Upcoming Exhibition

Body Bags: "I am a Trash Bag"
photographic works by Catherine Gomersall

opens Wednesday 28 July @ 6pm

runs until 20 August

Breathing Space
Library
Edith Cowan University
2 Bradford St
Mt Lawley

Catherine Gomersall is a visual artist mainly working in photography and has exhibited internationally. The artist takes up such topical contemporary themes as consumption and waste, and her works seek to investigate the disturbing aspects of psychological and emotional relationships with the everyday of material culture. This exhibition exemplifies a significant component of her practice-lead research methodological approach to a Doctor of Philosophy.

The series of colour photographic prints explore the “trash bag” as a metaphor for a particular category of emotion: “bad” ones. Emotion itself has largely been treated as bad, as trash, in Western philosophical tradition - emotion has been situated as opposite and inferior to thought: affect versus cognition, passion versus reason, feeling versus thinking. In the contemporary use of the word literal trash has come to signify the objects of consumer culture - discarded wrappers, plastic bottles, unwanted belongings. In the body bags, the jumbo sized black rubbish bag embodies its badness.

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On Fate and Fatalism

In nuanced ways I engage with the concepts of fate and fatalism. Regardless of their unfashionable status in general philosophical and theoretical discourse, my works are situated within their meanings. In Robert C. Solomon (2003) ‘On Fate and Fatalism’ he argues that retrospectively the concepts of fate and fatalism were widely accepted and valued. Today however, belief in fate is mostly dismissed as foolish, superstitious and unscientific. My practice attempts to disengage this ontological reduction and demonstrates that fate and fatalism continue to have relevance in contemporary life. My work relates to Solomon (2003, p.435) who states that “the fatalist is interested in the significance of what happens, and that means fitting it in to a narrative that makes sense of our lives”. My practice indentifies the notion of fate as implicated into a narrative concerned with the meaning of our lives.

A significant narrative, or what I call a “narrative-set”, is commonly used to make sense of contemporary life. In post-industrial society, consumption or consumerism is recognised in contemporary art and supported by popular media. Hence, a large area of critical discourse in media and cultural studies is concerned with analysing and critiquing consumption practices. On a profound level, consumerism has become (at least for the large part of cultural theory and popular discourse) the story of our lives: our fate. For Solomon fatalism is the idea that what happens necessarily happens. The notion of necessity is significant to the narrative of consumption - often critiqued as characteristically excessive and unnecessary – but yet a significant practice that defines our daily lives and that is practically impossible to avoid.

For Dan Dennett (1984, p.104) the notion of fate serves no purpose other than creating “creepy effects in literature”. Fate as a literary device is ‘creepy’ because when fate looks forward it is always to an end, and because fate does not exist without a story of what has happened, fate is at the same time backward-looking. Fatalism disturbs because it is tied to the pivotal events of life such as marriage and birth or natural disasters, and of course to the ultimate fatal moment of death. The image of fate and the image of death are interchangeable, and both are used to deal with life.

Works Cited

Dennett, D. (1984) Elbow Room. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Solomon, R.C. (2003) ‘On Fate and Fatalism’. Philosophy East & West. Vol. 53, Iss. 4, pp. 435-454.