In the Margins

A margin is defined relative to something else. A ruled line. A body of text on a page. The margins are the excess, outside of the value we can qualify or quantify. Our understandings of the habitability of the margins are too often framed as fundamental differences between those that inhabit value and the rest that do not. What would happen if we reframed the margins beyond a simple dichotomy? What could we gain if the margins were a habitable space around and between the things we prioritize in defining? By analyzing a body of my own art, I visualize the margins through the categories of marginalia and color(ism). In marginalia, I emphasize the coordination between linguistic structures on the page as a way to project the margins into habitable space. Through an analysis of color(ism), I show that the margins are neither for blackness nor whiteness. It is color on the brink. The brink – an edge between two things that is only known through a spatial, epistemological, and ontological understanding of something because it neither one or the other. This emphasis on color is meant to draw a line from the semantic page to the aesthetic space through affect. Ultimately the goal of this paper is not just to theoretically propose such a space, but to also apply it as a form of embodied knowledge that I have/am living, and how such a space as the margins can be seen in traces through creative expression