"Traces of Communal Touch" by Kate L. Wurtzel and Laura L. McCartney
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Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Abstract

The matrixial sphere, as put forth by artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, is a shared and transsubjective space that is beneath the conscious, under the touchable and perceptible; it is a space where we encounter ourselves and one another in shared trauma, healing, art making, and the lived experience overall. This co-authored essay explores how a shared matrixial space and the matrixial gaze, which is not always visual, have been experienced through the square boxes of ZOOM as part of a collaborative, long-distance art exchange project. The project, focused on Spontaneous Creation-Making (SCM) sessions, as outlined in Barbara Bickel and R. Michael Fishers recent book Art-care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-inquiry, and Healing. These exchanges took place over the span of one semester and consisted of two higher education pre-service art education professors in different North American states. This essay looks generatively at moments where the authors and their students found themselves in a creative space that was not entirely internal or external, not entirely here nor there in terms of location, product, and predictability of the process. Using the lens of the Ettingerian matrixial, the authors question, examine, and pursue an investigation of moments where they, alongside their students, encountered the matrixial space in and through the cross-country SCM project. Applications of this unique art exchange are suggested for other art educators and those pursuing art-care practices in general.

Author Biography

Kate Wurtzel (she/her), Ph.D. is an artist, educator, researcher, and mother who currently works as an Assistant Professor of Art Education at Appalachian State University and has an active painting practice. Kate’s work, often grounded in the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, explores the creative process and its relation to pedagogy as an emergent and embodied experience. As someone who spent many years as a museum educator and public-school art teacher, Kate’s teaching and making practice takes relationality, care, and material forces into consideration. Through an emphasis on continued art practice, pedagogical explorations, and constant reflection, she seeks to encourage and support pre-service art educators as they discover their voices and recognize their own process of becoming as artist-educators in the world at large. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura Lee McCartney (she/her), Ph.D. is a curator, artist, researcher, teacher, and mother who currently works as an Assistant Professor of Art Education at Texas Woman’s University. She has worked as a museum director, curator and educator and has taught elementary, middle, and high school art in public schools in North Texas. In her arts-based practice, McCartney explores spaces to unravel moments of caregiving—between caring and “uncaring” for the things we hand down, especially as mothers and daughters. Her work resides in the tension between caring for objects and ideas with caring for loved ones, visitors, educators, and students as a curator/artist/researcher/teacher. She seeks opportunities to deconstruct material culture as a means to trouble the practices of collecting, creating, and curating as living curricula and pedagogies within art education.

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