School of Art - Theses

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Materialising feminism: object and interval

Phillips, Caroline ( 2017)

This practice-led research upholds a view of sexual difference as a mutable field constituted in relations between materiality, subject positions and the situated conditions of feminism. It considers multiple and different subjects as equivalent, in a framework of ethical relations across the divide between the feminine and the masculine. This contested binary, previously operating as a negative and oppositional framework, is now radically affirmed as a generative and affirmative topology of difference and relation. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s framework of the interval of sexual difference, the research locates relations of difference and connection within the generative space, place and threshold of the interval. Modes of making manifest these relations through a material-discursive practice, rendered via collaborative curatorial projects and art objects. Through this work sexual difference is repositioned as non-hierarchical and non-oppositional, whilst the affirmation of this binary through the interval situates identity through relations. The reconfiguration of sexual difference through the interval extends the possibilities for feminist art via its affirmative and productive new strategies for practice.