Textures and Paradigms

Textures

31/10/2012-21 (2021) – Lynda Beckett

I have considered, ‘the fold’, ‘the interior and the exterior’, ‘the high and the low’, and ‘the unfold’. There are two further traits of the fold to contemplate: ‘textures’ and ‘the paradigm’ (Deleuze, 2006, pp. 41–42). Within my practice textures are often translucent and porous layers that allow sensual matter to pass through. In the film 31/10/2012-21 (2021)[1] a mass of digital layers touch upon complex folding textures, as both the audio and video entangle. This piece has a roughness of texture, as a reading of Virginia Woolf’s short story The String Quartet (2019) crashes into the shipping forecast, and light patterns and images diffract over a German reading of Franz Kafka’s The Cares of a Family Man (2003), while I explain the concept of Odradek to my therapist, and short bursts of birdsong punctuate this virtual landscape. Intensity and chaos reign. Yet when making the piece, the different strands of video and audio seemed to find their natural folds as they cut together. Perhaps, as Deleuze suggests, it is at its limit that texture becomes most evident as folds evolve and different planes/patterns emerge (2006, p. 41). These patterns seem to hold the sensual within the threads of 31/10/2012-21 (2021). This is an important consideration because I think the new will be discovered within my practice at the point of chaos.

The Paradigm

 SKIN I (2020) – Lynda Beckett. https://www.lyndabeckett.org/#/skin-i/

The remaining trait is the paradigm, ‘the search for a model of the fold (which) goes directly through the choice of a material’[2] (Deleuze, 2006, p. 42). SKIN I (2020) is an unstructured, chaotic, irregular, and amorphic mass of knots. Within the form, the choice of physical material was immaterial. A repetitive configuration of fractal cell-like shapes gives the sculpture form. The surface is a patterning of threads, a framework that gives texture to the form, which in turn covers the informal, that which is prior to form. Perhaps the folds enable the thinking to materialise as form. SKIN I evokes memories of transparent skin on the verge of death.

The physical material, the knotwork, holds nothing. Yet raw data, as the socio-political, conceptual, geographical, and the sensual, seep out from within the form. The once human framework morphs into a knotwork of folds within a fold.

From another perspective, short videos became portals into virtual worlds, via the sensual, within my knotwork. This framework for making and thought developed from the theoretical work of Thomas Nail. He describes knotting as a method to entangle two or more fields to form knotworks (2019, pp. 147–148).

Still from Slippage (2021) – Lynda Beckett

Slippage (Beckett, 2021d) and Moor Slippage (Beckett, 2021e)[3] materialised between folds and became knotworks. I gathered material as part of my making process. It revealed different virtual spaces, as my apparatus became a fluid space, a portal and a knotwork. Found data as material, folded between physical and virtual environments as my computer became another apparatus within the process of making. According to Barad, the apparatus is the matter that forms the material conditions of possibility and impossibility (Barad, 2007, p. 148). During the editing the footage slipped and the pixels multiplied beyond my control. Within this data-driven apparatus, virtual sensual spaces were revealed at the touch of a button.

Still from Moor Slippage (2021) – Lynda Beckett

I intend to explore the matter of material within the traits of the fold as sensual, conceptual and socio-political knots, within my apparatus in more depth during the next stage of my research[4]. However, before unravelling the threads of my zoe/geo/techno assemblage in the form of the knot, I will briefly explore how the knot is perceived as an entity in history and art practice.

[1] See 31/10/2012-21, (Beckett, 2021c) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8hfHCY3POk

[2] Initially, ‘The paradigm’ seems to relate to a framework, a cartography, the physical surface, structure of the form or space. Yet, ‘this formal element appears only within infinity, in what is incommensurable and in excess’ Deleuze (2006, p. 43).

[3] See https://www.lyndabeckett.org/#/slippage/ and https://www.lyndabeckett.org/#/moor-slippage/

[4] Other PhD-level research that draws upon folds and ‘The Fold’ (Deleuze, 1991) includes, Tsai-Chun Huang's, In-Between Pleats (2020) and Sophie Bouvier Ausländer’s, On tangibility, contemporary reliefs, and continuous dimensions (2019).

The Continuum

The unfold

 

According to Deleuze, ‘To develop is to unfold’ (1986, p. 9). Within my ‘mental landscape’, the informal waves merge through diffractive thinking[1] as the visual folds, unfolds, and folds again before morphing within the virtual space of my mind. The informal, for Andrew Benjamin (The Appearance of Modern Architecture, 2004) is the matter or material before it is formed.  For Deleuze, ‘the informal is not the negation of form; it posits form as folded, as existing only as “mental landscape,” in the soul or the mind,’ (1991, p. 243). Creating may be considered as the process of folding material into different thoughts[2]. Leibniz states, ‘this action would consist in certain vibrations or oscillations… not only do we receive images and traces in the brain, but we form new ones from them when we bring ‘complex ideas’ to mind’ (1996, pp. 145-146).

 

According to Deleuze, this unfolding process is not contrary to the folding nor its erasure. It is a continuation, extension, and condition of its manifestation. ‘When the fold ceases to be represented and becomes a “method”, an operation, an act, the unfold becomes the result of the act’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 243). The act becomes the continuous process of folding and unfolding, as Leibnizian abstraction unfolds within the literal folds of the human brain (ibid., p. 231)[3].

Kinloch Hourn (2022) – Lynda Beckett

As I write, my thoughts unfold and diffract within my mental landscape. Drifting from my studio, I return to an isolated part of western Scotland. Once off the main road, it takes 45 minutes of twisting and turning down a bumpy single track to arrive at Kinloch Hourn. On a clear day, you can see the Isle of Skye from the head of the loch. Pivot south, and the landscape appears marked by natural folds and the occasional manmade scar, a road or path. Curious about the tracks and traces (Ingold, 2016, pp. 42–46)[4], having followed them for several days, I put pen to paper. The process was impulsive. I traced the tracks, making staccato-like movements with the pen, in response to the rhythm of the landscape, while paying little attention to the paper.

Tracks and Traces (no:9) (2022) – Lynda Beckett

Back in Yorkshire, without the original orientation of the drawings, a new cartography developed from a seemingly chaotic sequence of similar but different forms. New lines emerged and flowed across the artwork. The drawings found their rhythm. A rhizomatic pattern developed. The geographical tracks and traces transformed and created a graphic score without bars or staves. This method of mark-making is important to my practice. A new language forms, unfolds, one that refuses to fulfil the demands of any dominant codified structure.

Series of Tracks and Traces (2022) – Lynda Beckett

[1] Diffraction for Haraway ‘is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection or reproduction' (Grossberg et al., 1992, p. 300)⁠. See, Diffraction & Reading Diffractively, Geerts, E. and van der Tuin, I. (2016) for their interpretation of diffraction.

[2] Perhaps this ‘mental landscape’ is a depository of thoughts, images and sounds. A place where the aural and visual merge and, when recalled, form a different image or sequence of images in the form of memory.

[3] The body as flexible and fractal, is borrowed from Leibniz (1996, pp. 144–145).

[4] The anthropologist Tim Ingold defines the threads and traces within our environment. He suggests threads are filaments and traces are ‘any enduring mark left in or on a solid surface by continuous movement’ (2016, pp. 42-44)

sensing the infinite fold

The interior and the exterioR

 

Deleuze allows the sensual to materialise as an expressive abstraction, as he folds Pollock into his writing (2006, p. 130). Pollock’s method appears intuitive and rhythmic as the paint hits the canvas on the ground[1] (Chernick, 2020)[2]. As Pollock moves, drips and daubs paint from a height, the material folds and captures the sensual within the lines. The paint as it folds

Jackson Pollock painting in his studio on Long Island, New York, 1950. © Hans Namuth

seems to communicate Pollock's energy enabling emotions, visceral and sensual forces that are difficult to express through words to be revealed. When questioned about painting, Pollock replied, “painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves” (Chernick, 2020). He seems to create a new sensual language with no object or subject, as the folding lines form no focal point. For Deleuze, the fold is ‘actualized in the soul’ (1991, p.242), as the sensual force ‘is realized in its own way in matter’ (ibid, p.242) and flows through and from the materials. In the process of making, the material is all matter, human and non-human. From a Deleuzian perspective, Pollock’s work is a ‘folding of mind, body and world that articulates thinking itself as vibrational’ (Walton, 2016, p. 208).

Section of  Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) (Original painting 213cm x 498.5cm). © National Gallery of Australia.  

Suppose the act of making is thinking, a vibration, a diffractive wave, and a continuum. If this is the case, Pollock folded through Walton and Deleuze, ‘triggers “vibrations or oscillations” that continue to resonate and harmonise in the soul/mind' (Walton, 2016, p. 208). It appears to Walton that Deleuze forms a neo-baroque fold that flows between immaterial ‘folds in the soul’ and material ‘coils of matter’ (Deleuze, 1991, p.227) as Pollock splashes paint onto canvas from a distance. The distance seems essential and allows the sensual to be transient matter, flowing between the inner and outer, upper and lower (Vidler, 2002, p. 232), from the paintbrush to the canvas. As the paint flows, the tension distributes, and the two, the paint and the sensual, meld into the same world. Here, through the works of Deleuze, Pollock and Walton, fold upon fold, matter reveals its texture and becomes shared material. On the page, or canvas, or through thread, lines hold ‘an infinite number of folds… each one determined by the consistency or the participation of its setting’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 231). Lines are relevant to my practice as they lead to the forming of folds and knots within my knotwork. These knotworks are material and conceptual… and there is another dimension. The fluid space between the material and the thought holds the sensual.

 

The high and the low

 

Deleuze cites the Church of Sant' Agnese di Agone as an example of the grandeur of Baroque, as an allegorical house, a labyrinth of thought and a visualisation of the mind (Deleuze, 2006, p. 5). The marble facade holds the body, the church’s form, before the external folds into the interior and melds to infinity (Deleuze, 1991, p. 227). Within the church, 'the folds in the soul', the high, the immaterial (ibid., p. 227), and ‘the coils of matter', the physical material, the low, twist and turn and culminate in the form of myriad angels and saints, and the Virgin Mary, in Ciro Ferri's frescoes within the dome (Berardi et al. 2009) [3]. For Deleuze, this building is an apparatus that gives insight to the unseen yet felt.

The fresco at Sant’ Agnese di Agone painted by Ciro Ferri. Photograph Feng Wei Photography

Here the conceptual, sensual and socio-political converge, as Deleuze appears to breathe another life into Ferri's visualisation of the angels welcoming Saint Agnes into their world before they dissipate into eternity. As an onlooker left standing firmly on the earth, wondering about the destiny of imagined immortals, the material and the immaterial entangle and unfold (Deleuze, 2006, p. 39). Deleuze indicates it could be possible for us, being mere mortals standing on the ground, to feel separation from the saints in the dome. He also suggests the painted images, the celestial beings formed of pigments, evoke sensual connection within our minds.

 

Whether we, as onlookers, think the materials that form the pigment are 'active or passive, the derivative forces of matter refer to the primitive forces, those of the soul' (Deleuze, 1991, p. 246). It is the matter which forms the being within the painting and stimulates the sensual experience, according to Deleuze. This might imply sensual folds are found between the visible elements within the dome. However, within the sensual folds, the aural and the imagined aural experience, are invisible. If there is an invisible sensual connection between the folding of space perhaps this is the merging of the high and low within the church[4], the immortal and mortal.

 

For Deleuze, the imagined is ‘the two stories and their harmony’ (1991, p. 246), and possibly sound appears as a continuum, an invisible but audible wave envisioned within the ‘mental landscape’ (Deleuze, 2006, p. 40)[5]. If the imagined wave is sound from the choir of angels, abstracted and unfolded within 'the mental landscape' of the onlookers, then everything is seemingly in tune. Deleuzian harmony materialises, and the two stories merge, and a wave continuously resonates, folds and unfolds between the material and immaterial, the human and the celestial (Deleuze, 1991, p. 243), into infinity. This notion of seeking a space where the sound and the imagined evoke the sensual within a virtual apparatus is perhaps what I have been trying to do within the films, 31/10/2012-21 (2021), Slippage (2021) and Moor Slippage (2021). I intend to develop this thought by making sound pieces within this research.


[1] In his lecture, The Dramaturgy of Soul, speaking about Tintoretto’s Final Judgement, Deleuze suggests, ‘The ground is that from which all the grounds emerge, the fore ground and back ground, and that determines in each case the relation of the fore ground to back ground‘ (1987a).

[2] Jackson Pollock: Blue poles.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMgz-p0jjBI A documentary with original footage of Jackson Pollock working and speaking about his practice.

[3] Berardi, U., Cirillo, E. and Martellotta, F. (2009) speaks of the acoustic energy within the dome.

[4] This in-between space, or series of folds, seems to parallel the space between Pollock's hand holding the paintbrush and the canvas on the ground.

[5] Deleuze (2006, p.40) the reference of 'mental landscape' is multi-dimensional, perhaps it is the landscape the folds of the brain, or a landscape with regards to how we think and form thoughts. Alternatively, the landscape could be mental and have a mind of its own.  If the landscape is thinking, the matter as material has agency and folds into Bennett and Alaimo's scholarship. A 'mental landscape' could bring to the forefront the notion of the subject and dualist thinking and control.

The Fold

Unfolding The Fold

Folds of material within the cliff face at Happisburgh, Norfolk (2020) – Lynda Beckett

Within The Fold (1993), Deleuze folds notions of matter, soul, and the Baroque through the thoughts of other philosophers and thinkers, within the fields of the arts, architecture, philosophy and mathematics. Deleuze folds fold upon fold. For Deleuze, folds are matter, and matter becomes material, and as abstract thoughts, material entangles with the sensual, through the works of Mallarmé, Hantaï and Klee.

 

A greater exploration of Deleuze’s method of creating ‘folds’ is necessary before I move from the fold to the knot and knotworks, and before grappling with Deleuze’s abstract concepts of ‘the pleats of matter’, material, and ‘the folds in the soul’. Deleuze’s method of thinking is an act of folding his own thoughts[1] and those of others, into his thinking and writing process. Simon O’Sullivan describes the process as ‘a folding – or doubling’ of his ‘thought into the thought of another’ (2005, p. 102)2. This is not where Deleuze’s folding method stops; he plays with the definitions of familiar words, such as ‘fold’ and ‘baroque’ while entangling notions of ‘the pleats of matter’ and ‘the folds in the soul’ into his concept. This notion of folding thought and material is relevant to my practice because it parallels my own process as I fold the physical materials and words to create new works.

 

Deleuze’s thinking unfolds notions of matter, flow and infinity through the Baroque and Leibniz[2]. Leibniz’s concept of ‘material continuum’ is central to Deleuze’s concept of the fold, as matter is always in motion between two folds. My focus is on the fluidity of matter as it materialises within my practice. Deleuze highlights the curvaceous forms, blurred edges, and exaggerated lighting of Baroque painters, who create intense emotion within their works. These intense emotions emit the sensual and this is an important notion within my inquiry. The felt, the unseen, through the folding of materials intrigues me. This notion of the sensual is influenced by a Deleuzian understanding of Baroque as that which ‘affects not only all kinds of materials, which thus become matter of expression in accordance with different scales and speeds and vectors (the mountains and the waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain) but it also determines and brings form into being and into appearance, it makes of it a form of expression…’ (1991, p. 242). Deleuzian folds can be material, physical and conceptual. As singularities, folds are encompassed within a greater fold, creating a new fluid form, such as knots within a knotwork. These knots are not confined to artworks. The concept of knots within knotworks is transversal. Folding Baroque back into Leibniz, Deleuze describes a concept as something that is formed from a gathering of singularities, as something that is worked upon and evolves into a different fluid form (Deleuze and Stivale, 1998, p. 78).

 

This practice of folding material, according to Andrew Benjamin, is workful (2005)[3], ‘an operative function’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 227), one of productivity and creativity which goes beyond the confines of a classical period in history, as Deleuze demonstrates as he folds Plato, Proust, and Pollock into his form of Baroque (1993).

I RE-TURN II (2021) – Lynda Beckett 

This method of folding to create resonates with my own practice. I RE-TURN II, 2021, is an example of reusing and refolding materials and thoughts to create the new through traditional craft methods. It is the physical act of folding one thread that forms the knot. At the intersect of more than two threads the beginnings of a knot is formed. Throughout the making process, my action is fluid, yet the structure of the form unknown, until the knotwork is complete. And in turn, the knotwork is more than a physical form. It envelops the singularities of Baroque and extends the concept of The Fold (Deleuze, 1993) to the knot. A fold is an intensifier of material. A knot is an intensifier of an intensifier as it is made of, through and by the fold, which in turn materialises as something else.

Knots, folds and voids within To Turn/ To Wind/ To Loop (2021) – Lynda Beckett

An aspect of the knot that gives the sculpture form is the void. The spaces between the knots, to me, create the sensual. I investigate this notion later in my inquiry. According to Deleuze, there are six ‘traits’ of the Baroque that form The Fold. These traits provide a framework for my practice. They include the fold, inside/outside, interior/exterior, high/low, texture and paradigm.

To Turn/ To Wind/ To Loop (2021) – Lynda Beckett

The fold

A thread is folded to form a slip knot at the beginning of each of my sculptural works. For me, this act of folding is a portal to another world. To Turn/ To Wind/ To Loop (2021b)⁠ is a crocheted wire and paper piece that evolved during the lockdown. In isolation, I sat in my room. Absorbed within the looping rhythm, my mind wandered as one knot followed another, as the monotony of motion paralleled that of time. Distracted, for a moment, I watched a funeral hearse drift by. The threads of wire and white paper turned from the living into the dead. The materials fold once again as the microbial becomes the living, and the cycle repeats within the folds of life.

The physical act of material folding is relevant to my inquiry as the process of folding enables me to think fluidly, without boundaries with regard to the living and the dead.

[1] See Deleuze (1988, p. 118) on ‘to think is to fold’.

[2] According to Deleuze, Gottfried  Leibniz was ‘the first great German philosopher’ (Deleuze and Stivale, 1998, p. 77)

[3] A lecture given by Andrew Benjamin – The Appearance of Modern Architecture: Deleuze on the Baroque (2004).

Carnal or other-wise?

Sensing the sensual


Toes (1998) - Lynda Beckett

Etymologically, the word ‘sensual’ connects with the ‘carnal, concerning the body’ (Online Etymology Dictionary) and is associated with the erotic. Nathalie Loveless’ interpretation of erotic speaks of ‘our loves, our intensive and extensive curiosities, attentive to what and whom we are driven to explore’ (2019, p. 27). This could be conceived as a move away from the carnal. Within my practice, affect and relation entangles with the physical and psychological; intensive and extensive curiosities evolve through and with materials, as we, the materials touch within a space.

 

If the sensual is touching, and a mode of knowing, and embedded within situated knowledges as a part of becoming, ‘what might become thinkable if knowledge weren’t so tied to an account of subject-driven agency?’ (Manning, 2016, p. x). Acknowledging the not knowing and engaging with the unthinkable through touching is to touch on the anarchy of experimentation, which is ‘at the heart of all process’ (ibid., p.38) from Manning's perspective. Experimenting and playing with the knots is integral to my knotting process as I consider, 'What else can artistic practice become when the object is not the goal, but the activator, the conduit toward new modes of existence?’ (Manning, 2006, p. 46).

 

As I touch and play with the knot, its topology unravels and it morphs before me. Through the process of (k)not knowing, I make, think, and write. My physical knotting process developed from techniques passed down by the women in my family, and the use of similar rudimentary knots remains pivotal within my practice. I cannot read a knitting pattern and therefore am not controlled by a set of instructions. This lack of control and seemingly chaotic method, enables different materials to reveal their flexibility within a form.

 

Entangling Barad, Haraway, Braidotti and Manning, while writing about knowing and (k)not knowing, draws together different threads from physics, new materialism and the environment to form a zoe/geo/techno assemblage (Braidotti, 2022). A re-defining, reforming, and recreation of the knot as threads of the sensual, conceptual, and socio-political, develops a space where difference matters and materialises and acknowledges the equal agency of materials (Barad, 2007). The nuances of the knot are multifaceted. Before I explore the knot, I must first consider the fold, as my inquiry is building upon Deleuze’s book, The Fold (1993).

Entangling with the diffractive

Diffraction

 

May 4th (2022) - Lynda Beckett

For Barad, diffraction evolves from the scientific notion of waves, material, sound or light, combining and overlapping when they encounter an obstruction (2007, p. 74), and the theoretical two-slit experiment designed by physicist Niels Bohr. His thinking challenged the scientific world. He reassessed the performativity of matter as active, with the ability to have an agency which is not always predictable. Barad transferred his notions of diffraction from the laboratory and exposed the agency of matter to a broader academic audience through the framework of a diffractive methodology. Thinking diffractively appears to inform the basis of new materialist and posthuman thinking, as both break Cartesian and hierarchical power structures, and acknowledge the agency of material. Barad states ‘diffraction is not a set pattern, but rather an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling’ (2014, p. 168). Knowledge-making, using a diffractive methodology is a merging of practice and theory while engaging with materials within a space (2007, pp. 87–94). This methodology is applicable to my practice because the process of making is iterative and creates diffractive patterns.

Loch Quoich (2022) – Lynda Beckett

Thinking diffractively stimulates thought and makes new configurations of patterns. The process is more of a rippling of thought than a mirroring. For Barad, 'to mirror something’ only provides 'an accurate image or representation' (2007, p. 86). Reflecting focuses on mirroring and sameness, whereas diffracting looks for patterns of difference (ibid., p.29), eliminating the controlling relation of the subject looking at the object. Barad states that ‘subject and object do not preexist as such, but emerge through intra-actions’ (ibid., p.89). Diffraction pushes aside the tripartite arrangements of a reflexive mode of inquiry. The knower of knowledge, the observer, looking at the subject and the object, has no power. Each entity has equal status. Diffraction appears to dissolve the boundaries of hierarchy in search of a socio-political plane within a non-binary world (ibid., pp. 88-89).

Still from Diffractive Film (2020) – Lynda Beckett

Developing a diffractive methodology

 

Performativity, flux and motion are always necessary within a diffractive process. My first encounter with diffraction came from a light pattern performing on a piece of paper leaning against the wall in my room - without my orchestration. An intra-action was happening beyond my control. Diffractive Film 2020[1] captures an element of an indeterminate process, as I had no idea how the light patterns occurred. This happening paralleled Barad’s ‘agential realism’ framework, where ‘phenomena are the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies’ (2007, p. 206), where physical, theoretical, the sensual human and non-human materials were inseparable and formed something new within this space.

Still from 14 50 04 (2020) – Lynda Beckett

I continue to record light phenomena and remain curious about generative forces that create Diffractive Film (2019), 14 45 46, 14 50 04 (2020) and 14 50 08 (2020). Each pattern appears as a knot of light waves in motion—a material phenomenon forming within its chosen space/apparatus. For the purposes of this inquiry I am using a Baradian understanding of phenomena as all matter within a space entangling to reveal something new (2007, p. 333). Moving away from the notions of human-centred laboratories and structures of social control (Agamben, 2009, p. 3),the apparatus is the space in which the process of making happens.

Still from 14 50 08 (2020) – Lynda Beckett

Each phenomenon is a temporal form. Touch the patterning and the only physical sensation is the cold flat wall[2] Yet the light waves produce the visual illusion of a form within another space,[3]. These forms are forces of energy in motion, emerging phenomena without a name. They are indivisible, yet they provide sensation, perception, the feeling of something that is living, independent of human intervention or control. From a human perspective, they are lifeless. However, when they appear, they pulse and are active. Perhaps they are at the threshold of revealing something different. Jane Bennett suggests this state is neither subject nor object, more an ‘intervener’(2010, p. 9). As curious forces, these interveners appear and resonate as patterns in motion within a liminal space. They remain virtual[4] and momentarily visible unless captured digitally. These light phenomena are integral to my inquiry, not as artworks, more as conduits that stimulate thought.



[1] Diffractive Film 2020 - https://www.lyndabeckett.org/#/diffractive-film-2019/

[2] See Nail on 3D forms, ‘objects are flows of matter that have ‘folded’ into relatively stable patterns or cycles, such as vortices’ (2021, p. 31).

[3] For Deleuze on texture, light and ‘chiaroscuro’ see (1991, p. 245)

[4] According to Deleuze ‘the virtual is never subject to the global character which affects real objects.  It is – not only by its origin but by its own nature – a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity’ (1994, pp. 100–101).

Developing methodologies in practice

Source material - Situated knowledge

Beyond the Void (2019) – Lynda Beckett

         

On 6th September 2019, at 3:28 pm, I watched my sister take her last breath. In a zombie-like state, in the mi(d)st of a seven-week ordeal, held within a sense of ‘nothingness. The void. An absence of matter... Utter silence. No thing, no thought, no awareness. Complete ontological insensibility’ (Barad, 2012, p. 4); I made 'Beyond the Void' (2019). Fold after fold, the knots started to form. I was curious about the flexibility of the paper and how it allowed a plane of knots to evolve within this work. No one could control the multiplying cells within my sister’s body. They had their agenda.

 

This encounter with death was the moment within my process that everything seemed to simultaneously un/fold and multiply as a life unravelled around me. Beyond my control, at the point of rupture, nothing seemed to connect psychologically, yet all events were part of the whole. As I made, an assemblage of singularities was forming, a knot into a knotwork, while I was willing my sister to live, a life disappeared before me.


Beyond the Void (2019) – Photographed 2023 – Lynda Beckett

What is this void, this nothingness?

 

My sister's death left a void. Barad’s essay, ‘Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness’ (2017), speaks of the void as ‘the place where the living and dying meet’ (2017, p. 85). I continue to process this void and sense of nothingness. Returning to Deleuze, the point of rupture within a life seems to resonate with Barad’s void. Reading Barad, the sense of void is triggered by place, memories, and objects. Perhaps the void and the point of rupture are the space where the sensual reveals itself. This space feels virtual, a place where ‘the yearning and the imagining of what might yet have been…the infinitely rich ground of imagining possibilities for living and dying otherwise’ (Barad, 2017, p.56) materialise. Psychologically, Beyond the Void (2019) is the yearning for time together, the imagined and the as-yet undiscovered, the new.

 

In an earlier essay, Barad asks, ‘What is the measure of nothingness?’ and ‘How can we approach it?’(2012), and responds ‘On the face of it, these questions seem vacuous, but there may be more here than meets the eye’ (ibid., p. 5). As I contemplate how to measure nothingness, a subsequent knot appears as the seeing eye and the subjective ’I’. Both are troublesome because this research is not about the first person ‘I’ or what the eye sees. This inquiry is in search of the invisible, the unseen, the sensual that forms the knot.

Beyond the Void (2019), lying on the bathroom floor, 2023 – Lynda Beckett

Beyond the Void (2019), remains a folding of matter that is not immediately visible. The spaces between the knots form a cartography of a life... According to Deleuze, ‘there is no such thing as an empty space, a hole being nothing more than the site of a more subtle matter’ (1991, p. 233). At rest, the sculpture is seemingly lifeless. Under tension, folds and knots create a new topology formed from an encounter. To Simon O'Sullivan’s (2006), Deleuze suggests an encounter is when 'something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of fundamental encounter' (1994, p. 139). In other words, this mode of (not) knowing privileges the sensual over rational logic.

Beyond the Void (2023) – Lynda Beckett

           

Situated knowledges

 

Beyond the Void (2019) was made whilst I was situated within an encounter with death that forced me to reconsider my world. Through Barad (2007) I discovered Donna Haraway's (1988) concept of ‘situated knowledges’. As a methodology, it requires an embodiment with materials, and ebbs and flows between the practical, the sensual and the theoretical. While physically walking with her dogs (1988, p. 583), Haraway thought about seeing through the eyes of the dogs and having an enhanced perception of smell. The alternative perspective moved her thinking away from human centrism and gave her dogs agency within her concept.

 

Thinking through materials is the source of creating new knowledge within my practice. The process is intra-active between humans and non-humans[1]. Barad states, 'we don't obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming' (2007, p. 185). By folding and knotting different materials together, many practical and theoretical processes intra-act, entangle and flow into different scholarly fields.

 

Haraway’s methodology continues to resonate with Braidotti’s feminist posthuman stance (2022, pp. 213–214) and Barad’s new materialist positioning (2007). The appeal of this methodology on an epistemological level for both theorists is the break from Cartesian dualisms, specifically objectification and hierarchical structures. Furthermore, Barad iterates Haraway's demand to reform scientific establishments; to put a stop to ‘the influence of biased, male, and western-centric modes of operating in the construction of science' (Marçal, 2021, p. 55). And in conjunction with this, Barad and Braidotti challenge the reader to understand the world from within and as part of it, before calling for a mode of activism.

 

The doing/making might be considered as a 'diffractive methodology...a critical practice for making a difference in the world' (2007, p. 90⁠). This notion aligns with Braidotti's call for activism, which flows through a zoe/geo/techno assemblage within a new feminist posthuman environment.

[1] Barad continues, ‘there is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part’ (2007, p. 185).

Displacement Activity and the posthuman entangle

Folding posthuman feminism into practice

Displacement Activity/No Control (2018) – Lynda Beckett


During my MA (Central Saint Martins, UAL 2016-18), I wove life, geology, and technology into my practice. Displacement Activity/No Control[1] was a mass of threads and knots that developed from drawings and crocheted wire strands manifesting as an installation of knotworks. I did not want to control the materials. I knotted wire without following any formal pattern and set up a rig in the back of a moving vehicle to create the drawings. I now see this installation as a zoe/geo/techno assemblage (Braidotto, 2022) dissolving power structures and decentralising human control.

Displacement Activity/No Control (2018) – Lynda Beckett

During The Posthuman Life of Methods course at Utrecht University 2022[2], I recognised I could contribute as an artist to posthuman feminist knowledge through my knot making practice by developing the concept of the knot as a method and methodology. Throughout the course, scholars from the humanities, sciences and technology fields, highlighted and discussed climate change, environmental exploitation, and the rights of indigenous peoples. Throughout the course the ideas were disseminated as single strands of thought, rarely as transversal knotted thoughts. What might happen if the strands were folded together? What if the material were put under tension, then folded and knotted into different forms, how would this process change posthuman scholarly knowledge and practice?

As I consider the entanglement of Braidotti’s zoe/geo/techno assemblage within my practice, I realise I am forming what might theoretically be viewed as a knot, using the skills I have developed as a maker. Now I think about the knot as a conceptual tool and a method of making that evokes the sensual. Particularly when I am situated within a geological environment, thinking through making develops my understanding and a connection with my surroundings. The process of making demands a performance of actions embedded within the environment and felt within the space, where matter is equal.

 (Photograph courtesy of Valerie Sewell, 2018)

 

Making is an intra-action (Barad, 2007, pp. 175-176) of materials, seen and unseen. Intra-action, for Barad, is the cause and effect that emerges from the interplay and connectedness of different entities within a space. This intra-action is paralleled within my knot-making process. However, from a posthuman feminist stance, there is also affect. This sensual relationship between materials allows the unrealised or virtual potential to flow across and through multiple planes.

 

Pulling threads from Braidotti’s posthuman feminism

 

Braidotti informs my interdisciplinary art practice through her concept of posthuman feminism (2022, pp.5-6), where human and non-human materials entangle with the environmental, geological, and socio-political to form a complex assemblage without hierarchical structures. With all materials on an even par, the subjective ‘I’ moves towards the transforming ‘we’ (Braidotti, 2022, p. 8). The ‘we’ is multifaceted and cuts across the planes of the sciences, technology and the humanities.

 

Pulling threads from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti’s philosophical thinking breaks dualistic, hierarchical, and patriarchal structures and dissolves the stance of ‘man as the allegedly universal measure of all things' (2019, p. 32). Braidotti’s research (2022), and my own, cannot escape postcolonial thinking, i.e., the perspective of the white, educated European male. This perspective must be questioned. To unravel the postcolonial views of Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti (2022, p. 120) draws on contemporary philosophers Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (2010), who in turn draw on Caren Kaplan (1996)[3]. From Kaplan’s work, it could be argued that Deleuze and Guattari use the ‘I’ of the ‘observer’ rather than being situated within the observed to gain knowledge. They take the dualist subject/object stance. This means the object is not allowed ‘to speak for itself’ (Kaplan, 1996, p. 88), and this ‘perpetuates colonial discourse’ (ibid., p. 88). It could be argued that Kaplan’s observation of the privileged white male speaking on behalf of ‘the other’ remains relevant today within European scholarship. A dilemma is how to form a platform that enables the othered to speak for themselves.



[1] Displacement Activity / No Control (Beckett, 2018) - https://www.lyndabeckett.org/#/gipfel/

[2] Attending this course enabled me to interact globally with PhD students and theorists who considered the world as a zoe/geo/techno assemblage, as we responded to humanitarian, environmental and technological issues. A small percentage of the attendees were artists, yet every afternoon, we were challenged to think differently by responding to the morning sessions via art practice. It was positive to see a leading philosophical thinker acknowledging art practice as a method of revealing the new.

[3] This folding of thoughts parallels the folding within my making practice to develop new thoughts and artworks.

The knot of Rosi Braidotti's zoe/geo/techno assemblage

Three threads of new materialism

 

Before exploring the knot of Braidotti’s zoe/geo/techno assemblage, there are three threads within new materialism to unravel: the agency of matter, the Anthropocene and a world beyond human centrism. The notion of making in an environment with no hierarchical structures gives all matter equal status within the space. This environment might enable the development of a process of thinking through and with matter beyond theoretical structures, enabling material space to reveal its agency (Bennett, 2010, p.9). As I pursue an ontological method of thinking through making, the feminist new materialists, Karen Barad (2007), Claire Colebrook (2014), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010), Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008), provide conduits for me to incorporate scientific, socio-political, and conceptual fields of knowledge into my practice. Thinking through making enables new knowledge to emerge as new entities, events, and encounters (Tracks & Traces 2022, The Knot 2022, 31/10/2012-21 2021 and Beyond the Void 2019)[1].

 

As I began to focus on the agency of matter (Barad, 2007), the Anthropocene (Colebrook, 2014) (Coole and Frost, 2010), and a world beyond human centrism (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008), the knot became a tool through which to re-consider[2] the theoretical, physical, and sensual as properties of materials within my practice-based research.

 

The agency of matter

Image from Diffractive Film (2020) – Lynda Beckett

Matter[3], as ‘a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than a property of things’ (Barad, 2007, p. 224), first caught my eye as diffractive light patterns (Diffractive Film 2020)[4]. These patterns made me think about matter in a new way. From a new materialist perspective, matter is energy in motion rather than static (Coole and Frost, 2010, pp. 7–15). Ancient and modern materialism consider matter as passive and non-performative (Gamble et al., 2019, p. 113). Breaking these bonds challenges a human-centred ontology and creates a space to work with materials without hierarchical and dualist structures.

 

Niels Bohr’s two-slit experiment, exploring the agency of matter, as interpreted by Barad (2007, pp. 81-84), made me rethink my once-controlling relationship with material. How might I engage with materials without human privilege, thinking about them as dynamic entities in motion, while acknowledging the material's agency and surrounding space?

 

The Anthropocene

 

Claire Colebrook’s (2014) thoughts about the Anthropocene entangle with those of fellow theorists, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010). Their thinking highlights humanity's catastrophic impact upon itself, other species and ecologies for political and hedonistic gain, and reinforces my responsibilities towards the world I inhabit. Coole and Frost propose an engagement with materials as entities with life force and flow, within a shared environment, and they acknowledge ethical and political concerns will emerge. Their emphasis is for us to acknowledge our exploitation of the living organism we inhabit (Coole and Frost, 2010, pp. 5–7), while Colebrook reminds us that we cannot escape the impact of climate change. Yet, absurdly, we continue to exploit the world we are bound within as a species.

 

We need to acknowledge the power of Nature’s materials displaying agency. From a feminist posthuman perspective, as an artist embedded within my environment, I want to reconsider my relationship with materials as we, the materials and I, make. As I write, I am conscious of my environment, the lithium and other materials taken from the earth that make this research possible. This inquiry will endeavour to break the hierarchical structures of human centrism as we (the materials and I) work together to unfold and fold the knot.

 

A world beyond human centrism

 

I turn to Stacy Alaimo, who proposes that ‘we think as stuff of the world’ (2016, p.14). As part of the ‘stuff’, we become embedded in our environment and aware of what it is like for other creatures to inhabit a world we abuse. Alaimo’s practice of thinking as part of the environment, where the subject is ‘already part of the substances, systems and becomings of the world’ (ibid., p. 14), aligns with my posthuman new materialist thinking. Alaimo’s concepts parallel Barad’s notion that ‘there is no ‘I’ separate from the intra-active becoming of the world’ (2007, p. 394) . This democratisation of materials decentralises the human and aligns with Jane Bennett’s (2010) notion of ‘vital materiality’, questioning human superiority over other life forms and inanimate materials. Bennett also recognises the agency of materials and acknowledges them as forces with energy. As a maker, I cannot ignore this. I work with materials, bodies that have the capacity to be active, have effect (2010, p. 5), and affect[5]. If humans acknowledge the agency of materials, would it not follow that they have a platform to be affective and emit the sensual?

[1] Artworks to be found at my website, https://www.lyndabeckett.org/.

[2] The hyphen between re and consider allows for a continuous flow of considering and reconsidering, a motion that is always in flux.

[3] Matter is not opposed to information, thought, or knowledge – matter is the raw material before it takes form and is multi-dimensional.

[4] Diffractive Film (2020) - https://www.lyndabeckett.org/#/diffractive-film-2019/ This videos is one in a series I have captured during my research.

[5] According to Simon O’Sullivan, ‘affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter’ (2001, p.126).

Planes of No Sense


Plane of no sense (2023) – Lynda Beckett

Plane of no sense (2023) materialised when words made no sense. In Logic of Sense (2015), Gilles Deleuze speaks of no(n)sense as the underlying basis of sense and being. Nonsense and sense co-exist. Sense is a multifaceted entity and often the product of inter-related things.

 

Planes of nonsense (2023) below, is a knotting of thoughts and the unthought, that manifested as a form. The expression, the expressed and the sensed, became a mass of singularities (Deleuze, 2015, pp. 69–75) through making, an act of doing, touching and sensing. Planes of nonsense becomes a folding of folds, a knot, a multi-dimensional entity created within the flow of an evolving space. Folding the paper enabled me to change the cartography, lines, and thoughts as I passed the paper between my fingers. In turn, fold after fold, the creases developed new lines of thought, which have evolved through the process of making.



Planes of nonsense (2023) [1] – Lynda Beckett

The artist and philosopher Erin Manning develops the method of thinking through making via the concept of ‘the minor gesture’ (2016), as a breakaway from  epistemological thinking. According to Manning, ‘The minor gesture, allied to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the minor, is the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation’ (2016, p. 1). Manning’s concept appears to be an explorative research method where minor and major gestures entangle during the creative process. The major gesture appears to be the site of intensity, the space or the place of creation. The minor gesture seems more subtle. It is the unseen ‘force that courses through’ (Manning, 2016, p. 1) the work and its making. It is the speculative and not yet revealed, the force in flux, the unknown, the unnamed, perhaps even the sensual, that seeps from the site of curiosity and through the ‘finished’ work.

 




Emerging Thoughts (2023) – Lynda Beckett

             

For me, Emerging Thoughts (2023) is a mapping of the unknown. A process of mark-making, one semi-transparent image, a thought, merges with another. Something different is formed as the relationship between maker and material evolves within an environment in flux. When materials are folded together, the fields of art practice, new materialism and posthuman feminism produce fertile ground for new knowledge to emerge.

[1]  Planes of nonsense (2023) was part of SNAPSHOTS, a PGR exhibition in CSM library 01-31 March 2023.

[2] Artworks to be found at my website, https://www.lyndabeckett.org/.

[3] The hyphen between re and consider allows for a continuous flow of considering and reconsidering, a motion that is always in flux.

The Fold

Folding ‘The Fold’ into new materialism

 

For Deleuze the fold was a multifaceted conceptual device which he developed through the Baroque and polymath Gottfried Leibniz. Deleuze folded mathematical, philosophical and cultural theory into The Fold (2006)[1]. This process enabled multiple outcomes of meaning of ‘Baroque’ and ‘fold’ to surface. The philosophers Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn acknowledge that Deleuze started ‘exploring materialist/monist thought to the fullest, creating the fertile ground in which new materialism takes root’ (2010, p. 153).

 

Folding new materialism into practice

 

My practice is one of folding materials and thoughts through theorists, philosophers and artists, who are growing the transversal fields of new materialism. According to the philosophers Christopher N. Gamble et al., ‘new materialism embraces a non-anthropocentric realism grounded in a shift from epistemology to ontology and the recognition of matter’s intrinsic activity’ (2019, p. 118). Using a new materialist framework as the foundation of this inquiry allows a shift from human centrism entangling human and non-human matter within a neutral environment. Recognising matter as ‘active, self-creative, productive and unpredictable’ (Coole and Frost, 2010, p. 9) demands acknowledging matter as a living force beyond human control. This recognition gives material agency enabling a shift from theoretical thinking as the only source of evolving new knowledge, acknowledging materials might have something to show us. As an artist, the process of learning from materials, makes me consider what we might be if our shared environment was not so dominated by human power structures, and knowledge so controlled by written language and the spoken word.


The unfold of the fold (2023) – Lynda Beckett

Folding processes: The unfolding of making, thinking and language

As I write this text, thought and practice continuously fold/unfold/refold. The process is active/creative, as materials touch, entangle and fold with one another, forming a new language structure. The philosophers Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn, speak of new materialism as a ‘move away from linguistic representationalism’ (2010, p. 154). Tracks and Traces (no:23), a work of seemingly nonsensical staccato lines, moves away from traditional linguistic representationalism and imparts knowledge that might be sensed rather than read as an emergent form of knowledge-making.

Tracks and Traces (no:23) (2022) – Lynda Beckett

Tracks and Traces (no:23) enables me to venture into different spaces to create a new language. Perhaps this practice is a form of double articulation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 46–47). These marks are formed from looking at tracks and traces of matter etched into a geological environment. The structure a photograph might show is broken down to lines. The physical matter is transformed and created into abstract forms, that inform my thinking process through making, to form further content.

 

[1] Deleuze gave a series of lectures in the late 1980s offering a new interpretation of the baroque read through the works of Gottfried Leibniz as a process of folding thoughts. In 1991 Deleuze wrote a short paper for Yale French Studies before publishing Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque,1991, translated into English, 1993.

Gathering the Threads

Forming knots

 

This practice-based research investigates the meanings of the knot through art practice, theory, and writing. The three cannot be separated. The knotting process forms my artistic practice and informs my critical thinking. Knots form and entangle and become multifaceted entities with intensity. Each knot evolves, giving material agency as part of ‘an iterative, ongoing, indeterminate process’ (Gamble et al., 2019, p. 124). My making process is repetitive, fractal and chaotic, yet held within a space, an environment where Cartesian distinctions of body/mind, nature/culture, and male/female are no longer adequate (Braidotti, 2022, p.100-102). This research adopts Rosi Braidotti’s stance of posthuman feminist thinking, specifically her zoe/geo/techno assemblage (2022). This concept envisions the universe as an entanglement of life, where the physical and technological merge, embracing technological advances and acknowledging environmental destruction. Within this concept, the subjective ‘I’ dissolves and becomes ‘we’ within a non-hierarchal framework that ‘aspires to nurture and implement the ongoing process of unfolding alternative and transformative paths of becoming’ (2022, pp. 6–8).

 

Many threads from Braidotti’s assemblage flow through this inquiry to form knots. This research is embedded within life (zoe). It folds and forms knots within different environments (geo) that coexist within a data space (techno), realised within my making process.

The knot

 

My process is an act of folding to create physical, sensual and socio-political knots. The knots are multi-dimensional entities, porous and held within an environment - porous because they allow different materials to flow through. There is no inside or outside, no impenetrable boundaries. Knots are always in flux. En masse, knots realise as knotworks within my making practice. In a knotwork, a knot can be a single entity that folds from the virtual (the mind) into the physical as it becomes form. Knots materialise as nodes within a cartography that unfolds, revealing the new.



A Knotwork - To Return/ To Rewind/ To Reform (2021) – Lynda Beckett (2021a)

This inquiry is about the act of folding to create knots. I knit, crochet, draw and make films. The knot is my tool and methodology. According to Tim Ingold (2013) the creativity of ‘thinking through making’ lies in the improvisation of the processes rather than an innovation’. Within my process, nothing is ever finished, it is a meeting point. For me, the knot is a multi-dimensional entity, an ongoing binding together of flows, a thought in flux that evolves within a space. Theoretically, there are no limits to the fields of scholarship in which the knot can exist. Seen and unseen knots in knotworks have equal status within their environments. Knots have agency[1] for transformation in an infinite knotwork. In my practice, the knot enables exploration of the sensual, conceptual and socio-political as a material encounter. My understanding of the knotting of thoughts through making has developed from Deleuze’s The Fold (1993).




[1] If each knot has agency, it is a life force and a being, according to Thomas Nail (2018). For Nail, ‘being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete ‘things’ (rerum) are composed of corporeal flows (corpora) that move together (conflux) and fold over themselves (nexus) in a woven knotwork (contextum)’ (2018, p. 11).