Abstract

This practice-based inquiry asks, how might the knot allow material to be a conceptual, sensual and socio-political encounter? The research explores the knot as a site of intensity and seeks to expand Gilles Deleuze's concept of 'The Fold' (1993) via the mode of ‘thinking through making’ (Ingold, 2013). It also develops the concept of the fold through the craft practice of knotting and the metaphor of the knot as a tool within the fertile ground of new materialist and posthuman feminist scholarship.

Pulling on threads from Deleuze's fold and entangling notions of Rosi Braidotti's zoe/geo/techno assemblage (2022), this project unravels patriarchal and hierarchical binary structures of the human/non-human, life/death and created/found. The knotting process employs a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007) within the flux of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway,1988), and is informed by art practice, which facilitates access to materiality as a sensual, conceptual, and socio-political encounter. This inquiry proposes a posthuman knowing as embodied, embedded, and relational, within a geological environment in motion, where the agency of material is explored within a specific space.

As multifaceted forms, knots allow the researcher to create fields of inquiry, within the zoe/geo/techno assemblage, through experimentation and exploration. Thinking through making also enables the untapped sensual, the informal held within the virtual plane, to seep out and form new knots/knotworks, different cartographies of inquiry, adding knowledge to the transdisciplinary fields of posthuman feminist theory and practice.