How can that which is beyond articulation be articulated? constructions of belief through doubt and faith.
The question that began this research is a question about belief. It is primarily a question about form and forming that which cannot be articulated. Within this research belief has been defined as not-knowledge. Belief is oppositional to knowledge. It requires an action towards an outside of knowledge. It is absurd. Knowledge bases itself on measurable and quantifiable sets of reasoning. Belief is an outworking in spite of reason, an irrational action. It is a paradoxical action of faith. Faith is not faith without doubt. To communicate these actions, which are intrinsically linked to a singular, is tautologically problematic. The communication of belief (through faith and doubt) seeks to bring that which it defines as outside of understanding, into a position of understood. This research is an investigation into the paradox of this action and the precarious liminal state that it inhabits. It is a forming of an anxious state. Using a model derived from Soren Kierkegaard’s writing Fear and Trembling (focusing on the three states of the individal, the universal and the absolute) this research identifies a method of unfolding relationships that seek a position of simultaneity as a propositional position from which to articulate that which is beyond articulation. Within the studio based outcomes of this research an overarching methodology based on the process of production found within analogue photography is applied to material consideration and selection. It is a manifestation of a photographic way of thinking and questioning, based in limitations, but one that is not necessarily tied to the production of photographs. It is argued that materials are what they are as well as what they are not. It is a methodology that reflects the anxiety inherent in the precariousness that this research inhabits. The exegesis explores the conceptual reasoning of the paradoxical construction of belief. Addressed in the three states identified through Kierkegaard, the exegesis expands on the central research question with regards to each state and the bearing that these investigations have on each subsequent state. In the first chapter an approach is made through the idea of the individual. The individual is framed in terms of the self, identified through limit, the limit of self that is known through the action of encountering. The second chapter builds upon this idea of self but repositions it within the relationship of the individual and the universal. The third chapter builds a position around the idea of the absolute.This chapter addresses the issue of simultaneousness discussed in both of the previous chapters and introduces the idea of a simultaneous index formed through the relationship that is enacted in the encounter. This reasoning is paralleled to my own contemporary art practice and argues for a position of simultaneity as a model for articulating questions that may form a propositional state of belief constructed upon faith and doubt.