And The Skylarks Called Out Your Name: Posthuman Encounters with Loss Through Embracing the More-Than-Human World.
Howling at the sea, tears in damp morning air, songs on the wind, syrup-thick summer warmth, dawn before midnight, red moon, humming, whispers. Meet me where the sky meets the sea. This thesis proposes that immersion in the more-than-human world offers possibilities for an exploration of loss and its transformative potential. Loss here not only relates to personal bereavement, but also to a lack of connection with the natural world; in these post-Covid days many are feeling overwhelmed by feelings of isolation and alienation and a sense that something intrinsic has been lost in the modern world. Posthumanism creates a supportive framework to engage with notions of reciprocity, connectivity, embodiment, care and transformation in relation to death and the grieving processes it engenders. Practice-based art research, in both interconnected written and visual form, allows a working through of these concepts, making tangible their entanglements and in-betweenness through the incorporation of ancient wisdom, new science and intuitive expression. Combining critical discourse with nonrational forms of expression, the reader is guided through a multitude of imaginative encounters: wild swims where grief and magic meet across winter skies, cyclical seasonal rhythms and speaking other tongues, the life and death of vegetal beings, monstrous woods and former selves, and the mysterious point at which the sun is perpetually swallowed by the horizon. This aims to create a new multi-sensory language that engenders heterogenous perspectives and facilitates an attunement to a capacious world of possibilities. What matters? Who matters? How can loss transform and expand our ideas of being and lives lived beyond human, animal, other? What might we have to change? What might bloom, dissolve and re-emerge within us from alternative ways of thinking, knowing and becoming? This research offers expanded notions of humanness at a crucial time in the history of the planet and proposes ways of navigating the future, avoiding the catastrophic consequences of continuing as we are.
posthumanism, entanglement, encounters, Posthuman, Multidisciplinary, Photography, agency, Diffraction, affect theory, Affect, Nature, loss, grief, Bereavement, More-than-human geographies, more-than-human
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations