to care in a peculiar way (2009)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Helena Hildur W.
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Is there a method to die?
In the spring of 2009, I attended a course in aesthetic-based qualitative research at Stockholm University. My mother was becoming very weak at the time. As I set out to write on method and methodology within the course, she had to go to hospital for some days during which I kept her company as much as I could. Tests didn't prove anything wrong with her though, and she was sent back home. When she was lifted from the stretcher and gently put her back in her own bed by the transport team, she looked around her and smiled. From the well-known paintings on her walls and the books in her bookshelves, she turned her attention to at me. Still smiling, she looked into my eyes, saying: "And now begins a new and exciting phase in our lives."
Less than a month later, she deceased.
The day after her death, I took one of her carpets on the back of my bike and went to the shore of a lake to clean it, the way she used to do it when I was a child. Out of this situation, the question emerged. Absurd though it seemed, it echoed through my further reading, listening and thinking.
Konstverket som essä och tänkandets praktiker (2016)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Helena Hildur W.
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This study sets out from an artistic workshop designed to investigate light, colour and spatiality. During the original event, a number of participants joined to collaborate by means of painting, dialogue and movement. From a presentation of the workshop (as determined in time and space), the text argues that the character of an artwork is essentially unfinished; an ongoing ”truth process”. Adopting lines of reasoning from philosophers Vilém Flusser and Theodor Adorno, I gain a first understanding of how the artwork could be reconstituted within the limits of a scientific essay. Once more turning to the workshop's course of events, I find experiences within the actual situation relating to abstract concepts such as ”spirit”, ”quality” and ”freedom”. Next, the text pays heed to Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation that human knowledge is gained and mediated by language-games of various kinds. The selected concepts are consequently tried out in expanded ”studio talks”, involving artists from different fields such as painter Matts Leiderstam, writer Robert Pirsig and sculptor Joseph Beuys. The operation allows me to single out some specific conditions pertaining to artistic dialogue, from which I seek transitions to philosophical discourse. The text briefly reviews three contemporary, art-based projects offering such discursive exchange: haptiska blickar, Thinking Through Painting and Freikörperkultur. Against this backdrop, I seek to articulate an understanding of knowledge-making which embraces artistically as well as philosophically grounded practises. I find support from philosophers John Dewey and Hans Larsson – Dewey characterizing the esthetic and intellectual faculties as complementary movements within the human mind, and Larsson propounding intuition as the unifying and superior form of thinking. Assenting to their views, I conclusively suggest methodical introspection as another field for discursive interchange between art and science.
