About

My practice is about knotting. It evolves through my need to sense, touch, and taste a language that is my own. I often feel stifled by dominant systems that seemingly control our culture. Therefore I aim to form a language, a space, a place that is rhythmical and flexible, and evolving through the process of knotting material. The material in this process is primarily physical, as I mark-make, sculpt and play with sound and video. However, act of knotting is also a philosophical process as I pull threads from new materialists and posthuman feminists into my practice. My aim is to communicate through a process of looping materials, and then knot words to form sentences to incite new patterns of thought.

Throughout my practice-based research, the line has been central. It has twisted and turned, been folded, looped, and knotted. It has become a source that ebbs and flows, and one that reflects me as a non-male artist and goes beyond my feminine being. As I stutter through the works of Gilles Deleuze, I continue to sense and develop my language. Deleuze pushes the boundaries and arouses a more flexible and malleable than my present language structure. My evolving language speaks beyond words. It enables me to sense the knots within my sensual, conceptual and socio-political knotwork while examining my being through my practice, and to challenge the creaking patriarchal structures that appears to be in disrepair.

While gleaning from the philosophical works of Deleuze and Guattari, Simon O’ Sullivan and Thomas Nail, my process of discovery-making is grounded in the philosophy of contemporary thinkers, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Karen Barad. Within this place/space, I am free to create. Here, Louise Bourgeois, Eve Hesse and Anne-Marie Schneider, among other artists who inspire and give energy and drive as I continue to search for the sensual, the rhythmic and the non-binary. Here the stutter is a form of eternal return and is always welcomed. While I remain aware that my mother tongue is best spoken without words.

My transition to doctoral research follows a 20-year career in TV production and the media industry.

Lynda Beckett is writing up a PhD at UAL (LCC). She graduated from the MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies programme at Central Saint Martins, London, in 2018, with a distinction. She won the Daniel Ford Prize in Innovation and Technology on graduating and has recently been highly commended for the Cecil Collins Memorial Award 2018.