Broken narratives, visual forces

In this chapter I look into letters and paintings of Gwen John’s, an expatriate Welsh artist who lived and worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. John’s epistolary narratives and paintings are placed within a conceptualization of time as duration, a continuum where past, present and future coexist and wherein sequential linearities are broken, nomadic subjectivities emerge and forces of narratability are released. What I argue is that John’s letters and painting create a plane for broken narratives and visual forces to be explored as events that form a different image of thought about the ethics and aesthetics of what human communication entails.

Published online: 13 January 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.11.05tam