International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Cologni, E. (2024). Percipience, embodiment, contamination(s). The artist as wound. Practicing a feminist care aesthetics. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si1.25). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si1.25

In this account I will offer an introduction to the arising context of care aesthetics, with specific reference to relationality and to dialogic artistic research. This includes a parallel between the perceptual and phenomenological underpinning of my practice research, and how Merleau-Ponty’s notion of percipience informs feminist ethics positions including Maurice Hamington’s embodied care, and Ayla Daly’s affective reversibility, in addition to Elena Pulcini’s model of a contaminated subject. With this new proposition of a feminist care aesthetics, I contend that art is always in dialogue and a practice of care, as care is said to be “a basic aspect of human behaviour integral to our interrelationships.” This is in the hope it might be a useful tool to turn daily “distractions, interruptions and fragmentations ” into opportunities for dialogue and change through art that starting from the individual, can have a transformational societal impact.