‘Let Maimed Kings Lie’: Disability, corporeality, woundedness, and embodiment in the ‘makings’ of David Jones
Nic Aodha, Colette
Nic Aodha, Colette
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Publication Date
2023-02-27
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
This thesis addresses corporeality, woundedness, disability, and embodiment in the work of the Welsh modernist maker, poet, painter, and engraver, David Jones (1895-1974). I examine the work of Jones through the dual lenses of disability studies and modernism, unpacking the distinct corporeality that, I argue, emerges from the trauma of Jones’s participation in the Great War and his subsequent experiences of disability. I ascertain connections between the woundedness of his poetics, manifested in his distinctive use of broken lines, prose as poetry, and depictions of dismemberment and decapitation, and the centrality of materiality and process in his work. Jones’s reshaping of Christian metaphysics and Pagan animist metaphysics leads us to a more embodied, ruptured, and wounded truth about post-war, industrialized society. I use Tobin Siebers’s Disability Aesthetics (2010) to demonstrate how Jones’s process as a maker in the post-war period enables us to reimagine the complex embodiment and broken beauty of Jones’s ‘makings’ as a form of resistance to industrial modernity and a critique of traditional conceptions of wholeness, and beauty in art. I trace Jones’s dialectic modernism and the relationship between notions of complex embodiment, the mutable body, and the Catholic liturgy of the Eucharist, the broken body of Christ, and Jones’s complex dichotomy of empire as a disseminator of culture and a destroyer of localities. Jones’s triangle of modernism, disability, and the liturgy of the Eucharist is the centre of Jones’s practice. Finally, I demonstrate how Jones’s pioneering ‘makings’ anticipate important trends in contemporary art’s critique of the ideology of ability and embrace of the individual, multifaceted beauty of the disabled body through materiality
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NUI Galway