Next week I start my MA Fine Art: Digital journey, so I thought it would be best to start retracing some of the paths that brought me here (well, there, nearly).

I’ve had to take a short hiatus from making for the past few months while I learn to dance to a new rhythm in my life. Life is pesky like that sometimes; it shows up in all kinds of unexpected ways.

Ways that, as usual, seem to resist easy articulation, but are nevertheless felt and known.

I could give you a play-by-play of what has ensued, but it would just be a regurgitation of the facts as I see them, rather than the knowledge carried by the body through these experiences.

Which is what interests me. Not only my body, but bodies — the body as the first site of knowledge. Before we can articulate, explain or make sense of an experience, the body has already lived it. Felt it. Known it.

That’s where the good stuff lies — the real.

So, naturally, perhaps retracing is a good place to begin.

Not to construct a neat chronology of how I arrived here, because I’m not sure it ever happened that way. Looking back at my practice, the same questions seem to surface and resurface: the body, memory, repetition, maternal experience, rupture, what is carried, what is inherited, and what cannot quite be put into words.

I don’t think I necessarily knew that these were the questions I was asking when I began. In many ways, the making came first and the understanding followed —along with yet more questions. It’s as if the more you know, the less you know. But there is such teachability in that.

So, in retracing some of this trajectory, I’m interested not only in what I have researched and made, but in how one thing has led to another — how ideas have returned, shifted, accumulated and taken on different forms.

Maybe the best place to start, then, is with the body.

Throughout my practice so far, I have felt a deep desire to give physicality to feeling — to inner landscapes, to the bridges between inner and outer worlds. Perhaps this is because so many of those inner experiences have been felt in isolation.

Why do I attach one meaning to an experience, while another person might attach something entirely different? Sometimes that meaning is known only by the body. Attempts to convey these experiences through words — and the meaning I attach to them — never seem able to fully encapsulate what has been felt.

The materials, the processes, the making itself always seem to lead me back there. Back to the body. Back to this site, this beginning, where emotion precedes the word. Always.

So, what happens when meaning is known only by the body? How can that knowledge be made visible? How can it be recorded?