Well for better or worse I am booked into the conference at Curtin on the 6 November. I will be flying up and back which has its own stresses after the bumpy ride I had on the last flight! I have only just finished a full draft to give to my supervisor and it is possible she will hate it. We joke a lot about her 'red biro' BUT hopefully she won't want me to make too many drastic changes. It has taken hours and hours and hours to write 3000 words. It is really difficult to condense an idea, explain it and back it up with references without boring the crap out of the reader in that many words.These two paragraphs may not survive Ann's 'red biro' so is not put up as an example of 'best practice' by any means, but is the intro at this stage. I have tried to write the whole thing so that any intelligent person can understand it without needing the theoretical background in the field I am working in, it gets heavier as I get further into it.
One paragraph in a science-fiction novel offered a glimpse into an Imaginal world and confirmed something I already felt I knew, a ‘given’, a ‘truth’. It described how the main character encountered a solid wall, dematerialised and rematerialised on the other side. Despite the amount of evidence that should have undermined it this improbable account of reality instead supported my intuition about the nature of material existence - that it wasn’t really material at all. The image that appeared in my adolescent imagination provided the blueprint for a two-part methodology on which I conduct my art practice today: Image First and Truth to Image.
As a visual artist it is not surprising that I make sense of the world through images. Painting and drawing allows me to test ideas and explore places limited only by my imagination and artistic ability. Instead of dismissing imaginary wanderings as fantasy, Imaginal theory contends that images created by the imagination not only have meaning but the potential to effect change on a deeply psychic level. Consequently, painting can ‘alter the texture of consciousness….’ because ‘representability’ allows symbols to be transposed into thinking. (Winquist,1981: 31) My experience confirms this, however, although making images is a personal and mostly individual pursuit I am far more interested in its capacity to connect me to a shared realm of human consciousness.
