Hold Me: Togetherness as an Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

Through a conversational form, we weave together our experiences of making curious and conscious encounters with a work of art in a gallery, while grounding our nonlinear understandings of our shared aesthetic experience on the works of Maxine Greene, Peter de Bolla and Arnold Berleant. Holding, as our conceptual framework, seeds a kind of sensibility in us towards holding space to be dynamically in relation to each other and the work of art. The embodied and textual ways of conversing in this paper become a form of invitation to critically and creatively engage with the diverse meanings of aesthetic experience; an invitation to pause with and contemplate about how our embodied togetherness in the gallery led us to unexplored potentialities for seeking alternative ways of encountering the work aesthetically and internalising the aesthetic sensibilities and qualities that we experienced together in the gallery.