Affective Realities and Conceptual Contradictions of Patricia Piccinini’s Art: Ecofeminist and Disability Studies Perspectives

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.12.22

Authors

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5492-4255

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.22

Keywords:

Patricia Piccinini, ecofeminism, disability aesthetics, the uncanny

Abstract

The recent exhibition of Patricia Piccinini’s art called That’s Us (Toruń, CSW) largely represents the Australian artist’s visions and fascinations known from earlier exhibitions. Questioning and erasing the borders between species, the affective realities of Piccinini’s art are bound to the concepts of care, empathy and fragility, which refigure what is human and non-human and the relations between them by expanding the notion of mothering and fostering to include interspecies relations. Beginning with a discussion of the uncanny, abjection and monstrosity, this article aims to examine the complicated implications of interpreting Piccinini’s art within the conceptual framework of ecofeminism, as well as in the context of disability aesthetics. In her explorations of different and alternative corporealities, Piccinini, among many other things, asks questions about ideologies of normativity and able-bodiedness, suggesting the possibility of going beyond them.

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Author Biography

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska is Associate Professor in the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies, at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Her research interests include disability studies and disability drama, trauma studies and hauntology, as well as performance, art and archive. She has published on site and environment in performance, as well as gender, intertextuality, corporeality, trauma and hauntology in drama and theatre. She is the author of Hauntology and Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (2013), The Hybrid in the Limen: British and Polish Environment-Oriented Theatre (2003) and co-editor of the themed issues of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum (Spectrality and Cognition: Haunted Cultures, Ghostly Communications, 2017), AVANT. Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (Haunted Cultures/Haunting Cultures, 2017; Listening to the Urbanocene: People-Sounds-Cities, 2020; Altering Authorships: The Author Function in Contemporary Cultural and Literary Practices, 2021) and Rock Music Studies (The Residents, 2021).

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