Encountering Bodies, Prosthetics, and Bleeding: A Rhizomatic Arts-Based Inquiry

Abstract

Once a resolute constructivist, new readings, new theories, new onto-epistemologies nudged me into an unfamiliar and frightening, yet familiar and generative, space during my first years on the tenure track. I found myself in an ambiguous and fluid space between the paradigms of interpretivist and deconstructionist posthuman and ‘new’ materialism theories, and turned to arts-based research to research-create and think-with new scholarship. This paper, artmaking, and video of my artmaking entangle and provide lines of flight through art-text encounters with what became three interconnected concepts that emerged in and, thus, guide this inquiry: bodies, prosthetics, and bleeding. These concepts emerged as generative entanglements of becoming different through artful doing. Inspired by the concept of rhizomatic assemblage, this work seeks to move through various openings, creating various slippages between bodies (of writing, of making, of images) to explore what artistic research-creation might become through post-qualitative inquiry.