Disability and Illness in Arts-Informed Research: Moving Toward ...

the language of art. There is a back-and-forth in the creation of this text, between reflectivity and reflexivity, between sensation, perception, conception, art, and word. The artist, in her dwelling, brings form to mute sensation, to what worms its way into her being. She opens the world to depths, to a language of indeterminacy.

Questions, uncertainty, and points of ambiguity are articulated through the position of language and image. Their placement presents my sensory and conceptual understanding, and advances an experiential and interpretive dialogue. An important principle of my work is that neither words nor images are granted greater authority over one another, nor are they opposed. They are in conversation. I mine the generative tension between discourses to deepen understanding, knowing that more than I can give word to is entangled in the complex nature of human understanding. Within the landscape of my research, the cartographer's skills are symbolic: The mapping of form and language onto experience supports communication in an intersubjective world.

My refusal to separate and reify differences between the language of art and other symbolic and signifying systems may appear confusing. Their confluence may, however, occasion a productive ambiguity from within which borders (our imaginary constructions) are withdrawn or redrawn. From this point forward, language signifies a conceptual unity of discursive and presentational language forms and the notion that we live in an animate and eloquent world where language “accrues to all expressive bodies” (Abram, 1997, p. 80).

This is a postmodern text, and I must trust in the presence of a strong reader.¹³ Maybe even a noisy reader, a dreamy reader, a speaker and whisperer of texts. Modernist notions of originality, hierarchy, and rationality are questioned through the use of quotes, poetry, image, and repetition. Discontinuity, incoherence, and fragmentation are three postmodern conditions, factors in life. This text, because it is congruent with my life, presents these, as well as a postmodern desire to imagine change, and the healing of a world where ideas split skin and words spill blood.

Take comfort in the knowledge that I am not always sitting, thinking comfortably. North light reads over my shoulder. I'm here to help you