Creative Practices for Visual Artists

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Chapter 3

Time and Space

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests that our lived experience within architectural and physical spaces is so pervasive, laden with expressive content and interwoven with our own development that it has become a foundational organizing principle of much of our psyche. Our memories and responses to these spaces are dynamic in the way in which they arouse physical responses and evoke associative meanings. As a result, architectural metaphor forms the structural basis of many artworks. This can be seen in novelist Jorge Luis Borges’s preoccupation with labyrinths and libraries as a way of thinking about the limitations of human understanding; in Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home ...