Towards the unknown, visual poetics of the ineffable

Abstract

This thesis is guided by the research question: How can the potentialities of the ineffable, our unsayable yet shared unknowns, guide our imaginations towards expanded, open-ended and experimental methods of storytelling? It is about the intersections between language and unknowable worlds, and the ambiguities and ambivalences that emerge when one attempts to encounter the ineffable. It assumes that we share a common unknowability, indeterminacy and incomprehensibility, and that language both reflects and evokes this emptiness. All expressions of the ineffable, manifested in words or other forms, aim to point us to what is missing, what is paradoxically on the other side of expression or knowability. An exchange emerges between the said and the unsaid, in turn, to speak the unsayable, which is constantly emerging, transient and unstable.

This research maps trajectories and intensities of the apophatic in selected poetic and contemporary artworks, in order to consider these tensions in my own creative work produced as part of this PhD. To engage in the apophatic, one uses the tactics of contradiction, negation and omission.... which can lead to elliptical writing. Not surprisingly, this kind of enquiry must resist a degree of conventional clarity in order to embody the uncertainties and non-binary formations that this work approaches. While conventional language tends towards discrete definitions and exactitudes, the goal of apophasis is not. As a PhD through visual research, this written text collaborates with the ineffable geologies and geographies circulating in the artworks of the thesis. In eschatological terms, this work is about the edges and end of the known world(s) and how language both dilates and contracts these thresholds. This is an experiment in connecting the silences in language with the holes in the social, structural and geological landscapes in order to reflect on the voids of the past and the uncertainties of the landscapes to come.