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Form(less)


Lucy O'Donnell, Independent Artist

 

The objective of this research and proposal is to ground certain commonalities between drawing and miscarriage or pregnancy without birth. By acknowledging becoming, difference, trace and liminality the paper seeks consideration of the lived experience of drawing, integrating its anti-thesis of ‘unbecoming’, maternal loss and reproductive failure. This leads to a second question; how can the experience of miscarriage as an unraveling or unbecoming of self, nuance the emphasis on ‘becoming’ in the discourse of drawing. By considering the significance and role of image, particularly sonographer’s ultra sound image, discussions around ‘baby’ or ‘mother’, reinforce both internal and external commodification of bodies. Resulting from this limits the ‘emptying out’ of all pregnancies (Scuro 2017).


Methodology
The methodology looks to Meskimmon and Sawdon’s ‘allotropic figuration’(2016) a proposal that makes way for material changes in meaning and identity. This chemical and epigenetic undertaking utilizes lines and marks to express ‘an unfolding of matter and meaning through manifold, non-binary, non-hierarchical modes’. By reflecting upon the potential of non-binary, non-hierarchical unfolding possibilities of drawing, the paper rethinks allotropic openness in the context of the pregnant body. Here the feeling of failure resulting from miscarriage can be navigated and redirected away from capitalist culture and ableist ideals, which determines productivity, and in miscarriage casts the pregnant body aside, withdrawing subjective lived experience. The methodology uses and rethinks this ambiguity, looking towards drawings resistance to expectation, where concepts of failure are nonnegotiable. The methodology looks towards queer theory to assert failure. Here it is recognized that queer bodies are set up to fail and by embracing failure alternatives arise challenging hetronormative conditions, making way for unpredictability, chance and the unknown. The methodology acknowledges Judith / Jack Halberstam’s term ‘the wild’ that re-positions failure, re-orientating its usefulness as a position where unpredictability can thrive. By utilizing this method the research rethinks corporeal subjectiveness in drawing.


Contributions
This research proposes Western culture social anthropology advocates a ‘telos’, which, when reviewed can rethink the pregnant body becoming. Drawing is certain in its ambiguity, it regularly plays against product, where trace(ing) is liberated from surface and phenomenological experience becomes the work. The liminality of drawing can sustain a position of not knowing, exploration and instability. The contributions of this research will revisit the overlap becoming of drawing and subjective pregnant bodies, to rethink loss, failure and form(less). Rethinking drawing and human science, focusing on lived experience and emphasizing the philosophical significance of maternal constructs.

 

Keywords:  drawing, miscarriage, lived-experience, failure, loss


Biography

In-between being a mother of two Lucy O’Donnell makes drawings, thinks about pregnancy without birth and spends a lot of time wondering . Significant projects include PhD Drawing Vignettes: perpetual becomings…,  Sitting with Uncertainty, The Prison Drawing Project, TRACEY project space - Ballycastle Vignettes, The Partly Present Mother, Collaborations with Restless linnings and humhyphenhum(ha), residencies at Drawing Projects UK, Ballinglen Arts Foundation Ireland, Ricklundgården Sweden and Lincoln Cathedral.