Feeling Into and Feeling With: Art Practice and Empathic Attention

This chapter addresses empathic attention through the lens of contemporary art-making and is developed from my practice-based doctoral research. Throughout the text, empathy is seen through material engagement, as a particular kind of knowledge located in the provisional, in the speculative sense of becoming other. In doing so, it engages with phenomenological, aesthetic, and experimental methods of artistic production such as filming isolated gestures, using the body to mirror actions, exploring details in archival materials, and creating discreet installations. This chapter focuses on artworks in which gesture, orientation, and attention are key methods in the articulation and reception of the work. The chapter will examine the role of the photograph in my own artwork, considering it through phenomenological and affective lenses. Using my own experience of making art, the essay looks at how we might define the nature of empathic attention through art practice. To do this I will examine the affects and effects of art, both my own and others, to consider what Peter Goldie has termed “perspective shift,” framing empathy by examining its effects.