What's it like to live a meaningful life in the painfully simple here and now?
Knowing in being
In our form of inquiry, modalities such as drawing, movement, writing, photography, photo art and eco-printing - are used to give voice to more than we can know through conceptual intelligence alone. It invites us to stay present to the here and now, engaging our felt sense as useful information in our meaning making.
We are concerned with the generation of knowings, as verb, rather than knowledge as noun. Knowledge implies an entity that can be extracted out of context and time, fixed and immutable.
Knowings imply movement and change, fluidity and irreducibility. It is always relevant to the context in which it is generated. Each knowing, though fleeting in its potency, lends threads to the next until it becomes a part of an approximation that is graspable, visible and able to be articulated (in some form).
We are creating space for understanding phenomena through artful experiences that integrate knowing, doing and making, with a value of complexity.
What guides our inquiry?
Beauty ~ We see beauty as our muse, who points us towards what is meaningful.
“The role of the artist is to transform crass living condition and beautify people's souls through its gifts”- Oscar Wilde
Multiplicity ~ knowing is subjective and there are many perspectives through which a phenomenal is experienced. We are aware of ourselves as subjective perspectival beings whose are contextually and relationally. Reality as we know it is constructed through our shared experiences from these perspectives.
Our inquiry into meaningful living is a layered account whereby multiple stories and voices; reflexive and introspective, are woven together to tell a larger story. We are inviting you to enter into the emergent experience of the inquiry. This method of inquiry is known as autoethnography. It displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural musings, stories, imagery and dialogues. These reflect the complexity of our struggle with the constructs of our culture- the patriarchal, capitalist norms that we experience at present and how we navigate this space..
'Before enlightenment chop wood. After enlightenment chop wood'
The beautiful mundane- Our coming to meaning happens in liminal spaces, hidden from view in the substrata of daily living. It is a rhizomatic, emergent process. Rhizomatic is a term developed by French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari describing research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical knowings to emerge. It is a living inquiry. Shaun Mc Niff (1992) contends that intention must give way to follow the soul as it moves through its local environment, through daily life. We value the extraordinary that emerges when we attend to the ordinary.
Acceptance of Impermanence
Co-creation ~ We are in a constant state of flux and reciprocity with the material world. We are both devolving and evolving simultaneously. When we contemplate this we become aware of our fragility, our vulnerability and our irreducible relationships.
Phenomenology ~ “Phenomenology is the study of essences,” articulates Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception. It offers an account of experienced space, time, body and human relations as we live them. It is not empirical or objectivist. It is shaped by our experience of a phenomena in the present moment, not what we think we know of it. It is an attempt to suspend, judgement or interpretations to meet what is before us, as it presents itself, opening us to new knowings and possibilities.
