# Interweavings: Threads of Art Education, Poetry, and Phenomenological Grapplings

Boyd White, McGill University

[ Boyd.white@mcgill.ca ]

Anita Sinner, Concordia University

[ anita.sinner@concordia.ca ]

Darlene St. Georges, University of Lethbridge

[ darlene.stgeorges@uleth.ca ]

**Abstract:** This three-authored paper describes our individual responses to a video, *Dwelling*, by Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa. The nine-minute video is a wordless, but not soundless, presentation of jet planes flying within the confines of the artist's apartment. We chose the Youtube video in order to be able to share an artwork although we were working in three different cities at the time. Our responses consist of our individual poetic and visual (photographs, collage, paintings) interpretations of the video in conjunction with theory. We use phenomenology as our framework and underlying philosophy, and connect it with arts based research.

**Keywords:** Art Education; Poetry; Visual Art; Phenomenology.

The theme of this issue of *CRAE, Art Education and the Poetic*, presented an interesting challenge as a multi-authored paper. To begin, we decided to interact with the same artwork since we live in in different cities, and we did not want to rely on reproductions. We settled on a 2002 video artwork, *Dwelling*, by the Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa<fnref n="1" />. Beyond agreeing on our initial starting point, we set no rules on how to proceed. Our mutually embraced research orientation, however, is phenomenological. More specifically, we recognise our foundational work with hermeneutic phenomenology as informing our ways of proceeding, and so we endorse Findlay’s general (2012) claim:

> Phenomenological researchers generally agree that our central concern is to return to embodied, experiential meanings. We aim for fresh, complex, rich descriptions of a phenomenon as it is concretely lived. (p. 17)

> Beyond such a general principle, which, with its emphasis on meaning, implies an epistemological orientation, we lean toward an ontological one, in other words, toward hermeneutic phenomenology “in the poetic tradition of the late Heidegger” (Findlay, 2012, p. 18). Yet at the same time, we do not expect our study to result in an underlying “essence” (in the Husserlian sense of a general meaning) of the phenomenon we introduce. It can be argued that the search for essence is an essentially scientific mindset. Our phenomenological turn, instead, is more artistically oriented and speculative—a merging of description (a noematic, or object-oriented, “the meant” dimension) and interpretation (a noetic, or reflexive, meaning making dimension) that draws upon our respective subjective grasps of the video. Despite the individual and quite varied nature

<footnote n="1">¹ (Sawa's video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD_hvfLZ2hM).</footnote>
of our responses, those “grasps” share a common art educator context that we need to acknowledge. Inevitably, those academic influences colour our interactions with the video as we grapple with the reciprocal, dialogical, ambiguous and contingent nature of the encounter. In this exercise, these grappling have resulted in evocative renderings that, we hope, turn “the reading of research into an experience in itself” (Findlay, 2012, p. 29).

**Boyd's response to Dwelling:**

James Cohan, owner of the eponymously named New York art gallery, has this to say about Hiraki Sawa's *Dwelling*:

> Gregory Volk, in the essay for an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2005, wrote: “The more one spends time with the work...the more psychologically eventful these airplanes are, as they proceed on their inscrutable routes, seemingly at their own volition. They conjure a solitary apartment dweller’s drifting, multiple thoughts—a transportation in and of the mind, including random memories, hopes, nagging reminders of pressing tasks, and strange bursts of enthusiasm that come from nowhere in particular.” (James Cohan website, n.p)

Volk has captured nicely what the work suggests. I particularly like the phrase “transportation in and of the mind.” The airplanes are a clear reference point. But the apartment in which the action takes place also suggests stillness, stability, a separation from the commotion of the world outside the apartment walls—this, despite the airplanes flying from room to room. The fact that we see no human in this video, just evidence of human activity, such as a toothbrush and razor on the bathroom shelf and knick-knacks in the kitchen, increases that sense of insolation. We are observers of, voyeurs even, into someone’s private, domestic life, with the airplanes as metaphor for Wordsworth’s world that is “too much with us; late and soon” (Wordsworth, 1802). In watching this video I bring my memories to bear on the scenes. In terms of process, I began by jotting down words and phrases as I watched the video. I watched it several times, each time trying to capture what I had missed before or reinforce initial responses. Below are my initial, in-progress “conversation[s] with myself” (Oughton, 2012, p. 75).

**Entanglements**

Sawa whimsy
eery airplanes toy sized
in a bachelor pad

Taking off
barely clearing
the rolled up quilt
landing, briefly
here and there

among the knickknacks
on the window sill

kitchen table bathtub bed

More and more traffic interweaving
frenetic like
moths to a lightbulb
nearly
 colliding hypnotizing
 engine drone insistent
 somehow reassuring
 familiar
 fading then
 returning celebratory Hey!
 While outside
 distant jets
 silently scroll by and
 two vapor trails
 criss-cross
 tracing an X somehow
 on the ceiling.

The outside presses
in
like draught through a
not quite closed door
street noises
at all hours
background to
daily rituals
shaving doing dishes
putting the cat out
bringing him in again
Where were you?
This is routine.

Montrealers tend to turn
inward especially
in winter
I open the shutters anyway
Across the street
the neighbour's lit window
invites compels displays
a silent movie of
domesticity
urban life self and other
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>*Figure 1.* Entanglements collage.</figcaption></figure>

I chose “entanglements” for my poem because what Sawa is doing with his video is drawing our attention to the impact that the material world and humans who inhabit it have on one another, and together form a gestalt unique to the occasion. That is, Sawa’s airplanes, his apartment interior (and a couple of exterior shots of it), the indoors and outdoors, together with each moment of viewer response, combine to create a heightened sense of being-in-the world. Such a heightened sensibility is ontological insofar as our willingness to tangle with the events in the video raises our consciousness of the entanglements and creates a particular mode of awareness that we have not experienced before—an awareness that invites us to consider alternative ways of understanding the
world and our place in it. There is an ethical element to the experience as well. For example, it invites us to consider the problems inherent in human/technological intra-action. To what extent is technology altering not only the physical environment, but even individual self-definition. (See for example, Eric Andrew-Gee's article, "Your smartphone is making you stupid" *Globe & Mail*, 2018). Then too, there is the question of one's duty to oneself and others as we strive towards our evolving self-definitions.

I agree with Ian Buruma (2018) who observes, “There is a moral component to most forms of human expression, including art” (*Globe & Mail*, February 9, A15). The gist of Buruma’s article, however, (whether or not we can, or should reconcile reprehensible behavior and highly praised art) is a topic outside the focus of this paper. Nonetheless, art educators need to acknowledge the existence of possible moral components.

I am not persuaded, however, that moral issues are what guides most of our interactions with the arts, at least not our initial interactions. Indeed, the first time I saw Sawa's *Dwelling* on a large screen in a museum gallery I was captivated by the incongruity of airplanes inside a house and the sheer whimsy of the project. Questions of ethics did not initially enter into my responses. I think too of other contemporary works that have received international acclaim and that do not seem to have ethical concerns at the core of their raison d'être.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Cloud Gate (panoramic view).</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>*Figure 3. Cloud Gate (detail).*</figcaption></figure>

For example, Anish Kapoor's *Cloud Gate* (2006), in Chicago's Millennium Park, affectionately referred to as “the bean”, draws thousands of visitors each year to intra-act with the work. It may be that the celebratory nature of people's participation in the work can be construed as a requirement that one has a moral obligation to celebrate life, but that seems a stretch. I would argue, instead, that it is the pure fun of the piece, the affective “hook” that draws viewers in. Thus, I am inclined to consign ethical considerations to a particular segment of aesthetic interactions.

I am persuaded that the arts, first and foremost, heighten consciousness, and a particular form of consciousness at that. I refer to Suzanne Langer's (1967) assertion that the arts objectify feeling. Those feelings may take multiple directions, from sensuous celebration, to aversion, to awareness of moral duty, and so forth. I argue that the holistic nature of aesthetic encounters provides opportunities for that range of responses. As Rosiek (2018) notes, from the perspective of new materialism:

> Art has always been about more than providing conceptual clarity. Artistic representations... invite people into new holistic relations—conceptual, affective, collective, tactile, material, etc.—with the world in which we live. They explore possible modes of being... (p. 37).

My foray into arts-based research has consisted largely in experiments in ekphrasis. My poetic exploration, above, is my invitation to readers to share in my relations between words and one particular artwork, between affect and subsequent reflections on our ethically loaded intra-actions with the world around us.
**Anita's response:**

**The artist's palette: Dwelling within scholarly interventions**

O light and honor of the other poets,
May my long years of study, and that deep love
That made me search your verses, help me now!

*Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno*

Hiraki Sawa's *Dwelling* is an ideal medium through which to consider the relationship of poetics and visual art with teaching and learning. Underscored by a quality of playfulness reminiscent of childhood, the evocative banality of this video suggests latitude, where plurality in interpretation and application, and my situated response, is but a singular expression in turn.

*Dwelling* immediately conjured for me an articulation of academic life where the video reveals degrees of distinction in difference. In the scenes, Sawa offers an analogy to how we reside in the interiority of restricted domestic habitats, our home-minds, yet we remain in juxtaposition, in flight, where detached physical movements at exhilarating speeds and with discretionary complexity keep us suspended in an atmosphere of productive uncertainty. Sawa's experimental work gives pause to consider academic life, for how and why we actively partake in transitory events to showcase our foreign-minds, our exteriority as an act of dissemination. Much like the varied settings of the video, scholarly events have the allure of yet unknown exotic places, but the promise can easily erase our pedagogic prerogatives because of that very same dislocation. And therein lies a visual-poetic nexus: un-be-longing.

As a pedagogic prompt, Sawa's artistic intent became secondary to the application of the video as a way into reflexive conversations about identity construction that ignited within my aesthetic relation. The allure of 'making strange' is in continual tension with patterning, analogous to our academically taking off, landing, cruising and parking, and beginning again. The stimuli of this video become symbolic of identity in curriculum and instruction, inclusive of bursts of new interest on a pendulum with the monotony of routines, and with all the restlessness at the heart of intellectual exchange. Resonating with nomadic lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005), Sawa speaks to me as a visual-poetic fold, where we reside in ideas, and those ideas become the locations to conceptualise our self-in-relation as a contributing and hopefully meaningful scholar, always seeking to push and to pull the theoretical and methodological innovations possible, in this case in art education, as a scholarly intervention.

Beginning with a notion of imaginable potentials, the following visual-poetic triptych provides an impulsive opening to then unpack questions of artwork scholarship. First, my abstractions from photographs of the Artist's Palette<fnref n="2" /> hot springs and pools; photographs which were composed at a recent academic event that provided the opportunity to visit Wai-O-Tapu, New Zealand. This visual extraction is deliberately intended to dislocate the selection from the broader context, creating a lyrical line rather than a painterly sentence, obscured with steam, rich mineral concentrations that saturate

<footnote n="2">² The term 'Artist's Palette' it is the name of the spot in a park in New Zealand that was the inspiration for my photographs for this essay. Artist's Palette is also found in reference to Death Valley, where mineral concentrations produce dynamic colour concentrations in the landscape.</footnote>
colour, tone, and contrast, and for me, generating an intuitive rhythm in reflexive practice. Intoxicated by the intense stench of sulphur, the Artist's Palette brings on maladies of a headache, nausea, shortness of breath, so feeling faint I turn back now to dwelling with Heidegger (1953/1996), and the imperfection of our phenomenological immanence that weaves my commentary on academic life with found phrases in *Being and Time*, chosen precisely because "it is said that being is the most universal and the emptiest concept" (p. 2). Drawing on the metaphoric sensuality of thermal ruptures and volcanic residues as demonstrative of academic life, I combine these visual 'words' with haiku-inspired 'images' to convey the existential identity in the nomadic intent of the scholar. This triptych is a proposition, an allegoric gesture to the divine comedy of academic life, and a nod to Dante's *Inferno*, presented with contemplative intent, much like Sawa's video.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>The Artist's Palette</figcaption></figure>

When we ask not,
The discretion of silence:
*Mit-dabei-sein*
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

When we reign judgement,
The castrated intellect:
*Wider-ein-ander-sein*

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

When we seek truths,
The little deaths³:
*Allein-sein*

In the sterility of prolific productiveness
My friend, where have you gone?
Wait for me, out of time.
## Un-be-longing: A scholarly intervention

*The Artist's Palette*, informed by *Dwelling*, is an experimental venture intended to bring our attention to the specificity of language, the nuance of perceptive thinking, and the sensorial seeing embedded in visual-poetic expression. The magnifying effect of encounters of the mind, body and spirit, as Prendergast, Leggo and Sameshima (2009) suggest, extend to artwork scholarship as rumination and speculation, tentative and tensioned, and arguably residing in-between the characteristics of scholar-artist-poet, interchangeably. My concerns for artwork scholarship continue to reside in the processes of creating, innovating, and experimenting because my interest is foremost in the pedagogic, where hybridity in practice has theoretical underpinnings to reconceptualize art education topographies beyond the boundaries of thought that have shaped, or limited the shape, of the field of study to-date.

### Mit-dabei-sein: Being in on it with another

Sawa's video is for me an expression of the nature of estrangement that materializes when negotiating institutional contexts. From this prompt, core questions emerge on how we effect our positionality as scholars and if we elect to maintain our autonomy, or participate in our institutionalised censure. Through visual-poetic expression, we have a venue to critically assess, resist and voice that which infringes on both freedom of thought and responsibility to provoke, but do we have the courage to embrace dangerous conversations? Such intertextuality then resonates with the impulse of strong poetry and art, recalling Aoki, where our “yearning for new meaning,” is not about technique, or what has been written visually or textually, but instead, “enraptured in a world of sculpturing in space” (Ng-a-Fook, Ibrahim & Reis, 2015, p. 1). By moving towards “indwelling,” where curriculum is informed by life stories, in this case living academically, there is an opportunity to question or to remain silent, and if we “call out” from our situated imaginings, we may find ways to decentre these same conventionalized landscapes through expressive methods of inquiry (p. 2). The processes of artwork scholarship then have the ontological potential to retain our integrity and coherence, as Ng-a-Fook et al. (2015) suggest, despite the neoliberal discourses that continue to reshape our scholarly lives.

### Wider-ein-andre-sein: Being against one another

Mindful that deliberation and judgement are definitively different acts in academic contexts, I remain acutely aware that for any and all adorning the cape of a poetic pilgrim, the artistic value of such work, in this case *The Artist's Palette* as my artful response, may well be deemed inferior, indifferent or mediocre, rather than strong, and that is the wonder of aesthetic reception. Galvin and Prendergast (2016) describe this as mediation of our philosophical ground, and much as Sawa's video stirs in viewers, emphasis is upon form and rhythm in creative analytic practice. If we take on the mantle of such expression as teachers, perhaps it is with the invitation to participate and express, or simply *to make* that we advance the potential of our students, while recognizing our un-be-longing to the roles of poet, artist, or even scholar. There will always be degrees of quality and qualification beyond any one of us, regardless of stature and status. Being 'against' one another may prove a vital disposition to maintain to ensure we do not become too self-referential, or too self-reinforcing as art educators, no longer wary of the presumption of authority and expertise. Perhaps in the end, that is the irony of identity in academic life.

### Allein-sein: Being alone
When seeking notions of ‘truth’ in our scholarly journeys, we create scenarios where our place in the academy is contingent on the aesthetic reception of the event (conference presentation, course instruction, this article, and so on). Attending to the genuineness of each idiosyncratic contribution to the wider context of learning, such visual-poetic expression is comparable to momentary losses of consciousness, or in the vernacular French, *la petit mort*, or many little deaths.<fnref n="3" /> Extending this further, when we engage in artful production as the mapping of identity, and dissemination as the epistemological apparatus, to borrow loosely from Loveless (2015), our being alone is reflective of residing in the conditions of the academy, within our home-minds and away-minds alike. And while the former is a given, the latter is a question of acceptance. Variations in definition, research design, methodological singularity, validity of poetic expression and visual rendering, as well as verification of the commentary, demands we have the courage to be nakedly imperfect in our renderings. Yet to be naked and imperfect, and alone as a scholar, is a risky venture to pursue. To live in this relational state as a precondition arguably ‘makes us strange’ and requires we follow a path that is an artfully nomadic, scholarly intervention.

**Darlene’s Response:**

**Dwelling Within: The unfolding pedagogy of creation**

As a Métis artist, poet and educator I dwell within an aura of experiences that seek materialization in a composition of light, form, color, sound and text. I perceive my artistic practice as a *multi-textural dialogue*, a type of poetic and visual metaphorical dialogue that embodies my perceptions, intuition, sensory knowing, dreams, memories and my unfolding identity. Here my psyche life enters into my perceptual awareness through a metaphorical dialogue that occurs between my inner and outer spaces of experience. When I take the critical turn inward to engage in multi-textural dialogues, I situate and root myself in a dialectic interplay of imaginative, intuitive, cognitive and metacognitive knowledge(s). In this way my creative practice can be understood as an artistic epistemological and an ontological process that deepens, expands and propels my inquiry of being with(in) the world. Understanding artworks as emerging from deeper and complex spaces, places and structures within our mind, body and spirit enables us to interpret them as archetypes of being (Boutet, 2012), offering us a platform to harness complex and diverse understanding(s) and empowering us to imagine and create the ‘otherwise’ (Barrette, 2012).

I respond to Hiraki Sawa’s work *Dwelling* artist to artist, through the unfolding pedagogy of creation in the praxis of art-making and poetics and in the connection of spirit.<fnref n="4" /> When viewing his video, I am immersed in his internal landscape that speaks to me of a nomadic spirit, symbolically represented by the multiple and continual motion of airplanes in fight.

<footnote n="3">³ A little death: la petit mort, defined as the momentary loss of consciousness, also
orgasm.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ I use the term spirit to refer to a multi-layered energetic complex of the human being; (Lander, 2014, p. 3)
experience(s) of energy, insight and alternative states of consciousness, and not to any religious and/or
political affiliation.</footnote>
As a painter and poet, I recognize and honor spirit in my experience and over the years have discovered my way of tuning into its rhythms by spending time *being* with myself in my studio and in nature. Through this subjective inward practice of *being* I gain access into a timeless space where I can let go of day-to-day expectations, conceptions and predetermined knowledge. I explore my inner sense of knowing and grapple with unexpected emergence of the NEW—knowledge, insight, considerations, problems and questions. Here the seen and unseen realms are of equal importance. Ermine (1995) sheds light on how we can come to know the world through subjective inwardness:

> Our ancestors were on a valid search for subjective inner knowledge in order to arrive at insights into existence. What they found became the basis of continued personal development and of Aboriginal epistemology. By engaging with/in the world, exploring and analyzing processes of self-actualization, through inwardness, Aboriginal people found a wholeness that permeated inwardness, that also extended into the outer space. (p.102-103)

This is an Indigenous epistemological view of subjectivity and the role of the inner world in gaining a broader view of the outer world and our place within it, and one that I embrace as a Métis artist. Understanding the relationship between subjective experience and knowledge through a metaphorical correspondence with the world is a dialectic between the physical and spiritual realms reflected within each of us. Viewing Sawa's *Dwelling* reminds me of the value of mitigating fixed perceptions and boundaries through metaphor and metonymy as a method of creating openings where generative dialectics between the internal and external realms of experiences can emerge and connect. The value is in the process: in exploring and considering possibilities.

*Encounters* (Figure 8) is a reflexive auto-ethnographic exploration of my ethereal/spiritual experiences while walking on Mount Royal<fnref n="5" /> and how I translate and extend these in my studio through a series of paintings and poems. In the spirit of our collective responses to Hiraki Sawa's work this is my relational offering—artist to artist.

## Dwelling Within

My story begins with an exploration and creative articulation of my spiritual experiences when walking on ‘The Mountain’: specifically, the visual and sonic encounter of trees, leaves and wind and its ethereal effect on me. Like a space opening in the universe, these encounters lead me into alternative realms, offering me new perceptions of my seemingly familiar surroundings. Here a tree is more than its construct as I perceive its breath and feel its roots under me. As its branches reach toward the light I too am reaching and extending myself because we are connected through a type of symbiotic energy. The melody of winds and leaves that surround me provoke sensations that reverberate through my entire being and enables me to free myself from imposing structures and expectations of the day to day. As I crouch down and look deeply through my extended lens (my camera) I see into the abstractions and I am transported into *being*. I fully embrace my inward journey. Hours go by untethered. As I breathe deeply through this experience I feel a profound sense of infinity and am moved to tears. In awe of Earth’s creations, I am grateful for my relational connection and can only explain the emotional impact as being moved by spirit.

<footnote n="5">⁵ Mount Royal Park referred to by Montrealers as ‘The Mountain’ : https://www.lemontroyal.qc.ca/en
Retrieved May 1 2018.</footnote>
I am jarred loose
undisguised
inward
where the obvious ends and imagination begins.

Seized by her energy
silhouettes of lucid dreams
unfold before my eyes
abundance of blue skies

air

breath

Breathe

I translate and extend my encounters in my studio through the creation of a series of abstract paintings of photographs of leaves on the forest floor, disconnected from their tree, silent and in transition as they await the return to their Earth. I see beauty in their pauses, interpreting these as exhalations in unison with the sonic vibrations produced by the melody of winds, so I give them hues of lavender and ivory as they congregate on turquoise ground (Figure 4). Over an extended work period in the studio I create eight related small canvases (12"x 12") with this energy.

As I continue my inward journey the energy shifts dramatically and there emerges an outpouring of wild energy that cuts through the silence on my canvas. Thick raw paint applied with sweeping gestural motions articulates a wielding current. Within a mere few hours four canvases are born (Figure 5).

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4. Encounters (Detail) (2016). Oil on canvas.</figcaption></figure>
Fueled like a river
raw with tenacity and purpose
you emerge without warning
on my turquois ground
jolting me from my slumber.

No time to question
YOU lead
I follow
with wild magenta
black
yellow
I can't run fast enough
hot cadmium red
you pick me up off the ground
with your powerful current
all form is relinquished

I am transfixed without time
being carried through hills
valley and corridors
between questions I skim waters
take inventory, dance
and mediate existence
calling for the metaphors
in my heart

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. Encounters (Detail). (2016). Oil on
canvas. 2016.</figcaption></figure>

I am open
exhausted
grateful

On a subsequent studio session, as I continue to articulate my spiritual experience the energy radically transforms, relinquishing all form, color and movement, leaving only grey matter (Figure 6). Like an echo in the distance I feel a slight murmuring of energy of something not quite present or perhaps past. Attending to this illusive energy I create four more canvases. After hours of work I struggle with a sense of loss and uncertainty. Did I miss something? Hours of work seemingly led to nothing. Disappointed, I stack up these canvases with the unsuccessful work pile on the floor, leaving the studio that day amiss.

A restless night ensued conjuring up dreams of a white feather in flight by a
circulating wind.
Dancing among light breezes at dusk
couched in the murmur of doves
deep in tenderness
lucid dreaming

I feel I feel I feel I feel I feel I feel
I feel I feel I feel I feel I feel I feel
I feel I feel I feel I feel I feel I feel

a new horizon
sensations
openings spaces
to an unseen realm

flashes of birth
water

air
wind
fire

incandescent words

close to the skin

each born to its source in infancy

like a needle

entering its field of memory

eternity flickers

white feather's dancing

to sempiternal songs

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Encounters (Detail). (2016). Oil on
canvas.</figcaption></figure>

My dream helped me understand grey
matter as a complex transitional space that I
needed to honour without expectation. The
process was in motion and aimed to articulate a
particular type of frequency that required me to
have patience and trust, to go with the flow you
might say. Returning to the studio with clarity and
respect I retrieved those “unsuccessful” works
from the studio floor and began working them
with a palette knife. After a period of time grey
matter transformed into four unique works (Figure
7) that encapsulate sonic experiences I had while
on the mountain. Energy waves of red, yellow,
pink and cadmium red took their place in the
collective expression of my unfolding pedagogy
of creation.

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7. Encounters (Detail). (2016).
Oil on canvas.</figcaption></figure>
The completed artwork *Encounters* (Figure 5) is a *multi-textural dialogue* embodying my spiritual experiences, perceptions, intuition, sensory knowing, dreams and memories through multiple metaphorical dialectics between my inner and outer spaces of experience. Like Hiraki Sawa's work, it shows how art making is a rich and complex narrative of the human experience — an epistemological and an ontological process that can function in multiple and diverse ways, including as gateways to alternative realms of experience; as objects of experience; as sites of phenomena; and as opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of dwelling within the world.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8. *Encounters*. (2016) 16 images, 12 x 12 inches. Oil on canvas.</figcaption></figure>

## Dwelling together

As we mentioned in our opening paragraph, hermeneutic phenomenology has provided the framework for our poetic/artistic/art education explorations. Each of us, after our own fashion, has attempted to show how we engage in meaning-making in relation to the environment, reciprocally forming and informing one another. It is also apparent that our
personal contexts influence our interpretations of the Sawa video, resulting in quite
different responses. This is as it should be. The inherent and integral ambiguity of
artworks, especially wordless ones such as Sawa's, invite/require commitment on the part
of the viewer to invest one's personal history into the work. Indeed, without that
investment, the encounter remains an arid academic exercise that, at best, results in
recognition of a category of artworks, but one devoid of personal meaning. From an
educational perspective, however, the grasp of a personal meaning is not enough.
Education implies sharing, and that requires a move from the private to the public. We
are pleased that *CRAE* has provided this opportunity to share our responses and hope that
readers will continue the conversation.

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