Auto-ethnography: Managing Multiple Embodiments in the Life Drawing Class

Abstract

There has been growing interest in the role of sketching, drawing, and other forms of artistic and/or creative practice as a research method within (and beyond) the social sciences. In such projects researchers have been firmly, often deeply, embedded in their practice, either as long-standing practitioners of their chosen art or craft, or as curious newcomers. In this chapter I consider how auto-ethnography, as a state of ‘reflexive-thinking-being’, employed here within a space of artistic activity (life drawing classes), has enabled me to explore geographies of bodies, nudity, sexuality and intimacy by moving – physically, conceptually and recursively – between moments of the mundane to instances of the spectacular. Consideration of how touch, smell, gesture, as well as different kinds of looking – all of which are fundamental to the work and practice of a life class – is drawn into an analysis of how the act of (re)producing bodies, inside and outside the life class, mediates body-space relations.