How to Grow A Wisteria

Emma Talbot presented a paper titled 'How to Grow A Wisteria' at "Intimacy Unguarded: Art, Autobiography, Memoir", a symposium organised by Emma Talbot and Joanne Morra.

Based on research developing out of her own practice, with reference to Ricoeur's 'Time and Narrative', Lucie Irigaray's 'Elemental Passions', Plato's writing on' Thaetetus'and memory. The paper provided a context for and explored means of using ones own memory/autobiography to develop drawn and painted narratives.

With almost 200 people in attendance, this one-day symposium drew on the work of artists, writers, theorists and neuropsychologists to explore creative and critical approaches to autobiography and memoir.

Taking on board autobiography and memoir’s complex negotiation of fact and fiction, truth and necessary lies, self-knowledge and misrecognition, memory and the continual reconstruction of events, the participants in this symposium set the stage marvelously for the project Intimacy Unguarded. They asked: What is love, and how do we represent it? What is experienced when holding another man? Why is it impossible to write one’s life? What happens when we are no longer able to recognize ourselves? What is to be done with all of the fragments that constitute a life? How to create a livable life story?

The beauty of the symposium was the speakers’ abilities to open up ideas, concerns, passions, failures, and promises; and for the audience to transform what was presented into an engaging and thought-provoking dialogue. Many questions were raised, and much was left open. Surely, this was an appropriate ending to the unfinished work of autobiography and memoir.

• http://blogs.arts.ac.uk/csm/2014/02/13/i...
• http://iavc.org.uk/2013/intimacy-unguard...
• http://www.slideshare.net/CSM_Research/f...
• http://www.slideshare.net/CSM_Research/h...