Encounter blurb draft

Encounter (2013) is an example of my artistic exploration into an alternative world and a reflection of Gilles Deleuze's conceptualisation of 'a thousand tiny sexes' which inspired its multiple differing drips. These drips melting in different directions could appear as though they are resisting the gravity of this world in a desire for a different kind of gravity. This symbolic image could serve as a visual metaphor for what I am proposing as a desire and call for a different kind of world which uses two separate, but equal, female and male symbolic, language and social structures. Thus, the One chair presents a linear phallogocentric drip symbolising the 'Schoolmaster' phallic construction of sameness and the 'one truth', and the Other chair contrasts this with the multiple differing 'labial' drips symbolising 'a thousand tiny sexes' creativity of the 'pupil'.

I have positioned the phallic drip on the 'One' chair and the labial drips on the 'Other' to extend the emphasis on their contrast and to also create subtle architectural references. Not only does this side difference of drips relate to past feminist critiques of female as the 'the Other', 'the Second Sex' 'The Sex That is Not One', it could also link the viewer to the common phrase, 'the grass is always greener on the other side'.

As a feminist critique of our current political and social relations, sexual difference and traditional phallocentric thought-image; this sculpture presents its melting flowing table which represents a distance between the two chairs. This symbolic distance represents the hierarchy between the 'schoolmaster' phallic chair and the 'pupil' labial chair and the rhizomatic journey we must take in order to think difference to this phallogocentric image of thought and resist its dogmatic binaries to learn creativly. Through creative thinking can we enter into a transcendental structure of learning and think rhizomatically: this living on the edge of learning could be the ultimate resistance.