Vital bodies and the images that love them

My dedication to the performed image stems from an interest in language and the way potential signs and symbols escape formation and remain fluid. In art, figures in a state of process, or becoming, have been related to notions of the ‘grotesque’, ‘perverse’, ‘biomorphic’, discourses of indexicality or simply ‘forms’, leaving them to occupy ambivalent territory in the imagination. My question is: Might there be more productive approaches to an analysis of these representations which clearly reference outside themselves?

My research at Goldsmiths involves an exploration of connections between my artwork and both classical and contemporary interpretations of key concepts developed by early 20th century process philosopher Henri Bergson. I probe Bergson’s insistence upon the notion that life and reality are in constant flux in order to explore how this central claim relates to the status of the radicalized figure in art. My investigation traces links between the virtual Bergsonian body, (a formless body of dynamic vital energy, or what Bergson termed as élan vital, which lies just beyond the periphery of representation), and the actual body of flesh and blood, (the body defined by static forms and outlines produced by perception). Bergson claims that all representations fall short of the real way creatures live in time. Relating to this, through my artwork I search for unbounded symbols created by the body which access what could be called a 'Bergsonian vision'. Drawing upon Bergson’s concepts of ontological becoming, duration, intuition, pre-visible change, and unified consciousness, my investigation explores how manifestations of the figure existing outside the periphery of formed semiotics may be interpreted in a way which embraces and validates intuition as an indispensable mode of consciousness. I also explore the paradox of producing a static set of marks to indicate a non-static subject or set of events. Bergson’s work demonstrates, (rather performatively, I might cheekily add), the struggle with describing the process of living thought with the codified language of static words. Similarly, I am interested in investigating the gap between static representations of the body and the body as it truly is – vital, dynamic, evolving, possessing in various characteristics and modalities which lie well beyond representation.

My multi-media artwork lies at the center of this investigation as the above theoretical interests have naturally arisen from my practice itself. The abiding commitment to the body in motion in my artwork has grown out of the intuitive necessities for exploring non-indexical pictorial perversities, working with the figure as a linguistic tool, and drawing links between the body and the wider universe of energy & potentiality. My interest in amorphous signs and symbols led to my theoretical investment in themes of flux and ontological becoming, which is where Bergson’s still fresh and progressive insights become essential.

I utilize various techniques which indicate an aesthetics of the in-between: composite, hallucinatory approaches to dealing with time and space; the use of ephemera such as light and movement as modelling materials; attaching the camera directly to the body; the painterly application of light directly to the photograph’s surface. I also frequently employ marks and modes of an incidental variety including blurs, fractures, fragments and gestural assemblage. All this in effort to whittle pictorial proclivities within lens-based media into unexpected formal and symbolic distortions.

In my research I aim, through text and visual artworks to examine challenges and potential solutions to appraising the dynamic, vitalist body of ‘emergent forms’ and becomings in art. I examine Classical Bergsonism in light of recent re-evaluations of process philosophy (via Brian Massumi and Gilles Deleuze) and key contributions from feminism and queer theory (via Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler), and art itself, which together (I hope) will provide fresh theoretical insights for analyzing the significance of the figure in formal and symbolic states of flux. This structure will provide critical tools from which to re-evaluate the status of ‘bodies in process’ in art.


Lash, S. 2006. Life (Vitalism). Theory, Culture & Society, [Online]. 23 (2-3), pp. 323. Available at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/323 (SAGE Publications) [Accessed February 9, 2009].