Academic Publications
Article:
Emancipatory Monstrosity: A critical contribution towards infertility discourse informed by personal experience, reflective and creative practice
in MAMSIE: Studies in the Maternal
Volume 15 • Issue 1 • 2025 • Special Issue: Affect, Creativity and the Maternal
Editors: Anna Argirò (Guest Editor), Anna Brook (Guest Editor)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.24561
Chapter:
10 (Sym)Poetics of Biomineralisation: Molecular Biology/Literature/Posthuman Poetics
by Ruth Alison Clemens and Jennifer Aurelie Crouch
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781399512688-014
A Sympoetics of Biomineralisation - Biomineralisation as SYM-poesis! Creativity itself! The CONVERGENCE is a powerful way to take in complexity: Sometimes I’m at a tube station, and I see a stone slab on the floor - a floor tile - containing embedded fossilised molluscs and graptolites. I think of deep time and ancient life being presented before me, sliced and polished by industries of extraction, construction, infrastructure, exploitation, and city architecture. I wonder about the many steps of people who have passed over the slab with/without noticing these prehistoric ecologies. This ancient artefact/beacon should never dissolve into a sort of bland decorative aether - BE IN AWE OF THE SLAB! I am reminded that nothing is ever just a thing. Everything is profoundly embedded, embodied and relational. I want to listen to dissolved ions of calcium carbonate! As them "What have you seen/felt over the aeons?! Who have you been and where?" Mother of pearl (nacre) is iridescent, bringing in the physics of light in relation to matter, physiology, culture and psychology. And the layers of nacre contain molecular traces of its surrounding ecology/toxicity while it was alive. Cultures across time and space have revered and respected shells. In them, we see complexity - prismatic diffraction, light physics, design, art, poaching and extraction. I love that my diagrams could be included as part of the research/text, using spatial/geometric/diagrammatic image making to delve into such interconnections within and between naturecultures. This chapter is part of an amazing volume edited by Rosi Braidotti, Goda Klumbytė and Emily Jones - all miraculous angels with vital powers of cutting through the nonsense of our very cursed era. We need an affirmative ethics if we are to survive
Published in:
POSTHUMAN CONVERGENCES: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices Klumbytė, Goda ; Jones, Emily & Braidotti, Rosi (eds.) (2025). Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices. Edinburgh University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781399512688-fm
