Autoimmune Animations: Intimacies of Care and Constraint

itinerant space: a journal of art, design and communication research practices, is an experimental online platform for doctoral researchers at RCA.

Editor-in-chief: Professor Teal Triggs
Founding editors: Nick Bell, Karen Bosy, Kirsty Smith
Editors, Issue 3: Nick Bell, Kam Rehal, Yunqi Peng

Contact: itinerant.space@rca.ac.uk
itinerant space, School of Communication, Royal College of Art, Garden House, Dorando Close, London W12 7FN

Peer review panel, Issue 3:
Nick Bell, Kam Rehal, Yunqi Peng (School of Communication)

Website design: Regular Practice.
Site development: Mads Kullberg

Contributor Biographies

Issues

Issue 3 is anticipatory.
The theme for Issue 3 is anticipatory practice and suggests that research is never static nor fixed. It operates in motion, is expectant, if not enthusiastic. For example, anticipatory research necessitates foresight and an understanding of consequences. The work contained within this Issue 3 is research-in-progress, which anticipates for example, the multifarious ways in which the work might be developed, resolved, or might play in opening new lines of inquiry.

As a process, anticipatory practice fosters approaches that instil ‘an openness to be imagined’. This is not about speculation, rather anticipatory research is future-facing and holds the potential for revealing ways of how we navigate an increasingly complex set of contexts, challenges, and interactions.

‘In conversation. We posit – what it could be.’ – Teal Triggs

‘Anticipatory practice is imagining the future. It also means responding to the contradictions that emerge when imagination meets reality in practice. Every unexpected outcome that accompanies anticipatory practice is an opportunity for both surprise and reflection, as it hints at a thoughtful yet entirely new direction.’ – Yunqi Peng

‘Through the doing of research, we anticipate how our contributions might be understood / challenged / further expanded by the work of others.’ – Kam Rehal

‘Inclusive cross-community communication is an anticipatory practice in which social infrastructure emerges – a web of connections and relationships between neighbours, community gatekeepers, organisations and institutions – through which the challenges, opportunities and conditions of future change can be better anticipated.’ – Nick Bell

The Editorial Team would like to thank the eight contributors whose research extracts feature in this issue. The breadth of their subject matter, with the diversity of approaches to project work, predicts the exciting potential for research conversations in the making.

Autoimmune Animations: Intimacies of Care and Constraint
Hannah Clarkson

Project overview —

These animations are experiments through which to explore the relationality between different areas and methods of my research and practice: drawing, performance, and the medical humanities. They are a method of engaging with method; a way of trying to understand what relationship drawing might have to movement or performance through a choreography of control and letting go. Made by feeding my drawings into an app created to animate children’s drawings of people, it would be easy to assume that these animations might provide a direct translation into or a score for performance. Instead, what emerge are absurd ‘autoimmune’ animations of a body which seems forced into movements it doesn’t want to make. Or, perhaps this is precisely the plurality my research as a whole seeks, acknowledging the intimate relationalities between care and constraint; the ambivalence of an autoimmune body which both protects and provokes itself. In trying animation for the first time through an app wherein I cannot control what my drawings might become, this research extract hopes to embrace that paradox of a body (the physical body/a body of research) struggling to exert control over itself; whilst giving itself over to movement towards a place or sensation unknown.

This exposition is an extract from my ongoing practice-led PhD research, The Art of A(r)mour: playful strategies of resistance, costumes of care and absurd decorum for the autoimmune body.

Biography

Hannah Clarkson is a visual artist, writer and researcher with an interest in materialities of storytelling and voice, and embodied languages of empathy. With a BFA from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (2013) and an MFA from Konstfack, Stockholm (2017), she is currently a practice-led PhD candidate in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London (2021-2025). Alongside an active art and writing practice, she teaches creative writing for post-graduate students at Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Publications include: Decolonizing Architecture anthology (ed., 2021); Synonyms for Shelter poetry collection (2020); and The Green Room: Perspectives on Artistic Research (ed., 2018).

In Clarkson’s PhD research – building on medical humanities practices – autoimmunity meets autopathography and absurdity in an embodied illness narrative, advocating both personal and social agency through exploration of the possibilities and parameters of play. Led by practice, this research aims to re-present ‘autoimmune’ understandings of shelter, playing with absurd sculptural costumes and performance to articulate material, relatable narratives of trauma and care.

www.hannahclarkson.co.uk

www.lahp.ac.uk/student/hannah-clarkson

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