The happening of drawing: an exploration of Holocaust sites using phenomenological applications of drawing and writing practices

Spicer, Gary Philip (2024) The happening of drawing: an exploration of Holocaust sites using phenomenological applications of drawing and writing practices. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

‘Remembering, as a vital activity, shapes our relationship with the past’ (Bonder 1998 :479). This in turn defines our present. Time, then, operates as a distancing mechanism between the events we are ‘remembering’ and ourselves. This practicebased research investigates how, by being a witness across time, space and place, the bi-modal phenomenological approaches of writing, drawing and reprography can form a coherent embodied arts practice that engages with the present by confronting turbulent pasts. The research also represents my excavation of self and the mining of personal genealogical memory and experience, having a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother growing up in North Manchester in the 1960s. The representation of Holocaust sites and events in Eastern Europe, via a phenomenological approach, forms the broad archaeological basis to the enquiry. The two volumes of this thesis – theory and practice – are attempts to locate and determine what Ava Hoffman termed the ‘right tone of response and timbre of expression’ to the Holocaust event today, nearly 80 years since the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945. It describes the entanglement of historical and personal genealogical narratives emergent against the backdrop of my search for personal meaning within a contested and conflicted Jewish identity.