Jules Findley

This PhD by project is an investigation into the relationship between the affect of grief and the creative, embodied encounters with paper materials. In some types of traumatic loss, complicated grief can subsume the bereaved in a way like no other. Mourning can be a very difficult process.

The research integrates creative practice working with fibre based materials with the scholarly and cultural exploration of the literatures and theories of mourning as a specific psychological state of mind. Using paper as a means of connoting affect and grief in the practice, paper becomes the metaphor to discuss research questions that connects the maternal with affect in maternal grief. 

The process is auto-ethnography, using subjective experience as a medium through which to reflect on the relationship between materiality and affect. The substrate using play, judgment is suspended, whilst the hand creates individual materiality.  The theory of culture and society, which enabled the methods of auto-ethnography and creative practice research to emerge, is the paradigm of post modern and post positivist accounts of new relations between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’.