In her talk Yvonne’s described how she tries to capture a phenomenological sense by using gesture both to access traumatic memory and embody absence. She uses the tactile experience of drawing to remember and visualise difficult experiences which she says enables a different way of seeing. She described how atrocities and collective traumatic experiences are unpaintable and the way in which the hand of the artist can manipulate and image so that it allows us to engage with it in a different way. She used Gerhard Richter’s September 2005 as an example  and how the scraping action, which blurs the all-too-familiar media image of the twin towers, provokes a sense of horror in absence. She described how this type of gesture by an artist, which she called ‘painting with bodily awareness’, can be used to access a corporeal sense and the imagination in a different way. The result is that the viewer is forced to look and contemplate the image, to engage with it in a different way because it is no longer familiar. They are able to reimagine the felt moment and understand stories which are only perceptible in the imagination of the viewer. 

I found Yvonne’s descriptions of the way the viewer can be encouraged to engage with a painting and in doing so become a participant, really interesting and useful. Her ideas not only articulated something of what I am trying to do in my work but also helped me think about the essence of what I am trying to convey. Yvonne made me think about the complexity of both finding the right gesture to access the sensation you wish to convey and the right language and gesture to enable the viewer to access the work link.