Caretaking Trans-states

What does transness look or feel like inside painting or choreography or performance? What does it look or feel like inside other threshold practices like keening, sex, grief work, or drag? What are the somatic, social and artistic sequences that allow us to trans? This project is an exploration into the threshold spaces that liminal embodiments can hold open. Trans communities are plagued by invisibility and hypervisibility simultaneously, so the choice to explore transness as a method – a way of thinking and making – rather than another re-presentation of our bodies, is an attempt to uplift our deeper contributions, which are often missed in a culture of spectacle. In orienting away from literal representation, this research does not intend a withholding of the body as such, but it is an experiment in not giving the body away. This study looks for company with other trans bodies (in the non-human, ancient and natural worlds) and explores ways of rekindling kinship with them. Ironically perhaps, this searching occurs through practices like performativity and figurative painting, which show bodies, but it’s the push of this paradox which activates its own transing. Throughout this doctorate, I call my paintings away from the white box of the gallery, inviting them instead toward the black box of the theatre. Ultimately, I attempt to unhook transness from the silo of gender, and reweave us back into the cosmos of trans practices and rituals, such as the transing that is death. Through painting I reclaim trans kinship with mangroves, crepuscular time and keening, sharing how painting can be used to generate trans choreographies on and off the paintings surface. I consider the potential of embodied transing to work against what Carl Mika (2017) calls the colonial imperative of clarity. I reintroduce transing as unknowing, unknowable and undoing - following a hunch that transness holds medicine for our Pākehātanga.

Name thesis:degree_name

DocFA

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Fine Arts

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Trolove, Jack Michael

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Longley, Alys
• Cousins, James

• Painting
• Trans

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/72445

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/72445