Paper short abstract:

By focusing on artworks made by persons confronting their own mortality, this essay explores the relation between the exterior, visible colours of art and the interior experiences of pain and imagination, as mediated through the process of artistic production by persons living with a sick or unstable body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the thinking and being of people close to death and suggests that we can not only use artworks, such as painting, photography and sculpture, to begin speaking about people's embodied experiences of the world but as a material basis with which to critique social-scientific and phenomenological approaches to knowledge. In Merleau Ponty's analysis of painting he asserted that "although it is certain that a person's life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called for that life", thereby suggesting a link between the materiality of art and the biography of the person that made it. If so then Is it possible to find traces of a people's lived experiences within the subject matter and materiality of art in the same way that we can see the sweep of the artist's elbow joint and wrist in the brushstrokes? And rather than engaging in the anthropology of art,how might we use art to address a series of anthropological questions about the perception of time, space and the body? This paper seeks to address such questions by highlighting the relation between the visible surfaces of art and the processes of artistic production by persons confronting their own mortality while living with a sick or unstable body.