Sharing Space and Taking Care: Intersectional Feminist Approaches to Art Practice

Sharing Space and Taking Care: Intersectional Feminist Approaches to Art Practice explores the possibilities inherent within feminist art making to extend care (as a practice and a concept) to its audience. Through the examination of emancipatory theories of art by Jacques Rancière, and the feminist concerns of the conflation between labour and care for feminist subjects, installation, performance and drawing are used to investigate those caring possibilities within art.

The theories of Lola Olufemi, Donna Haraway, Legacy Russell, Joan Tronto, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray are examined to animate a feminist argument for creative world building and embodied knowledge. Intersectionality is explored and reveals the problems associated with gender and constituting women, whilst simultaneously pointing to the potential for sharing space through intersectional inclusive practices.

It is my contention that intersectional feminist art, in particular installation, is capable of holding the complex experiences of women in tension together, and that this capacity invests the audience in the process of re-imaging the world, outside of their current conditions or their responsibilities under capitalism. This manner of investing the audience in the process of re-imagining the world, outside of their current conditions, promotes a sense of agency, and as such can be viewed as an act of care. The receipt of care is what promotes meaningful engagement for people with the world that surrounds them. In this way, I think of care acting as a catalyst for the ability to engage with the world in a self-determined, meaningful way. The installation space holds a shared, common ground for that imaginative enterprise to take place. For art to engage its audience with the possibility of agential world re-imagining and engagement, a type of care has to have taken place.

The work of intersectional feminist artists Tai Shani, Lee Bul, Emily Perry, Jenny Saville and Jade Montserrat is discussed to evidence the argument for the caring potential of art and the sharing of space. The exploration of gender as performance and the potential of repetition and parody to enact agency through that performance leads to an examination of ASMR, mesmerism and mediumism. The slow process of drawing is considered in relationship to the visibility, bodily autonomy and agency available to women and marginalised genders, and as an extended act of care for the bodies that are represented. The possibility to view the body as landscape and journey are alluded to in the investigation of the fat body.

Finally, each element is brought together and interpreted as an abstract, embodied and bodily journey realised through the installation