Process and Relational Dynamics in Painting and Writing

Eden, Jenny (2025) Process and Relational Dynamics in Painting and Writing. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This research examines my process of painting and writing from ‘inside a practice’, to explore, elevate and reposition the decision-making activities of a painter and the associated value of the painter who writes. Through a collection of finished paintings and a fundamental relationship with writing, the research responds to the notion of ‘a painting looking back at me as much as I look at it’, where an interchangeability between subject and object acknowledges a painting’s capacity to communicate and the psychoanalytic magnitude of my reply. Situated with relevant contemporary painters, the work promotes the notion of a ‘painter-writer’ as one of two central contributions to knowledge in this research, foregrounding my self-coined ‘agential writing’ (alongside a personalised academic voice) to speak from the position of the paintings and the painter-painting relationship. Another fundamental contribution comes through my ‘Relational Dynamics’, a term that refers to the complex psychoanalytic exchange between me and a painting, scaffolded through the thesis with a corresponding set of secondary and tertiary contributions. Significantly, the project is informed by key aspects of painting theory along with selected philosophical engagements which permeate the work, coming together in different ways in painting and writing. It draws on Jane Bennett’s new materialist notion of ‘nonhuman power’ and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of ‘thing character’ to account for the painting as an ‘object of being’ in the tumultuous process of making. This is mapped against a simultaneous attraction and opposition to Isabelle Graw’s writing on painting’s subjectivity, to foreground the importance of my relationship with a painting in the establishment of beingness. Underpinning the relational dynamics, the research is also aligned with the provisional and transient qualities of Sigmund Freud’s ‘pre psychoanalysis’, which activates a psychoanalytic atmosphere and an investigation of the ‘preconscious’ in the reverie of my process. A comparable sense of evolution is situated with Henri Bergson’s ‘becoming’ and ‘duration’ in phenomenological terms, to discuss a myriad ways the paintings are insubstantial and yet continue to form in the eye and mind. This is all aligned with a metamodern perspective in the thesis culmination, addressing the contradictory nature of my painting-writing and its relationship with oscillation and simultaneity in two animated mind-diagrams, the epitome of the ‘painter-writer’. Reinstating painting’s relationship with ‘being’ after preoccupations with multiplicity and (physical) ‘expansion’, the research (re)focusses attention to the process of painting and its informed articulation as a means of furthering the medium. It demonstrates a single painting’s ability to challenge material, conceptual and intellectual agency, redefining painting production in favour of idiosyncratic pictorial space and calling on selected psychoanalytic and new materialist permeations to fuel one painting after another. Through an associated and invented dictionary of terms, the work looks inwards in order to be a model outwards, offering a broad creative methodology as a useful pedagogical tool, both within and beyond the medium of painting.