ABSTRACT
When the body is laid down in art things like wood, paper, oil, pigment, skin and blood are theorized as much “force as entity, as much energy as matter”. A diffraction of the body, of his, of the hospital bed, the time of day, the author's father's body that clutched to and hung from before during and after. Where six umbilical cords attached a baby body, a medical drawing of a uterus, a uterus lying in an orchid, a snail, a medical device, and the bone structure of her pelvis. Dwight Conquergood reminds that, "For performing researchers the body becomes the porous boundary of exchange, the interface", the porous exchange of biology, words, and things offered the author's grief process an accountability to the body that he inhabited, an accountability that could not be satisfied with words alone. The performing body radicalizes relations with ink, atoms, oil, affect. Her art work explicates the complexities of "agency lodged in the body".
