STONE & BREATH: INHERITING MATERIALITY AND EMBODIED PRACTICE
by Emma Fielden

MFA Thesis, UNSW Sydney, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture.
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ABSTRACT

This project explores materials as active collaborators in artistic practice, focusing on the ways in which their agency carries and transmits histories and legacies. My research attends to materials as vital agents that activate embodied legacies through their properties and relations with the body. The project draws on a theoretical framework grounded in New Materialist writing by Jane Bennett, feminist perspectives from Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray, and post-structuralist philosophies from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I position artistic practice as a site where materials, bodies, histories and legacies shape one another. The project begins with a collection of materials I inherited from the studio of Australian artist, jeweller and poet Margaret West (1936–2014). West’s marble entering my studio revealed a new approach to working with stone, which I then extended to lapis lazuli, malachite, turquoise and spinel. West’s silver entering my studio evoked my personal history with music: my classical silver flute, and my relationships with my flute teacher and my mother (a soprano). My own embodied legacies of sound and breath emerged from West’s silver, revealing how inherited materials carry embodied knowledge as well as material lineage. Through the work of artists Carolee Schneemann, Mel O’Callaghan and Lee Ufan, I discuss materially driven art practices that foreground the agency of matter and the body to explore how embodied and material legacies shape and are shaped by artistic practice. I discuss how these artists engage gesture, breath and mark-making, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between material and bodily forces. Through expanded approaches to drawing, painting, performance and sound, a methodology emerges centred on material experimentation and transformative processes including crushing, mark-making and embodied gesture. The project results in two bodies of work: 'From Breath'—a drawing and sound-based performance where a giant handcrafted silver flute is played while marking a black square canvas, and 'The Sky Swallowed a Stone'—a series of paintings incorporating layers of crushed stones, mineral colour, oil and veiled silverpoint. The project proposes a new way of working in the studio where inherited materials and embodied legacies are living forces, transforming artistic practice and being transformed as the work unfolds.