 6 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Shifting Conversations, 2021. 176 Figure 7 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Shifting Conversations, 2021. 177 Figure 8 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Shifting Conversations, 2021. 178 Figure 9 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Unravel, 2022. 179 Figure 10 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Shifting Conversations, 2021. 180 Figure 11 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Moving in Flux, 2022. 181 Figure 12 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Moving in Flux, 2022. 182 Figure 13 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Moving in Flux, 2022. 183 Figure 14 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Dispersing Echoes, 2022. 184 Figure 15 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Dispersing Echoes, 2022. 185 Figure 16 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Dispersing Echoes, 2022. 186 Figure 17 Marika St. Rose Yeo, Dispersing Echoes, 2022. 187 Bibliography Aristotle. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Silva, Denise Ferreira da
Moving outside spacetime : clay and creative praxis
Text