THE JOURNEY
Through visual language, drawing, painting, installations, I am able to 'see' to understand more. It is my way of thinking. Image (to words); (words) to image. Early works centred on my favourite places, family, surroundings, memories, helping me to know where I was in the world, looking out from inside. I was the fulcrum of my work.
Through visual language, drawing, painting, installations, I am able to 'see' to understand more. It is my way of thinking. Image (to words); (words) to image. Early works centred on my favourite places, family, surroundings, memories, helping me to know where I was in the world, looking out from inside. I was the fulcrum of my work.
Click Images to expose links, background and processes
X/uberant (the joy of being alive)
clicks into PROJECTS, where CURRENT WORKS opens to an ongoing series of Built Canvases . Yvonne Jones 2023- 24
Hearing the term posthuman excited me.
"I am human, what is this posthuman?' Wanting to know more took me on a journey. With internal replacement lenses my body was altered by technology. Through my art practice, the corporeal became central to my curiosity, it was finely sharpened following my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. My thanks to the medics who enabled me to collect material for the works.
I have recently be found to have cancer cells in my oesophagus.
The works are centred on experiences of existence of this ageing female flesh-and-blood 'unit'. Using biological gender and cultural effects to explore and make visible an ongoing life, the phenomena of being human today (a ' now-human'). Observing the corporeal structure with its medical events and interventions, memories, dreams and imagination, embedding them in the visual language of the works. The multi-helical journey steers through different art processes; drawing, painting, expressionistic figurative and abstraction, video, installation, built canvases and texts. This now-human / emerging posthuman, seeking out relationships with living today and notions of the posthuman
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Approaching the Posthuman through Art .
Stelarc claims 'the body is obsolete', Moravec that 'The Senses have no Future'. Through my art practice I observe my own existence, exploring, exposing. The significance of experience gained from the body, the senses, that Stelarc and Moravec dismiss. By exposing questions of the relationship between human and posthuman the works engage with socio transformative issues. My born-female-corporeal-body draws in issues of feminism. Peeling the Body brought focus to the ongoing issues of gender in the modern day, with the possibility of a posthuman subject side stepping / rising beyond them. Human, a complex noun sometimes associated with gender inequality, also the characteristics commonly associated with human existence. Experiences through the senses, emotions, compassion, empathy, disease and mortality. Posthuman, the literal and the subject. The literal imagined by Hans Moravec, we transfer the ‘I’ of ‘me’ or ‘you’, into a new machine, leaving the worn out corporeal body behind, defunct, making immortality possible. The posthuman (subject) written of by Katherine Hayles, accepts some of the notions of the posthuman, but continues to accept our mortality. (yvonne jones 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.
Current Work shows the current position of the Journey. Each project is a step of The Journey.