THE JOURNEY- Yvonne Jones
As an older Welsh Woman Artist, working in the New Forest, I use my biological gender and cultural assets to explore my so far, ongoing life. Works are centred on my body as it exists each day, with its ageing flesh-and-blood, exploring and recording the phenomena of being human today. The work explores my life, as I observe experiences of my existence as a corporeal body, I engage the flesh and blood structure and interventions, memories, dreams and imagination. The helixical journey steers through painting (moving across expressionistic figurative and abstraction), into video, installation art, built canvases, and the use of new or revisited processes that evolve. I seek to express living as a 'now-human', and to seek out our relationship with notions of the posthuman. What lies ahead?
Approaching the Posthuman through Art .
Works include painting, video, installation, built canvases for more information re availability - contact me.
By exposing questions of the relationship between the human and posthuman my works engage with socio transformative issues. My born-female-body draws in issues of feminism. My Art Practice PhD Peeling the Body brought into focus the ongoing issues of gender in the modern day, with the possibility of the posthuman subject able to side step or rise beyond them. A wider concern is that of the future of the human. I do not agree with Stelarc when he claims 'the body is obsolete'. My concern is the if it is not valued and protected, we could well become an endangered species. By human I mean acknowledging, owning and exercising of the characteristics commonly associated with human existence. Experiences through the senses, emotions, compassion, empathy, disease and mortality. There is an area of difficulty using the term human, with regards social issues and the degradation of women. By posthuman I mean both the literal posthuman and the posthuman subject. The literal posthuman, imagined by Hans Moravec, believing we will be able to transfer the ‘I’ of ‘me’ or ‘you’, into a new machine leaving the worn out corporeal flesh and blood body behind and defunct, thus making immortality possible. The posthuman subject a more abstract idea, spoken of by Katherine Hayles, where we accept some of the notions of the posthuman, but continue to accept our mortality. My PhD thesis says more about this in detail, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/. |
We exist today between The Human and The Posthuman.
We live in an ever evolving posthuman world.
A world where the artist Stelarc has claimed that the body is obsolete.
Where the roboticist Hans Moravec states that the senses have no future.
Where the postmodern literary critic Katherine Hayles urges us to surrender
to our natural life span and death rather than seeking immortality.
Each work is Unique and of Itself, based on my corporeal existence.
The process of my work is one that travels through spirals, looping back, off at tangents, as it evolves.
Each project is a step of The Journey.
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