Presentation

About: Ana Paula Estrada is a Mexican–Australian artist based in Brisbane. For the last eight years, Ana's art practice has focused mainly on the documentation of life stories of older Australians by combining photography, oral history, and the artist book. She is currently undertaking a Doctoral Degree at the Queensland College of Art Griffith University.

Exploring Connectedness Through Materiality

Ana Paula Estrada (QCA)

Abstract: Recent and innovative scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that addresses life narratives tends to exclusively focus on content and, as such, to completely ignore and dismiss the significance of form(1). My current research addresses and explores the importance of form and, and more specifically, the role the materiality of ‘the book’ has to play in the transformation, dissemination, and reception of personal narratives. In this paper I will present my artist book I Cannot See You (ed.5) to explore, both the idea of translating emotions into a physical form, as well as investigating how the book’s materiality can be used to draw the reader closer to the subject matter of an artwork.

I Cannot See You deals with my transformative experience of going through a separation. The paper is made from old t-shirts that my ex-partner left at home when he moved out at the end of 2018. During the process of washing, cutting, and pulping the clothing to transform it into sheets of paper, I felt many emotions such as sadness, despair, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Before folding and gathering the sheets into a book form, I laser-cut words that were extracted from a letter that I had written after the decision of separation was made. American professor Walter Ong, suggests that ‘the reader is normally absent when the writer writes and the writer is normally absent when the reader reads’(2). The work responds to this comment by exploring the possibility of using paper as a vehicle

for meaning and of connecting through materiality; can touching my book’s paper increase the closeness between the reader, the writer, and the subject matter?

1 Catherine Dhavernas, “Re-thinking the Narrative in Narrative Medicine: The Example of Postwar FrenchLiterature,” Journal of Medical Humanities (Forthcoming)

2 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 167