Plane of no sense (2023) – Lynda Beckett
Plane of no sense (2023) materialised when words made no sense. In Logic of Sense (2015), Gilles Deleuze speaks of no(n)sense as the underlying basis of sense and being. Nonsense and sense co-exist. Sense is a multifaceted entity and often the product of inter-related things.
Planes of nonsense (2023) below, is a knotting of thoughts and the unthought, that manifested as a form. The expression, the expressed and the sensed, became a mass of singularities (Deleuze, 2015, pp. 69–75) through making, an act of doing, touching and sensing. Planes of nonsense becomes a folding of folds, a knot, a multi-dimensional entity created within the flow of an evolving space. Folding the paper enabled me to change the cartography, lines, and thoughts as I passed the paper between my fingers. In turn, fold after fold, the creases developed new lines of thought, which have evolved through the process of making.
Planes of nonsense (2023) [1] – Lynda Beckett
The artist and philosopher Erin Manning develops the method of thinking through making via the concept of ‘the minor gesture’ (2016), as a breakaway from epistemological thinking. According to Manning, ‘The minor gesture, allied to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the minor, is the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation’ (2016, p. 1). Manning’s concept appears to be an explorative research method where minor and major gestures entangle during the creative process. The major gesture appears to be the site of intensity, the space or the place of creation. The minor gesture seems more subtle. It is the unseen ‘force that courses through’ (Manning, 2016, p. 1) the work and its making. It is the speculative and not yet revealed, the force in flux, the unknown, the unnamed, perhaps even the sensual, that seeps from the site of curiosity and through the ‘finished’ work.
Emerging Thoughts (2023) – Lynda Beckett
For me, Emerging Thoughts (2023) is a mapping of the unknown. A process of mark-making, one semi-transparent image, a thought, merges with another. Something different is formed as the relationship between maker and material evolves within an environment in flux. When materials are folded together, the fields of art practice, new materialism and posthuman feminism produce fertile ground for new knowledge to emerge.
[1] Planes of nonsense (2023) was part of SNAPSHOTS, a PGR exhibition in CSM library 01-31 March 2023.
[2] Artworks to be found at my website, https://www.lyndabeckett.org/.
[3] The hyphen between re and consider allows for a continuous flow of considering and reconsidering, a motion that is always in flux.