Visual Silences, Nomadic Narratives

In this paper I look into letters and paintings of Gwen John’s, an expatriate Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. John’s epistolary narratives and paintings are placed within a conceptualization of time as duration, a continuum where past, present and future coexist and wherein linear sequentialities are broken. In this light, untimely events emerge, narrative subjectivities are dispersed and forces of narratability are released. What I argue is that John’s letters and paintings create a narrative plane for visual silences and nomadic narratives to be explored as events that force us to think differently about the ethics and aesthetics of what human communication entails.

Citation:
Tamboukou, Maria (2008) 'Visual Silences, Nomadic Narratives'. Auto/biography Yearbook, Vol. 2, pp.1-20. Nottingham: Russels Press..