Nocturning: Becoming Spherical (with darkness and the more-than-human)

Nocturning: Becoming Spherical attends to the affective dynamics and relations of darkness and explores how immersive exposures in the night can illuminate other ways of knowing, seeing and being. The work is positioned within dialogues around the effects of light pollution on biodiversity, the disruption of circadian rhythms and the shifting baseline of dark skies experience. In a view to move beyond prevailing binaries of light and dark, the creative enquiry engages with diverse forms, temporalities, and characteristics of what can be termed as darkness as well as being situated across urban and rural geographies. Furthermore, embedded within the research process is a more-than-human canine companion, offering rich imaginaries for multi-species collaborations and cohabitations. 

The research adopts a sensory/walking ethnographic methodology which prioritises the experiential, improvisational and the relational whilst considering a multi-species collaboration through an eco-feminist lens. There is an emphasis on the cultivation of attentiveness via kinaesthetic and atmospheric attunements. Furthermore, an interplay between the seen, unseen, sensed and felt is considered via a performative conceptual framework that incorporates photographic and embodied creative writing practices, as an interrogation of the complexity in representing lived experience. 

 Through a creative interpretation of fieldwork, I offer an illustration of the manifold shape-shifting capabilities that are revealed through night-walking and the resultant poetic texts offer a demonstration of becoming spherical. Becoming spherical involves moving through thresholds, exposing vulnerabilities, coming together in multi-species entanglements and coming to our senses. The research culminates in a draft (hu)manifesto that stakes a claim for an embodied night-walking practice as a methodology for becoming spherical. I offer an argument that turning towards the dark and fear of the unknown contributes to relational repair via re-enchantment, whilst also being a resilient, liberatory, creative and recalcitrant act.   

The container in which the research has emerged is one that expands the frame of photography and involves an interplay between light and dark, seen and unseen, sensed and felt. It also draws from the semantics of the photographic process. The chapters dilate the peripheries of vision and the existing research field, before moving into a methodology grounded in alternative forms of exposure. The work then culminates in evocative vignettes which weave the descriptive with the analytical before moving into the drafting of a (hu)manifesto. 

The work was developed as part of my thesis for my MA in Movement, Mind and Ecology at Schumacher College, Devon and I would love to continue developing the work in collaboration. I am currently in the process of adapting the work to exist outside of academia as well as tip-toeing into ideas around the development of the ideas into a PhD. 

If you would like to chat darkness or go night-walking, please do get in touch! 

The entire text can be accessed here.