The gape at the gallery: writing from the flesh

This piece offers up a methodology for writing about art — in this case an exhibition of jewellery titled She wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered (Lisa Walker, RMIT Design Hub Gallery, 2018). The approach centres around coming to language through somatic practice — or a speculative somatic encounter — as a way to get beyond concept and to another kind of language that is not already structured by extant paradigms of knowledge. The proposition is that thinking that is disconnected from the body is a narrowing of the mind, a narrow discursivity. The methodology attempts to start in the body, to listen to the body as a move toward an expanded response to the artwork. From this place we might discover another kind of art writing, another way of noticing different things, differently; themes come into view that may otherwise have been occluded; resonances and rhymes across experiences give rise to something novel.