This research turns towards the question of how to remain with what is no longer here, or perhaps never fully was. Rather than seeking visibility, access or mutual response, it stays with what withdraws. A Petal Held at the Edge of Falling unfolds from this commitment: to trace how relation endures without reciprocity, and how proximity might be sustained across distance.

The title evokes a condition of suspended relation: something held not to prevent its fall, but to remain with the moment of falling. The petal gestures toward both fragility and transience - a part of the flower that carries the tenderness of what will eventually slip away. “Holding”, in this context, is not one of grasping, but of pausing and lingering at the threshold. It is staying with what is in the act of departing, attending to its movement rather than arresting it. This shapes the ethical and affective stance that underpins the research: one of care, restraint and an attentiveness without enclosure.

This research does not aim to restore or recover what has departed. It asks instead: how might one remain in relation with what is absent, distant or no longer physically present? Longing, as it appears in this research, is a sustained orientation towards what withdraws. It is a gesture of remaining-with, even when the other cannot return. Rather than a lack or loss, longing here unfolds between as a suspended tension of proximity and distance: a relation sustained both despite and because of it.

At the heart of the research is the relation between the lover and the absent beloved. The beloved remains unnamed throughout the research as an intentional ethical positioning. Rather than an act of concealment or abstraction, this refrain from naming is a way of preserving the space and difference between self and other, informed by Luce Irigaray’s necessity of remaining two. Here, the withholding of the name is a form of care that allows the other to remain in their own irreducibility while honouring their alterity.

This gesture is shaped by a relational and ethical practice referred to as with/holding. The term withhold typically implies a refusal or suppression. Yet when apart - with / hold - reveals a double movement: of being with while holding back. The slash between foregrounds a critical interval as the space of restraint, while also honouring the hesitation and the refusal to seize or enclose. In this, with/holding enacts a relational tension grounded in an attentiveness to difference and does not grasp or demand reciprocity. Rather than functioning as a prescriptive or fixed framework, it arises from within the research itself: sensed, enacted and continually returned to across the writing and the material practice.

The mode of attentiveness shaped by with/holding also informs the methodological approach referred to as the image of. It names an orientation that signals a way of engaging with and sensing through relational imagery. This approach draws from a way of thinking that begins with gesture rather than definition. Within this methodological approach, to figure something in the image of is to trace its mode of presentation and its relational emergence rather than a fixed form. It allows for what is sensed or thought to take form, even if only partially or belatedly. Rather than treating images as symbols or representations, the image of approaches them as sites of relation, grounding and giving form to the ethical stance underpinning the research.

The decision to write primarily in the third person forms part of the thesis’ methodological and ethical positioning. It facilitates a critical distance that maintains proximity without assertion - a with/holding in restraint and non-enclosure - while reflecting the core ethical concerns of the research. The only deviations from this third-person narrative appear in the interleaves, which are brief first-person passages situated between the main figures. These interleaves introduce a more intimate and affective register that is not intended to clarify or interpret the surrounding material. Adopting an epistolary mode, these passages are written from the position of the lover, figured as “I”, and gestures towards an absent beloved, addressed as “You”. Analogous to the material interleaf, these textual interleaves preserve the thesis’s overall rhythm without disrupting its structure. The first-person voice employed here introduces a momentary proximity that allows the writing to touch, before withdrawing again.

Each written component emerges in tandem with material inquiry, grounded in the processes and conditions of the studio practice which centres on the making of acrylic polymer skins. These skins are responsive, permeable surfaces that register contact and shift over time. Pigment is not applied to produce a fixed image, but absorbed gradually through processes of diffusion and settling, shaped by the material’s inherent receptivity to its environment. What emerges is never stable: appearing, withdrawing and remains partially deferred. This durational process resists control and calls instead for a mode of attention grounded in care and restraint. Together, these practices remain in dialogue and relation with one another through what is no longer fully present, yet continues to affect, move and remain.