not nor III

 

While not nor I explored identity and movement through a participatory art installation, and not nor II explored relation and positioning through collaboration and performance, not nor III focuses on the process of becoming that can emerge when living and creating from the margins.

not nor III begins by exploring what is carried in the body when living in this in-between space. It examines how embodied experiences take form through artistic expression and how these translations can create moments of recognition that bring people together. From this position, I begin to understand myself differently, leaning on Ahmed’s (2006) understanding that how we inhabit the world shapes what becomes possible for us to see, feel and become. hooks (1990) states that the margin can be a space of radical possibility and living, and creating from this position has gradually changed how I see myself and the world around me.

One way I have come to understand this shift is through what I describe as a process of uncloseting. Uncloseting is often associated with sexuality, but here it extends beyond that meaning. It refers to the ways people move through the world performing identities they believe they are expected to inhabit, often without fully recognising who they are. Feminist theorists have long described identity as something enacted through social expectations and repeated performances (Butler, 1990).
 

I use the term uncloseting to describe a gradual process through which these performed identities begin to loosen. Living and creating from the margins has opened a space in which aspects of myself that were previously unseen could begin to surface.
 

This stage of the project unfolds through a series of poems that move between present, past and future. The poems move across a wide emotional landscape. 
 

Each poem explores experiences and emotions, asking how these feelings sit inside me and how they come to be carried and felt in my body. The poems are seen as the first translation, from the body to words. From there, the work continues through other forms of artistic translations. The poems are translated into a series of photographs, which then generate a short stop-motion film. After that a short sound d piece. The work then is shared with other artists, performers or creatives (including collaborators from not nor II and new who wish to participate), who are invited to explore and respond to the material. The work then unfolds across a sequence of artistic translations. As the work passes through different artistic media and through the interpretations of other artists, it becomes a series of evolving expressions. Each translation offers another way of  

seeing and feeling the same emotional core, allowing these emotions and processes of becoming to continue to unfold. In this sense, meaning develops through interaction and exchange, where knowledge emerges through conversation and relational engagement. This also resonates with Bourriaud’s (2002) argument that contemporary art often operates through encounters between people, objects and situations. As the work moves between text, image, sound and other unexpected media, it reflects what Pink (2015) describes as sensory ways of knowing, where experience is explored through different forms of making and perception.
 

While the work opens to other creatives, they respond to poems, images, video, or sound without knowing the stories that inspired them. They meet the work where they are, bringing their own experiences and art practice. Meanings shift, stretch and become sometheing else. This exchange echoes what Grant Kester (2004) describes as dialogical practice, where meaning is formed in relation, in response, in encounter. And somewhere in this process, I wonder if their work might change how that story lives in me, the one that first found its way into the poem.
 

Through this process, artistic practice becomes a way of thinking through what is felt and lived. Moving between writing, image, sound, and other creative practices allows different aspects of becoming surface in ways that one medium couldn't. The work remains attentive to the shifting and unfinished nature of the self. In this sense, not nor continues to operate from the margins as a space of possibility (hooks, 1990), where new ways of seeing, feeling and understanding can gradually emerge through practice (Ingold, 2013).

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Across its different stages, the work moved from identity to relation to becoming. not nor I explored how identity shifts through movement, reflection and the presence of others. not nor II opened the work to collaboration, showing how meaning changes when it passes through other bodies, voices and interpretations. not nor III turned towards what is carried in the body and towards the process of becoming that can emerge when fixed identities begin to loosen.
 

What has become clear through this work is that meaning does not stay still. It moves. It shifts. Then shifts again, because we are always in motion. Artistic practice is not just a way of expressing what we know or feel. It is how we come to understand it.

The project suggests that the in-between is not empty - it is full of possibility and growth. A place where reflection, encounter, and new ways of understanding and being can surface.
 

not nor becomes a way of staying with the tough questions rather than moving too quickly to find the answers. It is not only something we make, but something we think through and share with others. Through writing, image, sound, movement and collaboration, meaning is unfolded through dialogue, through relation, through what is lived and felt. In this sense, not nor doesn’t try to represent or translate experiences, it works from within it, allowing understanding to emerge slowly, through practice, through others, and through and in the space in-between.