EMMA MACEY
ARTIST | TEACHER

This portfolio is a record of an Oxford Brookes MA project 

 

There has always been an uncomfortable sterility about my work (examples below). I am trained primarily as an academic rather than an artist and my brief forays into making have focussed on the acquisition of technical skills so that I can adequately assist my pupils in realising their ideas. I do not write in the same clinical manner as I draw because I constantly rehearse my use of language in the dialogue that I have with pupils and colleagues. That dialogue, and thus my writing, focuses on the development of conceptual practice that has authenticity precisely because it is linked to first hand research and subjective experience. I used this project to develop the conceptual complexity of my imagery by giving myself license to use subjective experience as a catalyst for making, but the engrained compulsion to begin each project within a theoretical framework persisted and so I was slow to start. Two things addressed this hurdle.

 

First, I was introduced to auto-ethnography as a methodological framework and that seemed to give authority to a process that I had previously been culturally conditioned to consider self-indulgent and arrogant, particularly as a woman. Spry’s article was particularly powerful in giving me the confidence to view my own experiences as valid artistic narratives; she says that:

 

For me, performing auto-ethnography has been a vehicle of emancipation from cultural and familial identity scripts that have structured my identity personally and professionally. Performing auto-ethnography has encouraged me to dialogically look back upon my self as other, generating critical agency in the stories of my life, as the polyglot facets of self and other engage, interrogate, and embrace. (Spry, 2001, p. 708)

 

Second, the first lecture occurred at the Pitt Rivers Museum just a fortnight after the birth of my second child; another boy. As I paced the dimly lit exhibition of anthropological artefacts, I was struck by the number of objects that were involved in male initiation ceremonies. As I was contemplating this, a passer-by commented to her friend, “There’s such an emphasis on courage –but so often they get scared and just turn around and run”. This seemed an unfair assessment; ‘these societies did not fight adolescent development but instead… used boys’ propensity for risk and channelled that into an elaborate structure designed to help a youth expand his physical, intellectual, and emotional capabilities, transcend childhood, and follow a healthy path into adulthood –and, even more important, manhood’ (Stephenson, 2006, p. 5). This is what I want for my boys, and after doing some research it seems that 'the chaos, violence, reluctance and apaty of modern youth are symptomatic of the (dissolution of formal community rites of passage rituals)' (Mahdi in Mahdi, Christopher and Meade, 1998, xxiii). If my boys are going to be well-adjusted adults, I cannot rely on the community to foster their moral development, I am going to have to do it myself.

 

This project is a tentative attempt to define the moral principles that I wish to impart to my infant sons. It is characterised by an investigation into rites of passage associated with the transition from boyhood to manhood. The work is articulated in media with metaphoric potential to represent parenthood; the media demands a negotiation between the inherent nature of the material and my desire to manipulate it into a defined object. 

 

References

Mahdi, Christopher and Meade. (1998). Crossroads: The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage. Illinois, USA: Open Court Publishing Company.

Spry, T. (2001). Performing Autoethnography: An Emobodied Methodological Praxis. Qualitative Enquiry , 7 , 6, 706-732. London: Sage.

Stephenson, B. (2006). From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age. (2. Edition, Ed.) Rochester, Vermont, USA: Park Street Press.

 

 

Examples of Early Work

 

 

 

 

 

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