Eleanor Oliver

“when my right hand touches my left hand ... the "touching subject" passes over to the

rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the

midst of the world”

- Merleau Ponty, Maurice, “The Visible and the Invisible”,

Northwestern University Press, 1968, p.133/134

The image is one in which each hand is simultaneously experiencing the active role of

touching and the passive role of being touched. The capacity of an individual to feel the

right hand as a subject touching the left hand as an object, and vice versa, highlights

the complexity of the body’s relationship with subjectivity.

Bodies are liminal entities, they posses no definite interior and exterior, no clear demarcation

between what is “self” and what is “other”. Bodies are comprised of many orifices and

permeable material that blur the boundaries of subject and object. Processes of menstruation,

pregnancy, and childbirth are the extremes of liminal bodily experiences, they highlight how

indefinite places, between inside and out challenge subjectivity. Such reproductive processes

remind us of the potential for one body; one subject, one individual, to carry another inside us.

When it is almost impossible to distinguish when one body becomes two in this process, how

can subjectivity still assert its dominance over the body?

Untitled Collage (Mixed Media, Collage on Paper)

This collage depicts the liminal experience of maternity; two beings in one, tenderness,

severity. The maternal experience as a place where the abject and sublime mingle