Forming knots
This practice-based research investigates the meanings of the knot through art practice, theory, and writing. The three cannot be separated. The knotting process forms my artistic practice and informs my critical thinking. Knots form and entangle and become multifaceted entities with intensity. Each knot evolves, giving material agency as part of ‘an iterative, ongoing, indeterminate process’ (Gamble et al., 2019, p. 124). My making process is repetitive, fractal and chaotic, yet held within a space, an environment where Cartesian distinctions of body/mind, nature/culture, and male/female are no longer adequate (Braidotti, 2022, p.100-102). This research adopts Rosi Braidotti’s stance of posthuman feminist thinking, specifically her zoe/geo/techno assemblage (2022). This concept envisions the universe as an entanglement of life, where the physical and technological merge, embracing technological advances and acknowledging environmental destruction. Within this concept, the subjective ‘I’ dissolves and becomes ‘we’ within a non-hierarchal framework that ‘aspires to nurture and implement the ongoing process of unfolding alternative and transformative paths of becoming’ (2022, pp. 6–8).
Many threads from Braidotti’s assemblage flow through this inquiry to form knots. This research is embedded within life (zoe). It folds and forms knots within different environments (geo) that coexist within a data space (techno), realised within my making process.
The knot
My process is an act of folding to create physical, sensual and socio-political knots. The knots are multi-dimensional entities, porous and held within an environment - porous because they allow different materials to flow through. There is no inside or outside, no impenetrable boundaries. Knots are always in flux. En masse, knots realise as knotworks within my making practice. In a knotwork, a knot can be a single entity that folds from the virtual (the mind) into the physical as it becomes form. Knots materialise as nodes within a cartography that unfolds, revealing the new.
A Knotwork - To Return/ To Rewind/ To Reform (2021) – Lynda Beckett (2021a)
This inquiry is about the act of folding to create knots. I knit, crochet, draw and make films. The knot is my tool and methodology. According to Tim Ingold (2013) the creativity of ‘thinking through making’ lies in the improvisation of the processes rather than an innovation’. Within my process, nothing is ever finished, it is a meeting point. For me, the knot is a multi-dimensional entity, an ongoing binding together of flows, a thought in flux that evolves within a space. Theoretically, there are no limits to the fields of scholarship in which the knot can exist. Seen and unseen knots in knotworks have equal status within their environments. Knots have agency[1] for transformation in an infinite knotwork. In my practice, the knot enables exploration of the sensual, conceptual and socio-political as a material encounter. My understanding of the knotting of thoughts through making has developed from Deleuze’s The Fold (1993).
[1] If each knot has agency, it is a life force and a being, according to Thomas Nail (2018). For Nail, ‘being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete ‘things’ (rerum) are composed of corporeal flows (corpora) that move together (conflux) and fold over themselves (nexus) in a woven knotwork (contextum)’ (2018, p. 11).