ABSTRACT
293Isn’t it the truth that when you are thinking about something—writing something, making something, even just musing on something—it appears everywhere, as if everyone else were suddenly preoccupied with it too? You find yourself at the nexus of a dialogue with the world. You switch on the radio, or pick up the paper, and every woman out there seems to be considering and reconsidering her body, her past work, her subjectivity, what she’s going to do next. On a recent Monday night at a dinner in Brighton for twenty women artists (Anon. 2012), Becky Edmunds began to talk about the shape of creative practice across a long life, the life of the dancer Deborah Hay about whom she is making a film. On Tuesday I watched Jeannette Winterson on TV repeating the gestural language of her fire and brimstone adopted mother whose cautionary tales midwifed Winterson into becoming the writer she is (Winterson 2012). And that thing that I’ve been musing on? It’s how the body is shaped by experience; how past and future play out, all the time, in one’s own embodied sense of self.
