I think I had been aware (perhaps only obliquely and intuitively) whilst forming ,my talk that the way i was structuring it was vital; a way to give an honest, embodied experience to the audience of starting the PhD but it wasn’t until afterwards that I was able to verbalise that to Rob Irving. In starting with the autobiographical poetic text it invited the audience to enter into a particular world, full of visual imagery. Katie Davies said afterwards that she just completely went with it, delighted in the visual imagery and that it helped her hold the viscerality of loss and death and not shy away from it, that the roller-coaster ride of the first few months was a felt embodied experience. The cartoon was a hiatus/fracture, a pivot point that the unravelling turned on.
Our talks complemented each other and our conversation afterwards opened out into an animated audience discussion.
Davina Kirkpatrick- presence of absence 