Abstract
The birth story of the Metramorphosis book begins in 2010 at an artist residency on Toronto Island. The book is bound with buttons allowing the cloth pages to be unbound and bound over and over again. In this way it is read anew each time, as it is never re-buttoned in the same order. After a year of stitching into the book I realized it was not my book alone to complete, as the study of matrixial theory (Ettinger, 2005) I was contemplatively engaging in the book making is about relationality, co-becoming and copoiesis. In 2012 I began to carry the book with me on my travels. In the generative state of co-becoming the book has taken on a life of its own. The 2017 Arts Pre-conference and call to write this article prompted me for the first time to write about this living matrixial book as an on-going socially-engaged art/inquiry/contemplative co-event. This article includes images of the book pages, Ettingerian quotes, my reflections on the lived experience with the book, and a poetic rendering of the matrixial trance that lies beneath the book’s journey.
Recommended Citation
Bickel, Barbara
(2019)
"“Metramorphosis”: A Socially-Engaged Arts-Based and Contemplative Inquiry,"
Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal: Vol. 4:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/atj/vol4/iss1/5
Included in
Art and Design Commons, Art Education Commons, Art Practice Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Educational Methods Commons