Apophatic Art Practice and Research

Connecting with the ineffable in times of flattening

Contributors Project / Editorial Team
  • Merel Visse
  • William Franke
  • Ryan Woodring
  • Béatrice Machet
  • Sarah Travis
  • Enaiê Azambuja
  • Sarah Tarkany
  • Peter Kline
  • Kythe Heller
  • Cailtin Gilson
  • Chelle Stearns

Facilitators

Merel Visse is a Dutch-born, USA-based scholar, visual artist, educator and program strategist. Her work explores the landscapes and textures of care — intimacy, tenderness, precarity, oppression and abandonment — the things we feel but cannot fully name. Around that attention she makes spaces with others, where thinkers, artists, designers, and learners gather to stay with the difficulties and joys of everyday life. She has initiated and led grant-funded, cross-disciplinary programs with civic and academic reach. Her studio practice moves between watercolor, drawing, installation, and video — ways of getting close to what will not hold still to be named.

Most recently, together with an inspiring team, she launched a project on Apophatic Art Practice and Research. The project builds on various networks, institutional spaces, and experiences. Following her two-year term as visual arts section editor at the International Journal of Education and the Arts, Merel now serves as the co-editor at Visual Arts Research, and on various other editorial boards. Merel writes articles and books, that are somewhere out there, varying from research methodology (Researching Care With Case Studies, 2025) to articles on her Apophatic-Aesthetic Inquiry approach (Sometimes, Indirect is More Direct, 2025). Together with Dutch colleagues  she prepared and founded a Ph.D. Program on Meaningful Artistic Research. With Elena Cologni, she co-leads the Art & Care Platform Series. Inge van Nistelrooij and Merel founded the Dutch Gloed Collective, an ethics-and-art training collective. Merel was an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (2018), and at the School of Visual Art in NYC (2016). Merel holds a faculty position at Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies in the U.S.A., where she has been leading a graduate program since 2019. Before that, she spent over 10 years as a faculty member at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, with the Care Ethics & Policy Group. Merel received her Ph.D. from VU University Amsterdam.

Ryan Woodring is an interdisciplinary media artist compelled by a bilateral relationship with invisibility wrought by chronic illness and a decade+ of visual effects experience making things disappear. His work playfully engages in cycles of rendering and refusal, bobbing at the surface of communicable experience in a post-AI landscape of hyper-classification. He recently founded the Soft Data/Base, an interactive archive compiling artist projects that generate mutable data for ineffable experience, and developed an experimental drawing workshop in conjunction with his conceptual coloring book “Sick and Tired at the Met” (Irrelevant Press 2025). Woodring has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as The Museum of the Moving Image, Rochester Art Center, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, The International Museum of Surgical Science, Portland Biennial, and elsewhere, receiving project support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council of Oregon, Institute of Network Cultures, and others. His work has been included in publications such as Hyperallergic, Interview Magazine, and Redefine Magazine. Woodring co-founded Prequel, a free low-residency program in Portland, Oregon and belongs to Blockbusters Video Collective, New York. He holds an MFA from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts and serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of Digital Media at Drew University. He is a co-editor of Apophatic Art Practice & Research and associate editor of International Journal of Education & the Arts. Woodring lives and naps in Queens, NY. 

Guests

William Franke is a Franco-American philosopher of the humanities, poet, and professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University (formerly and concomitantly Professor Catedrático and Head of Philosophy and Religions at the University of Macau, 2013-2016). A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.

Kythe Heller is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar whose work spans text, film, music, performance, and multimedia social practice. She earned a ThD/PhD at Harvard University in Comparative Studies in Religion, with a PhD secondary field in Literary Arts, Film, and Visual Studies/Critical Media Practice. Previously, she received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in English Literature from Reed College.

Recently published work includes a collection of poems, Firebird (Arrowsmith), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and several critical studies on medieval and contemporary mysticism and spirituality, phenomenology of the senses, aesthetics, and the arts, including “An Ethnography of Spirituality” in Arvo Pårt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press), “Living Backwards” in Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and “The Heart Receptive of Every Form: Representations of Fire in the unio mystica of Mahomet” (Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal). She has received fellowships and grant awards from the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Film, performance, and installation work has been screened and exhibited across the United States and Canada.

She is also the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, a global art and research collective in the future of the human spirit, founded at Harvard Divinity School and now independent. Vision Lab creates work to address contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice,and technology. She edits the international art and culture journal Forecast, and is a poet on the faculty of Bard College's Language and Thinking Program.

Béatrice (Anne-Marie, Marie-Jeanne) Machet is a French born poet, living between France and the USA, whose dance lessons as a child influenced and still influence her writing. As a teen she learned a lot from the Native American point of view about Native American history and Native cultures, until she felt impregnated with them. After having been involved in the French science-fiction milieu, flirting with cartoons and magazines such as Actuel, Charlie Hebdo, Fluide Glacial, she met Jean-Hughes Malineau, a Gallimard editor, who encouraged her to begin a career as a poet. From this initial meeting, each published poetry book of hers will testify to an evolution in her writing practice. At her credit some 25 books and chapbooks of poetry (three of them in English) plus Native American poets’ collections she translated into French, and three anthologies gathering 40 Native American contemporary poets whom works she translated into French. She gives lectures and conferences about contemporary Native American literature in Europe and China.

She is used to collaborating with artists from all kinds of disciplines such as painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, video-makers, dancers and choreographers, and with whom she performs her poetry. She is on editorial boards of french poetry magazines such as Recours au poème, Sur le dos de la tortue, Les cahiers d’Eucharis etc.

She has had writer residences, is regularly invited in international poetry festivals in France and abroad. She leads creative writing workshops, is called for teaching and performing in schools and colleges. She also launched and created Radio cultural programs, poetry oriented, from 1984 to 1986 and from 2018 to nowadays. She is responsible of a monthly radio program (Radio Agora) dedicated to contemporary poetry.

She taught at the University of Macao in the creative writing program of the English department, Her work is translated into Dutch, Romanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, English, Spanish, Albanian, Russian and now into Chinese.

She lives between France and the USA.

John F. Simon Jr. (b. 1963; Shreveport, Louisiana), a software art pioneer, holds degrees in fine art, geology, planetary science, and computer art. Throughout his career, Simon has explored various mediums, including plotter drawings, acrylic sculptures, charcoal, LCD screens, and web-based systems. Drawing inspiration from contemplative drawing practices, Simon’s daily drawings inform his larger artworks. His works have been featured in major exhibitions and are in the collection of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His seminal work Every Icon was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and he collaborated with Björk to develop an app for her groundbreaking album Biophilia (2011).

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, artist & cyberethnographer based in new york city. he is an professor of design and media studies at nyu. His work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. he writes about  virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence. his work and research have been presented and published in journals, magazines and conferences, all over the world. he is the author of the books "a cyberachaeology of checkpoints" and "a few essays of taste" (metalabel's 2025 zine of the year). he is the founder of 13101401 inc,  a design and research studio. he currently works as a product manager.

he's on substack, youtube, twitter and instagram.

Participants