Folding knotworks: a conceptual, sensual and socio-political encounter

This thesis proposes knotwork as a research-creation method, a conceptual and practical framework where making, writing, and thought interweave to navigate indeterminacy and transformation. Thinking with and through Gilles Deleuze’s ‘fold’ and Luce Irigaray’s ‘air’, it proposes air as an active medium that sustains movement and allows work to unfold in liminal spaces. Knotwork operates at thresholds where matter, sense, and thought meet without closure. Folding names a situated handling of materials and relations: gestures of gathering, releasing, and unspooling.

Suspended in air, forms shift, sustained in flux. Framed by feminist posthumanism, the research threads Erin Manning’s attention to affect and process with Rosi Braidotti’s zoe/geo/techno assemblages. Practice is the method: thinking-through-making via recursive folds across sculpture, immersive installations, audio-video work, drawing and writing. The page becomes a weave: words knotting into images and material gestures. Knotwork emerges as a living, relational methodology, restless and generative, rethreading experience as it loops and returns through loss, a conceptual, sensual, socio-political encounter.