The non-verbal and the verbal: expanding awareness of practice-led research in creative writings

This paper takes up the concept of practice-led research: research (or the production and performance of knowledge) that is implicit within practice – in this case creative arts practice and more specifically, creative writing practice. Does practice-led research offer new possibilities for recognition of contributions to research by writers? This exploration of creative practice and research stretches out tendrils between creative writing and other art forms. What may the predominantly non-verbal creative arts disciplines offer creative writing in terms of exploring modes of knowledge production and performance?

Dancing the thesis : potential and pitfalls in practice-led research

Practice-led or multi modal these (describing examinable outcomes of postgraduate study which comprise the practice of dancing/choreography with an accompanying exegesis) are an emerging strength of dance scholarship; a form of enquiry that has been gaining momentum over a decade, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom. It has been strongly argued that, in this form of research, legitimate claims to new knowledge are embodied predominantly within the practice itself (Pakes 2003) and that these findings are emergent, contingent and often interstitial contained within both the material form of the practice and in the symbolic languages surrounding the form.

This paper draws on Dancing between diversity and consistency: Refining assessment in postgraduate studies in dance, a study conducted with funding by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council 2006-2008, to critically examine some of the issues raised by such degrees. The study's structure formed around extensive literature reviews into higher degree dance studies; general examination/assessment discussions at research masters and doctoral levels; and issues arising from the relatively new artistic degrees involving practice components. Focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with 74 supervisors/examiners, research deans and administrators, and candidates/graduates elicited the views on assessing practice-led dance research of two principal participant groups; the professional dance community represented by Ausdance (The Australian Dance Council) and the staff and student cohort of Australian universities who offered dance or related postgraduate degrees.

Tensions arose through the project specifically in terms of deciding what kinds of articulations of practice-led dance research might be acceptable at the PhD level. Here, we address underlying issues of interdisciplinarity that arise from the current common practice of requiring a written requirement for PhD theses. This leads to a consideration of how differing cultural inflections and practices might be incorporated into our reading and evaluation of theses, how creative approaches to layered documentation can function as durable artifacts of creative research while contributing to the overall 'knowledge generation' of the thesis, and what kinds of language structures, such as metaphor, allusion and symbol, can be co opted to function generative in dialogue with other kinds of texts and discourses.

The aesthetic image : affect and the production of knowledge in practice-led research

This paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding how affect and aesthetic processes generate images that are implicated in the production of new knowledge in creative arts research. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.

The new wilderness: A practice-led model for arts based enquiry

The New Wilderness is a practice-led, multidisciplinary arts project first piloted by artists, writers, teachers and academics from Geelong, Deakin University and Courthouse ARTS Centre in 2013. In a series of workshops run by artists, and working to specific themes, the project provided a platform for participants to explore and respond creatively to change in the community; it culminated in a large-scale installation at Courthouse ARTS Centre’s main gallery. Our paper positions the project as a able to cut across convention, empowering young artists to respond to ‘big questions’ of relevance to the changing material, spatial and social relations within their communities. In questioning and seeking to transform communities into sustainable media, economic, environmental and social ecologies, this emergent model begins with a localised focus, which is designed to travel across time and place, and pedagogical frameworks. The paper positions Geelong as a community under radical transformation in its economic foundations and demographics. As artists and academics living and working in the region we see it as an experimental ground for investigations into a series of provocations that mirror the shape of the paper we intend to give. The provocations, as outlined in the workshops, might also be envisaged as new relations to:Object – From consumable to unusable to play. In revisiting the first iteration of The New wilderness in 2013 we discuss the ‘superfictional’ (Hill, 2000) enquiry that participants were asked to engage with. Its premise described Geelong as an abandoned, post-apocalyptic site. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as a group of future explorers and excavate objects from the city’s old tip. In unearthing their choices and re-presenting the objects in the gallery the participant was prompted to analyse site, situation, object and process as phenomena for ‘being’ or ‘telling stories’, providing insights into wider realms of cultural experience (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2010). Parallel to this ‘autoethnographic’ reflection our paper uses the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of consumer and material culture. He traces the subject’s relation to objects from use-value, to exchange-value and in the era of extreme capitalism, to pure exhibition-value. He searches for ways that the objects produced in our material culture can be ‘profaned’ (Agamben, 2007). Space – From the material to the spatial to the situation. We are interested in how objects and the practices they elicit can be ‘profaned’ by their situation (Agamben, 2007; Wark, 2103). To profane, according to Agamben, is to open up the possibility that the object loses its exhibition-value to ‘a special form of negligence’ (Agamben). He uses the example of the child’s ability to insinuate any object into a new logic of play (Agamben). Like the objects excavated for The New Wilderness they could be from a variety of spheres – business, household, industry, health etc… The child, like the artist, reconstitutes, reorders and assembles new relations between things. In reflecting on the first New Wilderness project the paper correlates the creative response of the participant (student, child, artist) with the occupier. The Occupy Movement, which took up residence in many of the world’s cities’ financial districts in 2011, used a number of strategies commensurate with both Agamben’s notion of profanation and McKenzie Wark’s reading of the Situationist International’s use of détournement - as a strategy that releases objects and subjects back into the field of play (Wark, 2013). The field was taken by the occupy movement to be the space in which they occupied – capitalism, its logic and its practices, were, for a short time, redundant in the occupied field. The New Wilderness conceptualises the city as a localised field, from which its discarded objects can be ‘profaned’ or, repurposed, to reflect on shared histories, responsibilities, pedagogies and future action. Subject: self/other– As much as we propose New Wilderness to be a pedagogical initiative we see it as personal, critical and political. In the themed workshops, designed to elicit personal responses to the object and the site, which culminated in a multi-disciplinary installation, performance and/or text based work, participants were encouraged to think critically, and importantly, collectively. Through the four workshops run in the first iteration of the project participants were asked to re-consider their material value-systems, much as the occupy movement was trying to do, and like the occupiers, participants were empowered to be agents of change. Our paper reflects on the practical outcomes and the conceptual, political and pedagogical strategies embedded in The New Wilderness project. The paper affords us the additional opportunity to imagine a life for it in other geographical, socio-economic and educational situations. Merinda Kelly and Cameron Bishop, 2013Bio: Merinda Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist, educator and PhD student at Deakin University. Her research interests include Visual Culture, Practice Led Research, the Ontology of Art, and Autoethnography. Her most recent work includes the Pop Archaeology' and the Globo-Touro Projects.Bio: Dr Cameron Bishop is an artist and academic working in Visual Arts at Deakin University. He exhibits regularly and has written a number of journal articles and book chapters. His research has focused on the philosophical and postcolonial dimensions of space and subjectivity and more recently has evolved into an active interest in strategic interventions into space and practice.

Foucault's 'What is an author' : towards a critical discourse of practice as research

A vexed issue for many artistic researchers is related to the need for the artist/researcher to write about his or her own work in the research report or exegesis. In the creative arts, the outcomes that emerge from an alternative logic of practice are not easily quantifiable and it can be difficult to articulate conclusions objectively given the emotional and ideological investments and the intrinsically subjective dimension of the artistic process. How then, might the artist as researcher avoid on the one hand, what has been referred to as 'auto-connoisseurship', the undertaking of a thinly veiled labour of valorising what has been achieved in the creative work, or alternatively producing a research report that is mere description or history?

In this paper I suggest that a way of overcoming such a dilemma is for creative arts researchers to shift the critical focus away from the notion of the work as product, to an understanding of both studio enquiry and its outcomes as process. I’d like to draw on Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is An Author ‘ to explore how we might move away from art criticism to the notion of a critical discourse of practice-led enquiry that involves viewing the artist as a researcher, and the artist/critic as a scholar who comments on the value of the artistic process as the production of knowledge.

Foucault’s essay provides artistic researchers with a template for more objective and distanced discourse on the practice-led research process and its writing. It allows researchers to locate themselves within contexts of theory and practice and provides an analytical framework though which researchers might locate themselves and their work within the broader social arena and field of research, As I will show with reference to the work of Donna Haraway and a number of commentaries on Pablo Picasso’s Demioselles d’Avignon, an application of Foucault’s ideas need not negate those subjective and situated aspects of practice as research.

Creative arts practice, creative industries : method and process as cultural capital

The value of artistic research is related not only to the products of creative arts practices, but also to methodological, material and social processes through which they operate.

This paper argues that although creative arts research methods – the use of personally situated, interdisciplinary and emergent approaches – contradict what is usually expected of research, such approaches underpin the innovative capacity of studio enquiry and its implication for extending practice-led research pedagogy across all research disciplines.

Gendered (s)explorations among same-sex attracted young people in Australia

This paper seeks to import a more complex understanding of gendered subjectivity into discussions of young people and homosexuality, and is based on an Australian national survey (n=749) of same-sex attracted youth (SSAY) aged between 14 and 21. Results revealed significant gender differences with regard to patterns of sexual attraction, behaviour and identity labels among participants. For the young men in the study, there was more congruence between feelings of gender a-typicality, same-sex attractions and same-sex behaviours. Overall, young women displayed more fluidity with regard to their sexual feelings, behaviours and identities. Young women were more likely to be engaged in private explorations of lesbianism, concurrent with participation in heterosexual sex and relationships. Young women were also grappling with more limited and emotionally risky opportunities for sex with other girls who were already known to them as friends. The invisibility of lesbianism as an identity or practice led to confusion about what feelings meant for the future in the arena of lived experience. The paper concludes that more research is needed into the impact of gender on the development of young people's experiences of homosexuality, particularly the manner in which invisibility and lack of social acceptance of a full spectrum of sexual diversity may disadvantage young women's emotional health and well-being.

Ferals, nomads, drifters, gypsies, vagrants, blow-ins, thieves, troublemakers, tricksters and terrorists : creative writing, from creative industries to creative ecologies

In this paper I consider some issues that I, as a creative writer and academic, find with the concept and current understandings of the term creative industries. The subject of creative industries is not one that has been adequately teased out in relation to creative writing, even though the creative industries model has been a strong force in cultural policymaking internationally since the late 1990s. It influences policies that in turn may affect writers, especially those applying for state or national funds to resource their writing, and also writers working within the academy and attempting to gain recognition and funding for creative work there. The issues relating to creative industries are also particularly pertinent at this time in Australian universities, as the new system of research quality measurement is negotiated, and creative arts scholars, including those in creative writing, struggle to define their work in terms of those negotiations. I will argue that the recent work of Paul Carter looks towards ways in which creative industries may be more inclusive and useful for the creative arts, including creative writing, and suggest that a reclaimed term, creative ecologies, indicates a good way of taking creative industries into the future.

Water's edge : And the water's edge writing

Water's Edge, and The Water's Edge Writing, is a work of practice-led research in the field of creative writing. Practice-led research, which refers to research undertaken in the process of making a creative artwork, has become a significant and innovative type of research particularly in the disciplines of the creative arts. This book consists of two parts in dialogue with one another. These include Water's Edge, a novel, and The Water's Edge Writing, an exegetical component. Water's Edge is the story of Serena, a midnight-to-dawn radio announcer, who discovers information about her family's past and future via the act of creative writing. The Water's Edge Writing addresses issues of practice-led research, including a teasing out of the nexus between creative arts practice and higher research in universities. This book represents an important example of how creative arts practice can constitute the discovery of new knowledge, in the form of practice-led research.

Lissitzky : new materialism and diagrammatic living

Lissitsky's spatial and architectural work anticipates the contemporary fascination with expanded fields of activity that have resulted in transdisciplinary approaches to research and the role of practice-led research. This paper will discuss Lissitzky's suprematist perspective in relation to contemporary practices - under the rubric of the "diagram" - that re-imagine and enact the relationship between the built surround and embodied cognition. Lissitzky's work will serve as the starting point for a discussion of contemporary practitioners and theorists working across philosophy, cognitive science and built environment in order to draw out, through the act of diagramming, life on new terms.

Here where it lives … bioscleave

This essay introduces the work of Arakaw and Gins to interdisciplinary specialists and scholars and practitioners who are concerned with issues of art-science convergence. The co-authors discuss several points of view to the work of these artist-turned-architects and address the difficulties and challenges that their work represents in terms of the convergence and complexity of multiple dicourse and the practical challenges to embodied experience, technlogy-based approaches ot knowledge acquisition and perceptually-based learning environments.

An Arakawa and Gins experimental teaching space : a feasibility study

This essay discusses the benefits of Arakawa and Gins procedural architecture for the development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning environments. the discussion of how the body is engaged in knoelwdge acquisition leads to a feasibility study undertaken at an Australian University to determine how an experimental, sensory and perceptually-based learning space might be built given the T&L priorties and the fiscal climate in which universitioes curently operate

Sisters of the sun

A film about flows of time and language on the Volcanic Plains of Western Victoria. Directed by Simon Wilmot. Produced by Patrick West & Simon Wilmot. Script by Patrick West.

The past has its place in the future. Wombeetch Puyuun is teaching Scottish-born settler Isabella Dawson his aboriginal tongue so that her father, James Dawson, can write his book. But how can language preserve the past in a land where time overwhelms words? Meanwhile, contemporary Australians from the Volcanic Plains of Victoria’s Western District meditate over life in a place of sheep, algae, eels, lava and stars. Susan Cole and Janice Austin, descendents of Isabella and Wombeetch’s people united for the first time, reflect on Wombeetch’s friendship with James, and what it means to be ‘the last of your tribe.’

The event 'Flows and Catchments' was held at the Warrnambool Art Gallery on 2/12/2012.

Sisters of the Sun has also screened at Lake Bolac Eel Festival (March 2014) and Warnambool Art Gallery (Feb 2013)

Global positioning systems : altered representations of place

Global Positioning Systems: altered representations of place, presents an exegesis from the practice led research submitted for the degree of Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. The thesis proposes a particular understanding of altered states of consciousness that is relevant to my practice.  This is outlined by Charles Tart and supported by the Altered States of Consciousness Consortium and explores a psycho-aesthetic experiences and does not involved transcendental states or spiritual associations. These experiences are transformed by an exhaustive application of digital technologies, where mosaic-like complexity emerges that induces sustained disorientation and surrounds a viewer in an immersive space.