Percipience, Embodiment, Contamination(s). Practicing a Feminist Care Aesthetics

In this account I will offer a new reading of dialogic artistic research in terms of feminist care aesthetics. This includes the phenomenological underpinning of relational dynamics in my art, and how Merleau-Ponty’s work informs Maurice Hamington’s embodied care (2004), and Ayla Daly’s affective reversibility. In particular, I propose that art is a practice of care as care is said to be “a basic aspect of human behaviour integral to our interrelationships” (Hamington 2004). By drawing on the caring-with dialogic art strategy (Cologni 2020), I unearth how Elena Pulcini’s ‘contaminated subject’ resulting from a critique of the ‘sovereign subject’ (2012, 2022), can turn daily ‘distractions, interruptions and fragmentations’ (Mother Art 1976/77) into opportunities for dialogue and change through art that starting from the individual, can have transformational societal impact.