My thesis project, ingress, reflects on themes of relation via objects, experience, materials, other people.
The period of time the writing covers and the site of writing are both emphasised as important. As the work progresses the focus is increasingly held by (and moves further into) the interior domestic space where it was written –– a phenomenology of the close at hand.
Ingress presents an oblique narrator, with positionality, perspective and personal pronouns shifting flagrantly, sometimes within the space of a sentence. This instability exemplifies the pivoting nature of the piece, as well as its preoccupation with gender and non-binary identity, and how this relates to the bodied experience. Embodiment in the work is often oblique – the narrator is concerned with finding proofs for their self via inference: via nature, contact, objects, materials, light.
ingress approaches its subject by prioritising the lived experience as primary (re)source. This close attention to the everyday, however, is drawn through with research, which functions to accompany and enrich the quotidian, much as culture interacts as supplement to daily life. This citational practice freely appropriates quotations within the space of the text, while also demonstrating intimacy with those cited, especially in the two middle essays, which write actively via practitioners.
Ingress uses this framework to consider themes of relationality: of the self, intimacy, the emotional, gender, material, queerness, attention.
