This doctorate art-based research explores how shifts in perception propel change and evolution in artistic practice, encouraging a reflective process that prompts both creators and viewers to reassess their perspectives, assumptions, and responses through embodied experiences. The research focuses on the postmodern concepts of deconstruction and hybridization, investigating how these practices serve as catalysts for shifts in perspective within the creative process and contribute to the evolution of arts and society. Additionally, it examines how deconstruction and hybridization can be pedagogically useful in expressive arts facilitation and social change.

Throughout my artistic journey, wonder has been my guide. I believe wonder and awe have the power to shift perception and ignite new pathways. My artistic practice has always been driven by experimentation and the exploration of many modalities—from painting to sculpture, from hands-on to digital, from visual art to installation & performance. My creations hybridize mediums and techniques, combining painting, collage, sculpture, photography, and video to reflect my inner and outer search. Born in France and based in Spain for many years, I see myself as a hybrid artist with a collage identity shaped by travel and interdisciplinary artistic exploration. Through this hybridity of identities, mediums, and techniques, I explore bridges between art, imagination, philosophy, perception, and the evolution of consciousness. Fifteen years ago, at a crossroads in my artistic career and personal evolution, I felt called to expand my exploration into relationality, working with individuals and groups to explore creative processes as pathways to transformation. This led me to train as a Gestalt art therapist and an expressive arts teacher and coach.

Gestalt theory, rooted in the study of form and perception, examines how reality shapes and meaning emerges from the dynamic relationship between foreground and background. Gestalt therapy employs creative and expressive methods to disrupt habitual figure-ground relationships, fostering shifts in perception and breaking through fixed ways of seeing reality. While Gestalt challenges perception at a psychological level, deconstruction, a philosophical concept developed by Jacques Derrida (1967), challenges the fixity of meaning within language and cultural structures. Initially a literary practice aimed at revealing biases inherent in language, deconstruction challenges fixed interpretations, stable identities, and universal truths in favor of fluidity, multiplicity, and contingency. As an artistic practice, deconstruction can be traced back to collage techniques and chance-based methods among Surrealist and Modernist artists. By destabilizing norms, deconstruction has generated radical shifts in perspective, becoming central to contemporary artistic practices and post modern art discourse.

At the core of expressive arts is the concept of decentering—in which an artistic experience enables individuals to step outside habitual perceptions of reality. By crafting and guiding decentering artistic experiences, practitioners foster shifts in perception through art-making and imagination, unveiling hidden resources, opening new possibilities, and expanding consciousness. When art disrupts conventional ways of seeing, it can foster profound transformative experiences and unexpected revelations. Such encounters engage the senses, offering moments of embodied insight. Decentering shares a fundamental kinship with Gestalt approaches, both aiming to disrupt habitual perceptions of self and reality through experiential engagement. This research seeks to explore how the practice of deconstruction in expressive arts contexts can support decentering and foster “gestalt shifts” of perception.

Expressive arts are also rooted in an interdisciplinary approach, encouraging participants to use multiple forms of creative expression to articulate their inner world. The intermodal transfer theory developed by Paolo Knill (2003) deepens the creative process by facilitating the transformation of expression from one artistic modality to another: an image becomes a movement, a movement becomes a sound, a sound becomes a poem. This intermodal dialogue enriches the process and supports cognitive crystallization. “Particularly, the use of creative writing and poetry allows images, movements, rhythms, or sounds to find conceptual clarity”. Intermodal transfer and its fluid transitions between artistic modalities align with the postmodern concept of hybridization or métissage.

Hybridization generates new forms of expression by merging diverse modalities, subjects, and cultural influences. It embodies the postmodern concepts of multiplicity and difference (Deleuze, 1980), where reality is in constant becoming and nothing is pure—whether in nature or society. Historically, all cultures have evolved through exchanges and appropriations from other cultures. In today’s contemporary artistic landscape, hybridization is evident in subjects, modalities, materials, motifs, traditions, and ideas. Artistic projects intersect with fields such as ecology, biology, technology, sciences, social change, and political activism. Digital media and the internet offer a global library of images, sounds, and cultural artifacts, expanding creative possibilities and paving the way for new forms of artistic hybridity. As Susan Scafidi discusses in “Who Owns Culture?” (2005), this constant availability allows artists to draw from a vast array of cultural expressions, broadening artistic, personal, and existential possibilities. In an era characterized by global communication and cultural exchange, hybridization is inseparable from creative evolution.

The interwoven postmodern concepts of Gestalt perception, deconstruction, and hybridization closely align with the expressive arts methodologies of decentering and intermodal transfer. All these approaches seek to step outside familiar perspectives, break through fixed ways of seeing, and reveal new possibilities for exploration and insight. My personal engagement with these concepts is rooted in my own creative process and interaction with different mediums and modalities. Originally not a scholar but an artist whose work emerges from an intuitive call to wonder and the exploration of aesthetic attractors, I was drawn to postmodern philosophical concepts because of their deep resonance with my experience of how creative processes shape and transform. This embodied experience led me to investigate how deconstruction and hybridization could serve as catalysts for artistic, pedagogical, and societal transformation.

My first encounter with postmodern philosophy was through phenomenology and intentional observation of the creative process, foundational to both expressive arts and Gestalt therapy. Since the dawn of civilization, humans have engaged in art-infused rituals to celebrate life cycles, invoke healing, and communicate with the divine (Sally Atkins, 2014). In expressive arts, artistic expression is seen as our original language—to be claimed, reclaimed, and made accessible to all. Art serves as a space for inquiry and discovery, a threshold to the unknown, a dialogue with the living world, and a means of connection between humans and non-humans. It offers a gateway to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “living in the flesh of the world,” immersing us in the phenomenology of relationality. In expressive arts, creation is a dance between not knowing and knowing, between decision making and letting the art shapes itself. The process begins with an intuitive call from artistic attractors, “trusting that as we attend diligently to the medium and embrace possible confusion and chaos, at some point coherence and meaning will emerge” (William Kentridge 2024). In expressive arts practice it is the bridge between art making and intentional phenomenological observation that will catalyse shift of perspective and transformation in unveiling the hidden layers of the experience. 

Central to the methodology of this research are a/r/tography and phenomenological observation, two interwoven approaches that shape both artistic practice and inquiry. A/r/tography bridges three symbiotic activities: my personal art practice, my art-based research, and my teaching of expressive arts. It embraces the fluid intersections between art, research, and teaching, allowing for emergent discoveries through creative practice. In my research, this methodology supports an ongoing hybrid creation process that generates its own perspective shifts.

A/r/tography fosters dynamic dialectical relationships, thirdness, and in-between spaces, deepening a phenomenological engagement with the world. This interplay requires attunement to perception, embodiment, and the lived experience of artistic inquiry. “The three activities weave through one another, creating métissage—a fabric of similarity and difference, a triangular dynamic that allows for both convergence and divergence. Métissage belongs to the borderlands, where cultures contest, merge, and reconstitute one another, dissolving rigid barriers “(Rita Irwin, 2023).

In seeking to grasp the entangled nature of art and evolution, my methodology is also informed by rhizomatic exploration (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) and tentacular thinking (Haraway, 2016), both of which challenge linear models of inquiry. These perspectives reinforce a fluid, relational, and open-ended approach to research. Donna Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble” and the question of “art as gift” also weave through this research and the artistic projects I have developed. Haraway’s concept of “contact zones” is transposed to aesthetic attractors, serving as entry points for a creative process that progressively shapes through the hybridization of artistic creation, “tentacular” rhizomatic research and participatory artistic experiments. A key aspect is to embrace the experience of getting lost and entangled, trusting that by attending to the process, coherence, meaning, and new pathways will emerge.

This research will be structured around six chapters.
Chapter 1 will establish the methodological foundation of the research, presenting the theoretical frameworks that support the inquiry. It will also provide a bibliographic review, outlining key texts and references that inform the study.
Chapter 2 will examine the emergence and role of deconstruction and hybridization in postmodern art and postmodern philosophy. It will explore how these concepts challenge dominant narratives, disrupt fixed meanings, and open new artistic and intellectual possibilities. The chapter will be illustrated with a selection of art movements, artists, and curators whose work exemplifies these ideas.
Chapter 3 will document how deconstruction and hybridization have shaped my personal artistic practice, sparking an embodied understanding of postmodern philosophical concepts. It will also explore how these methodologies evolved into pedagogical tools in the context of expressive arts teaching. Additionally, this chapter will highlight how these practices align with key expressive arts concepts, such as decentering, intermodal transfer, and low-skill/high-sensitivity approaches. The discussion will be supported by examples from my own artistic work and student processes.
Chapters 4 and 5 will present two personal artistic projects that use deconstruction and hybridization as catalysts for addressing contemporary issues and social change.
Chapter 4 will introduce “Memories of the Future”, an eco-futurist artistic project that explores the interspecies relationship between the Opuntia cactus and the Cochineal insect through speculative fabulations. The project hybridizes artificial intelligence, digital manipulation, and analogue craftsmanship to reframe ecological narratives and expand imaginative possibilities. Developed in collaboration with a collective of women artists, it raises awareness of the disappearance of the Prickly Pear cactus on the island of Ibiza and mainland Spain.
Chapter 5 will present “On Wax: a world of relationships”, an art-based research project that began with a journey to Ghana, West Africa, and seeks to reflect on the dynamics between Global North and Global South. The project engages with digital collage, video, patchworking, and weaving to deconstruct motifs from African wax prints and traditional African weaving patterns. By reconfiguring these visual languages, it opens a dialogue on cultural appropriation, cultural identity, hybridization, and postcolonialism.
Chapter 6 will reflect on the creative process that emerged through this research, examining how it transformed my artistic practice, my facilitation of expressive arts, and my worldview. This chapter will also address the challenges, unresolved questions, and areas for further exploration that surfaced during the research.