Hannah Clarkson
The Absurd Art of A(r)mour: Playful Strategies of Resistance, Costumes of Care and Decorum for the Autoimmune Body

Amidst the anxiety and autoimmunity left in Covid- 19's wake, nihilism is tempting. Hence the urgency of play, dressing-up and making(-believe) in the face of impending doom: as Nagg's tailor declares in Beckett's Endgame, 'Look at the world—and look at my TROUSERS'. Instead of an endgame defined by certain conclusion, this PhD embraces absurdities of play-as-protection and costume-as-care apropos autoimmunity, activating sculpture as costume for performance. Drawing from decorative armour and costumes of care worn in wartime and illness, and personal experience of autoimmune disease, it harnesses the absurdity of dressing up for/to resist death and difficult realities, using play and pretence as strategies for survival. Building on artistic and literary expressions of illness and absurdity—Jocelyn Herbert’s costumes for Samuel Beckett’s plays; Burrows and O'Sullivan’s ideas of fictioning; Frida Kahlo’s clothing—sculptural costumes and playful scripts perform autoimmunity's care-in-excess as exuberance, cultivating creative modes of decorum through fictioning-as-resistance. Existing studies on care and illness claim personal stories' value, yet often reduce narrative to data and clinical expression. In this PhD—building on medical humanities and theatre design practices—autoimmunity meets autopathography and absurdity in embodied illness narratives, advocating personal and social agency and exploring possibilities and parameters of play. Led by studio, writing, archival and performance practices, this research aims to re-present 'autoimmune' understandings of bodily agency, playing with absurd sculptural costumes and performance to articulate material, relatable narratives of trauma and care. It assembles a chorus of shapeshifting players who relate to their bodies and clothing in ways that assert their individual experience and create an empathetic togetherness: Jocelyn Herbert, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Zofia Stryenska, Virginia Woolf, my sister, my grandmother. Some I have met in ‘real life’, others are imaginary friendships helping answer the following questions: When a body turns in on itself—care-in-excess—how could autoimmune exuberance be re-materialised and turned outwards by making—make-believe—and dressing-up in sculptural armour? If decorum is decoration towards fitness for purpose, how might the exuberance of making decorative costumes of care reframe misbehaviour as mischief/play? How could embellishment contribute to 'fictioning'—embellishing a story—and autoimmunity—decoration as resistance, another mode of decorum? Instead of hiding behind myths of being 'sick' or 'well', how could 'fictioning' and 'dressing up' foster new, absurd modes of autopathography and empathetic exchange? My own story of autoimmunity introduces The Absurd Art of A(r)mour as dressing up, decorum, desire for self-protection, favouring costume as resistance over war metaphors for illness. Chapter One—The Fold, the Pearl and the Laugh of Venus—explores illness, empathy, and the folding of memory, experience and materials as/in my own and others’ art practice, figured by Venus, the pearl and the fold. Chapter Two—Drawing on the Archive as Dressing-up Box—explores care and constraint in Herbert’s costume/set designs for Beckett, theorising her archive as theatre, play, make-believe. Chapter Three—Playing Up, Misbehaviour and Autoimmunity’s Absurd Exuberance—examines misbehaviour and exuberance as expressions of hope, care and joy amidst or despite anxieties of autoimmunity.