Fluid Encounters

: touch experience in scenographic practice and perception

Abstract

This doctoral thesis has emerged from my practice as a scenographer and engages with embodied experience of scenography both as a maker and as a participant in artworks. Taking a fluid view that is stirred by the feminist philosphy of Luce Irigaray and a tide of environmental and material thinkers who have followed in her wake, I address touch experiences inherent in the production and reception of the scenographic. Drawing from my professional practice designing participatory environments, I explore processes of touch through the development of two installation artworks, challenging where touch experience can be understood to begin and end, exploring the furthest reaches and the murkiest depths from where touch continues to be stirred, from the proximal and intimate to the distant, longing for touch. The research findings that form this thesis have emerged through a series of practice-based encounters; immersion in fluids and environments, social and material exchanges, sculptural undertakings. The knowledge formations and their documentation exist in words and images, but also in sensations in the gut, in physical recollections and visceral affirmations. Much like the materials of my practice and the thinking that emerges from it, everything flows, nothing is stable. Fittingly, for a field that works with processes and with evolving forms, there is a fluidity to the formation of ideas and materials that, as the research progresses, becomes not only reflective but instructive, in ways of undertaking practice, but also as a way of rethinking bodies, human and non- human, and their worldly interpenetrations. These findings have important contributions to make to practitioners, visitors and thinkers who are active in this field of scenographic experience.

Date of Award	1 Feb 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Sponsors	technē AHRC
Supervisor	Adrian Heathfield (Director of Studies) & Emily Orley (Co-Supervisor)