Between an ‘I’ and a ‘You’
It was around midday when I found myself alone in the art room taking in the quiet presence of the space around me. There was a bottle of glue, opened, and scrap paper lying on the table. Pans of watercolour paint lined up neatly; some dry and pale, others damp and vibrant after a hive of activity an hour before. The afternoon sun was seeping into the concrete floor and a cold draft whispered through the open window. I was floating in a hazy dream, surreal and saturated. I took a picture of this tableau, both still and moving, in time. All the while I was conscious of feeling small in this place, and perhaps, the picture has captured -and framed – my feelings both known and unknown to me.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, The Art Room, 2023, photograph.
The name of this space (The Art Room) frames, and limits, how it could be inhabited. It is where its inhabitants imbue it with meaning through encounters, discoveries, and the act of dwelling in it. Emerging from these interactions is a web of relationships between the space and the people (as well as things) that are part of our lived reality. This moment, along with the various activities of Companioning, Dialogue, and creating multimodal Intersubjective Responses (ISR) have led me to posit that relational presence is collaboratively created through lived experiences.
Much like taking in the moment that afternoon, lived experiences arise from unique encounters between one and the other. The ‘other’ might even be inanimate such as a piece of batik cloth or a lump of clay. By engaging with these raw materials, one discovers their own stories, refreshing and reawakening one’s language and giving form to the way one feels things (Tufnell and Crickmay, 2004, p.41). The encounter is a moment of kairos where, unlike the vast expanse of chronological time, “it is the coming into being of a new state of things, and it happens in a moment of awareness” (Stern, 2011, p.7). My own experience of creating Mr Oggy, my multimodal ISR, had heightened my awareness of feelings that arose in the process of creation. Forgoing my usual favourites of pencil and paper, I found myself standing before a huge lump of clay. Clay, in itself, is a material that embodies ambiguity. It can be both dense and malleable. Sturdy, but upon drying, fragile. It can be moulded but it also determines its own form. I had no idea what form I was going to make when I first held a small palm-sized lump of clay. I explored it with my hands, rolling it around, making clay noodles out of it. Feeling it resist and give way as I pressed it, nudged it, pinched it, watched it. All the while, I noticed how cold, and how much stiffer, it was. How unfamiliar this cold clay feels in my hands! As if in response to that strange sensation, I took a piece of raw batik scrap and fashion it into a scarf for Mr Oggy. It was something that reminded me of home in a foreign place and filled with uncertainty…and also possibilities.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, Mr Oggy, 2023, Clay, Googly Eyes, Raw pink batik cloth, pink colour pencil, and green plastic lid.
These constellation of feelings and thoughts emerged during a short period of time reflecting how lived experiences “unfold in the seconds that make up now” (Stern, 2004, p.8). Additionally, these fragments of present moment “capture a sense of the subject’s style, personality, preoccupations, or conflict” (Stern, 2004, p.16). In my case, tactile and kinesthetic experience of working with clay heightened my sense of touch and evoked feelings of unfamiliarity and a striking sense of discomfort from deep within. These feelings were keenly felt in the present moment then… and now as it is relived in hindsight. Hence, lived experiences arise when one encounters another.
It is through such encounters between one and another that a relational presence is established. While the previous example focuses on a lived experience that involves an inanimate object, the sound and movement activity highlights how relational presence is constructed collaboratively through lived experiences. According to Rosalind Pearmain, “Relationship in its earliest forms seems to require a kind of echo and resonance with what is communicated from the other” (2001, p. 5). The activity of listening and responding through movements involves such a process. An echo - a forlorn whisper where one hears his or her own amplified cry - acknowledges oneself as the source of a voice, as the subject calling. This was further amplified during the activity. Reacting to unexpected changes in gestures, the guttural snorts, chittering, and whoops came from deep within me, like a primal response to stimulus. In reaching into parts which one is conditioned to block out or grow out of, one gets in touch with the currents flowing beneath what one is doing and feeling (Tufnell and Crickmay, p. 41) Through such visceral expressions, one becomes aware that exists an ‘I’, to the ‘You’ who is also responding through movement and / or sounds.
Combined ISR by Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun and Lachlan, Big Emu Energy, 2023.
In the act of resonance, where energy (and sound) vibrates and expands from one point to another, one becomes sensitive to minute gestures and sounds. An extension of the hand might implicitly signal a shift in roles or an upward lilt of a voice could elicit a change of gestures. The ‘I’ meets ‘you’ through an extension of the senses in forms of vibrations, resonance, and sounds and ‘we’ inhabit this space at the very moment together (Thorbun and Hibbard, 2008, p.157). Attuning to the hints and suggestions, meaning – in the form of a fluid code of gestures and sounds - is created between the Inquirer and the Companion as both collaborate on this turn-taking performance. Yet, despite this union, there is still a clear sense of self while still being open to another. This ‘emphathic dwelling’ allows the researcher to stay with the participants’ description while also maintaining one’s own position (Churchill et al, 1998, as cited in Finlay, 2011, p.78). There would be a misstep, or a lag in response which suggests that while there is a collaboration, one thinks and feels distinctly from the other. In acknowledging that, there was still a flow of energy felt between myself and my companion as we weaved a narrative of sound and gestures. Hence, a relational presence is constructed collaboratively through shared or similar lived experiences.
Through the act of Companioning, feelings and concerns are given space to emerge and be. Conversations, with its roots in old French, means “to move about or dwell in a certain way” (etymonline.com). Through conversations, pockets of space are co-created through speech and charged with meaning. Some spaces are filled and shared with another, while others are left empty or vague; perhaps intentionally bracketed out. Should I share this? Maybe not... In the process, one taps directly into the self that is known and also one that is hidden and unspoken, unexpressed even to oneself (Tufnell and Crickmay, 2004, p.41). Furthermore, multimodal expressions made and perceived with the five senses and beyond helps one to “move beyond explanations and prescribed sets of speech patterns and open oneself to surprises and discoveries that occur through interplay” (Mcniff, 2004, p.91). By personifying Mr Oggy, I speak to my companion through an extension of myself. I always send postcards to friends when I am overseas…But I wish I could get a postcard too. There was silence for just a few seconds but I noticed a heavy and hollow feeling rising and filling my chest. The cold air weighed down between myself and my companion. Mr Oggy was so tiny sitting on the big white table. My thoughts are made into reality through spoken words and a quiet acknowledgement of their existence by my companion. Through personification, what I say grows more alive as it is heard and received by my companion (Tufnell and Crickmay, 2004, p.42). Interestingly, what I do not say also fills the air like in a fermata hovering over a melody. Feelings of disjuncture and dissonance were given space to rise and stay in this bubble that we have created. Their materiality arrested and amplified through scribbled words in orange ink and their forms inhabiting a recording set in time.
Relational presence, that is co-created through lived experiences, allows one to explore and discover facets and fissures that are (un)known. “Conversations loosens and reforms us in the questions that arise, in incompleteness, differences, beginnings, contradictions, new possibilities – a surrendering of what we know towards what is as yet unknown – sensed perhaps, but as yet unformed” (Tufnell and Crickmay, 2004, p 42). Focusing on the second Dialogue and the ISR, I keenly observed and felt similar motifs and imagery that my companion and I used and talked about. It is as though we were wading through the same pool of emotions and feeling similar - but never the same – experiences of frustration, desire for freedom, and hope.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, Mr Glove, Egg, and friends, 2023, mixed media.
The very same could be said of getting in touch with dissonance and something other than the usual prescribed pathway of knowing. By engaging in multimodal expressions and personification, I brought what is hidden, ambiguous, and uncertain into expression as could be seen from my desire to receive postcards from friends (Bush, 2018, p. 129). In doing so, I have opened up space for emerging feelings of discomfort and disjuncture to stay and be present…and eventually to be addressed and transformed: Here’s a woolly jumper to keep you warm and a postcard set from Australia. (To Carpet) I made a fuzzy arm for you so that you could write! We could send each other postcards now. Through personification, one could connect with different facets of oneself, and engaging in a dialogue that facilitates an exploration of what is spoken or not. Hinted subtexts and undercurrents which moves beneath regular conversations could be brought to the surface where attention could be offered. Perhaps it could be made palpable for further exploration … or it could simply just be made tangible for one to see, hold, and be present with. John Berger illustrates this idea best by stating, “…in the sharing of the song the absence is also shared and so becomes less acute, less solitary, less silent” (2016, p. 99). It is no longer a lonely journey of discovery as one’s companion offers comfort in the form of presence, empathy, and a listening ear.
In learning of multimodal expressions, companioning, receptivity, and dialogue, I am aware of how these processes work together in Art Therapy to foster a space where trauma and hurt could be explored within the perimeters of trust and safety. In the process of making expressions and engaging in conversation and listening, risks could be taken and surprises could be made. They may (or may not) lead to transformation and healing. Perhaps Pearmain’s quote, “there are no happy endings, no neat closures,” expresses this succinctly (2001, p.11). As with wading in a pool, there is an awareness that one could continue to sit in the warm shallows or experience the risks and liberation that comes with diving into deeper and colder waters.
Bibliography
Berger, J. (2016). Some Notes About Song (for Yasmine Hamdan). In Confabulations (p. 99). essay, Penguin Books.
Bush, S. (2018). Emergence, Resonant Felt Sensing and the Arts: With/in the Relational Space. ANZJAT Australia New Zealand Journal of Arts therapy, 13(1&2), 125 –130.
Finlay, L. (2011). The Phenomenological Attitude. Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the Lived World, (pp. 73 –84). Wiley –Blackwell.
McNiff, S. (2004). Treating Images as Persons and Dialoguing with Them. Art Heals. Shambala: 82 -95.
Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Converse: Search online etymology dictionary. Etymology. Retrieved April 8, 2023, from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=converse.
Pearmain, R. (2001). Introduction. The heart of listening: Attentional qualities in psychotherapy(pp. 1 -11). Continuum.
Thorburn, K., & Hibbard, S. (2008). Multimodal conversations -methods for shared moments of meaning with vulnerable young people. InP. Liamputtong & J. Rumbold (Eds.), Knowing differentlyarts-based and collaborative research methods (pp. 141 -166).Nova Science Publishers Inc.
Tufnell, M. & Crickmay, C. (2004). Introduction notes to part 1. A Widening Field: Journeys in body and imagination (pp. 39 -43). Dance Books.