This thesis makes the case for ekphrasis – the description of the visual in language – as a three-part model for movement: from origin, accumulation, to release.

The written portion consists of three ekphrastic essays to/about art objects — paintings of mothers, photographs of trans friends as children, and sculptures of unmade beds — sentimental objects, theoretical sources, and dear friends. Each chapter corresponds to each of ekphrasis’ three movements, culminating collectively to ekphrastic release. The first chapter establishes ekphrasis’ psychoanalytic origin: as ekphrasis repeats the grief of the first loss through mimesis’ recall, the memory changes, transforming into a kind of forgiveness. The second chapter builds a theory of trans materiality, in which the orientation/phenomenological “purposefulness” toward a word-object moves the self toward the self, and the word-objects accumulate as one’s life becomes one’s life. The third chapter uses the ekphrasis of accessible text/image description as a scale model for interpersonal world building, an ekphrasis which does, which tangibly imagines different intimacies and futures in our co-constructed common grounds.

The project also includes a commissioned performance by the poets Sanna Wani and Elizabeth Mudenyo at Xpace Cultural Centre on March 16, 2024. More information about this performance and its relation to the written thesis can be found in Appendix A’s support paper.