…I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind. - Adrienne Rich, 1997

This body of work exposes a creative research process that began with a one and a half hour private performance ritual, witnessed by two friends, in which I literally wrote on my body. The documented private performance ritual launched the artographical inquiry that makes up part of my masters thesis in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. The performance ritual was an intuitive effort, undertaken in part, to embody and understand the numerous feminists who compellingly summon women to write from their own bodies and write with the body as a form of resistance. My personal intention and desire in this performance ritual was to begin to externalize and embody writing as art. What has become apparent with the unfolding of this exhibition is that it transgresses the boundaries between shame and freedom through the intimate and personal exposure of both the subconscious female mind and the naked female body, through the ritual process of a/r/tography. While I have felt at home with the method of a/r/tography, I have also struggled with the challenge of being conscious of and activating the often conflicting roles of artist, researcher and educator this method demands. Through this struggle I have come to recognize art making as research and curriculum making, seen art as curriculum, experienced performance ritual as pedagogy and worked with the body as text. This statement is an attempt to articulate a complex, exciting and emergent research journey.

Who will read this body? was preceded by a thirteen year individual and collaborative (co-creative) art practice of (re)presenting the human body, predominantly the female body, in two dimensional drawings and collages, and in the multi-dimensional medium of performance rituals. The process and experience of art making is extremely important for my art and practice. I have attempted to bring the art making process into the gallery setting through performance rituals co-created by myself and the co-creators/models of the projects. The installation of Who will read this body?, which will include an artist talk and public performance ritual, reveals the raw, organic, ritual process of a/r/tographic research and documentation, that has in the past been hidden from the viewer/reader/learner in my art exhibitions and public performance rituals. I have come to learn through artography that my art has a complex agenda. Not only does it encompass honouring and freeing the human body, but it also serves to challenge and bring to the surface a wounded patriarchal culture of shame and fear. I live within and embody this oppressive and hurting culture on a daily basis and believe that it is rooted in and perpetuated by the philosophical rupture between the mind and body, that has existed within western society for more than five hundred years. In this split, the mind is valued over the body, associated with the masculine and aligned with societal power, while the body is associated with the feminine and the natural world and is considered something to be controlled and brought into submission. In admitting my own struggle within this philosophical split I come to acknowledge my self as a microscopic part of a whole system.

I begin this journey with my self; with my own body and my own writing. I welcome the viewer/reader/learner into the exhibition space as witness to my artographic testimony; a testimony that has the potential to disrupt body/mind dualisms and illicit feelings of shame and discomfort. Drawing upon the feminist phrase "the personal is the political", I invite the reader/viewer/learner to witness the personal with or without shame and to move with the personal to the larger, more complex challenge of re-forging the often dissociated and hurting elements of mind, individual, and language, with those of body, communal, and image.

In this work I ask the viewer/reader/learner to ponder with me the questions that have troubled my own a/r/tographic journey:

Am I not making art?
Am I not researching?
Am I not educating?
Am I not writing?
Am I not performing?
Am I not ritualizing?
Am I not learning?
Am I not my self?