Erin Meares · Writing
Art, perception, and the making of meaning.
Essays by Erin Meares on art, perception, symbolism and how meaning takes form. A place to follow the relationships between what we make, what we notice and how we understand experience.
Main taxonomy · Twenty forms
Twenty forms of encounter at the edges of bodies, minds, and worlds.
A functional map of twenty anomalous forms: their mechanisms, conditions, scenarios, and relations within one shared environment.
Read the main taxonomyAddendum · Motive and conation
What does the incomprehensible want—and must there be anyone to want it?
Directedness, appetite, pleasure, purpose, and the possibility of wanting without a stable wanter. A companion to the twenty-form taxonomy.
Read the addendumSound · Evidence · Ritual
Sound, Healing, and the Trouble with Sacred Certainty
Acoustics, attention, tuning, ritual, and the uses of mystery. What sound can do, what the evidence supports, and who gets to say you’re doing it wrong.
Read the essayEmotion · Language · Experience
Dedicated to Melistrega
A provisional working vocabulary for some of the stranger weather inside us.
Read the essayArt · Perception · Practice
How a Work of Art Can Answer Back
How boundaries, materials, accidents and attention shape a work of art, and how the work changes the artist’s next move.
Read the essayAbout the writing
These essays follow connections among art, perception, symbolism and lived experience. They bring larger philosophical questions into contact with particular images, materials, language and encounters.
Written for curious readers, each piece offers a way into the work through an experience or question that can be followed on its own.