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

Amidst anxieties of autoimmunity, this practice-led PhD will embrace absurdity, highlighting the urgency of play, dressing-up and making(-believe) in the face of impending doom. Drawing from decorative armour and costumes of care worn in wartime and illness, and personal experience of autoimmune disease, it will harness 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-Beckett; Burrows and O'Sullivan; Cave; Palmer-sculptural costumes and playful scripts will perform autoimmunity's care-in-excess as exuberance, cultivating creative modes of decorum through fictioning-as-resistance.