THE JOURNEY- Yvonne Jones
From painting, into video, installation art, painting revisited and built canvases - I use my body as I exist each day, with its ageing flesh-and-blood material. Exploring and recording the phenomenon of being human as we / I, know it today, Using body experiences, memories and imagination, to ask where we are in relation to the possibility of a posthuman life
Approaching the Posthuman through Art .
Works include painting, video, installation, built canvases
for more information re availability of works - contact me. Using appropriate materials and process my artwork explores the meaning of being human with the corporeal bodies we still are. In the work I use the corporeal body that I am. My born-female-body draws in issues of feminism. My PhD Peeling the Body http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/, brought focus to the ongoing issues of gender in the modern day, with the possibility of the posthuman subject being able to side step or rise beyond them. The 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 I do not agree with Stelarc when he claims 'the body is obsolete'.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 exposing questions of the relationship between the human and posthuman my works engage with socio transformative issues, the first time I heard that we ‘may already be posthuman’ (in a conference in FACT, Liverpool UK) I wondered how I had not heard this previously. The term was etched in my mind. I needed to examine the notion. As part of this journey I became resident artist in the Centre for research for Cancer Immunology, UoS and currently with Foreign Objekt. By human I mean the acknowledging, owning and exercising of the characteristics commonly associated with human existence. Experiences through the senses, emotions, compassion, empathy, disease and mortality. I acknowledge the area of difficulty using the term human with regards social issues and 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 travels through spirals, looping back, off at tangents, as it evolves.
Each project is a step of The Journey.