first place:

Paola Tiné

“The Interview” (2020)

‘The process of making these artworks, following the data acquisition, had a somewhat revelatory power for my research analysis. By translating my notes onto a visual medium, which involved the creation of a storyboard, followed by the placing of several layers of oil paint on a canvas over an extended period of time, I was brought to understand the construction of the self as a complex process underlined by conflicting pressures, roles, expectations, duties, and individual dreams. By selecting her words and the images from her past, I realised that for Maya, the rebellion against family hierarchy and her refusal of gender constructions represented a crucial moment in the making of her individual self. Thus, in the proposed painting, I attempt to construct in a visual language the mental process that brought Maya to the need to make a choice that was determinant for the making of her own self. At the same time, the interview setting reveals the nature of the anthropological encounter as a dual work, a creative process in which the researcher and the subject act together to write a story with two points of view. Similarly to the process of reviewing fieldnotes in order to conduct a ‘thick description’, the way in which I have constructed this painting, starting from quotes of her story taken from my notebook here added digitally as a final revelation and insight, helped me to show how Maya’s story is also an artifact of my point of view concerning her words. In the end, the self is a work of art, like a painting whose final appearance is made by each brushstroke, as is anthropology itself.’

(CONT)

Gary moody “Spirit Ruptures and Sensory Struggles” (2023)

Second place:

‘This piece is an example of ‘spirit art’ that I use as a sensory, artistic, and auto-ethnographic technique within the field of ‘extraordinary ethnography’ (Meintel, Goulet). I use the spirit art technique to respond to requirements by the field of transcultural psychiatry for ethnographic insight into the experiential dimensions of spirit healing and spirit communication practices. My spirit art helps me understand how spirit mediums surrender themselves to the chaos and intensity of unconscious forces to learn an embodied multi-sensory language that provides insight and healing to themselves and others.

As I approached the exercise in my spirit art class, I did not have a pre-determined idea of what I would create. The technique requires the person to surrender themselves to spirits who share knowledge through connecting with a medium in an embodied space of multi-sensory chaos. The resulting piece depicts my auto-ethnographic journey through this process. As I entered an altered state to create the piece, I physically felt and saw my eyes as white hot circles. As I leaned into this intense experience, I saw a desert scene and sunset, which I drew. I started to feel a need for colours to come in, reflecting my artistic expressions that have emerged through my research. I drew water to the right that reflected the comfort and murkiness of my old self. A waterfall emerged to the left representing freshness yet the discomfort of chaos.

This wisdom more fully expressed themes of sensory ruptures and the struggle mediums go through as they re-orientate their sensory ratios to work through self-limiting beliefs and discover their natural expressions or True Self (to borrow a term from psychiatry). The piece also evoked unique comments from other spirit art participants. One participant shared an insight from their own experiences of spirit art. They explained that when creating art they receive different feelings and sensations one at a time. They described this process as having a “fragmented nature” as we can only handle the complexity of unconscious forces in small doses.

My spirit art helps me chart how these experiential states can be mapped against Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical concept of the rhizome. Here, I layer my experimental visual ethnographic approach to show that spirit communication practices overcome limitations of normal linguistic models (Csordas). The spirit language serves as a rupture for unconscious forces to offer individually tailored healing and insight to a recipient through heightened sensory and physiological phenomena. Visual art as a unique ethnographic technique offers insights to address a pressing global challenge, mental ill-health.

My spirit art technique was recently recognised through publication in the Anthropology of Consciousness, titled, “Dancing with Spirits”—Spirit art and spirit-guided experiential ethnographic techniques. The article has been well received by mental health practitioners who described my art as mirroring the best that psychotherapy has to offer. I have also recently extended this technique as applied anthropology where I create the art pieces for people with mental health and disability challenges, to provide them support and inspiration.’

‘Welcome to the Beetaloo Basin in remote northern Australia. This place is a lively actor (Tsing, 2005). The landscape is simultaneously natural and social, where making, saving, and destroying resources have become entirely mixed up. Zones of conservation, production, and resource sacrifice intersect, and temporality is confused. A panoptic view of the aboveground terrain and underground fracking infrastructure shows how subterranean water and gas have become inextricably interconnected with surface politics. Invisible and elusive matter is brought to the forefront as future imaginaries and the distant past intertwine.’