PLAN
- Research and discuss how my making refers to nature and connectedness and ground it in an application of theoretical research around Post Humanism, Feminism and New Materialism ideas, as well as the artists I explored and researched;
- I will mainly look at Dona Haraway, Ursula le Guin, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
- I will consider writing a summary of current books I am reading and about the connection between my work and research.
- My making embraces connectedness as I look for a fluidity and relation between all things, human and non human;
- The materials I explored are mostly natural – I can investigate other materials like to make paper with mushrooms;
- I am trying to grow mushrooms in the vessels I made of paper mache – I need to see the outcome and explore further possibilities around feathers and nests I have been working with.
- I am at a tension between the ephemeral approach of my making and having an outcome to share.
- I use different sites as places for making different explorations around materials and the non-human. I call these ‘para-sites’ and treat them as separate parts within my Body of work.
- I see myself as a ‘magpie’ – actively exploring, sifting and sorting.
- I believe I employ a reflective process in my studio practice.
- Shortcomings is to explore in detail how this making process serves as a reflective space where theoretical ideas are processed, questioned, and refined.
- In the studio, or Advanced Practice part of my course, I focus more on how insights and questions emerge while creating, particularly in my drawing practice.
KEY ARGUMENTS I HAVE SETTLED ON (750 word text)
Researching ideas around practice-led research showed me that it is a form of generative enquiry that draws on subjective, interdisciplinary and emergent methodologies. My perspective is based on the idea that human life is entangled in many relationships and that these theories can be explored through contemporary art. I consider my position to be similar to that of other artists I have researched, as well as the views of Donna Haraway. I was also inspired by Petra Lange-Berndt’s article, How to be complicit with Materials (Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality, 2015: 12-20) during my reading on materiality and exploring the focus on the process of engaging with materials by thinking with materials and considering to give agency to the material by acting with the material.
I have now concluded that I struggle to show how making in my artistic practice ‘feeds off’ concepts of thought and knowledge. My research needs to be framed within my practice. My theoretical acts happen in my making in my studio; sometimes, I ‘think’ in the medium I work with, and that piece of work is where questions, insights and problems emerge. This happens mostly in my drawing practice, which is more meditative and reflective as I work.
On a personal level, I can continue to explore how expressing my experience of loss/death through my work contributes to a broader understanding of shared humanity. During a recent exhibition where I shared a feather installation and my drawings, I had an experience of how my making can contribute to emotional healing and well-being. Viewers came to talk, and the experience was shared on a deeper level through interaction.
Connectedness and non-hierarchical approach to making:
In “The Mushroom at the End of the World“, Tsing has convinced me that human beings are products of and depend on collaboration and contamination for our survival and evolution, and, like matsutake mushrooms and other species, we are living in and adapting to damaged environments. I argue that our relationships with this environment are more important than ever. The power of new stories about the environment and the non-human brings about new knowledge and more involvement for artists to contribute. Using Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, this ‘new way’ of interacting can lead to further stories that matter. I will bring ideas from the other authors I have used in my research and discussed in other blogs to define this investigation.
To me, connecting with the land is a form of gathering. I would argue that I have ‘collected’ ideas and artists in the way I collect material – a form of finding connections around ideas around stories we tell about life and nature and our interactions with each other. Braiding Sweetgrass opened views around weaving and reweaving to connect people with the land and bring practical making and exploration of weaving and materials to use in the research.
How I work with and explore materials and learn from other artists:
“Para-sites include those experiments and collaborations that engage extra-textual media, including artworks, installations, films, performances, and demonstrations.” (Knots and Knowings, p 101-102)
I divided my making into different sites and called them, Para-sites. Using these sites, I can improvise, change, understand how to intergrate research theories and methods through collaborations and experimental practices in my making. It appears to be a good form of research creation. I see my ‘para-sites’ as a practical space where I use mushrooms, feathers and nests as objects I work with as my material while exploring the opportunity to create with the non-human. I can apply documentation, video, and photographs to complement the research practice.
New ‘para-sites’ will continue to develop – I am thinking of my community involvement and work I will do later in the year with girls around body-image and physical changes towards puberty, as well as a support group for single mothers.
Considering ideas of Ubuntu in my making as well as an ontology:
As a practitioner in a community with many social issues and hurt from past political inflictions, I think this approach can lead to a better understanding of how art can contribute to human connection, social transformation, and promoting positive values within communities and societies. I want to investigate how Ubuntu, emphasising interconnectedness, community, and individual relationships, can provide a rich and meaningful framework for exploring art creation’s philosophical and conceptual underpinnings. Ubuntu has an underlying ethic of care and empathy, emphasising communal relationships. It also extends towards a shared responsibility towards the Earth and its well-being. Ideas of adapting to the environment ring true for me. I prefer to place species alongside each other and see these ideas historically strongly influenced by politics, culture, history and religion.
By considering Ubuntu’s emphasis on communal support and individual flourishing, ideas of daily drawing practice to use the time to focus on one’s well-being are further explored in group sessions at the project where I am involved. In our current work, we are moving to our connectedness to nature in our area. In a recent class, we had the kids drawing outside, placing the focus on what we are hearing, seeing, and sensing. In this way, Ubuntu’s principles can also extend to a sense of responsibility towards the environment when we explore the landscape and nature around us. In early September, we will make bird wings as body attachments and focus on local birds while developing the ideas of making wings and learning/considering the diversity of birds we have in our area.
Ideas of care in the work Matters of Care, by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
Along with Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa fervently champions the subversion of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism in favour of de-centred and distributed agencies in these ecological care matters. Accordingly, these agencies are tantamount to a pluralistic, disseminated sustaining of co-existence, where humans and non-humans merge. I value her decentering the human subject into more-than-human webs of care. As a result, care shares a potential to re-organize human/nonhuman relations towards more non-exploitive forms of co-existence. Caring for something is more binding than just being concerned; it requires active involvement, e.g. concerning maintenance or improvement, just as caring for someone is more binding than just being concerned. What I found for Puig de la Bellacasa is that the meaning of ‘matters of care’ includes everything and everybody involved, not only those who pull the strings and are closest to the fore of attention, interests, power and investments. As a feminist v Puig de la Bellacasa foregrounds the invisible labour forces, such as the daily strains of mothers, unpaid or underpaid cornerstones of ‘ordinary’ maintenance in households, families, factories, services, institutions, even more so in ‘underdeveloped’ societies and economies. She highlights the importance of the speculative as a critical compass in these fields, i.e. a theoretical, open-ended, non-predetermined mode of thinking to counteract universal claims about what care and ethics should look like.
Bibliography
Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2023) Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed editions pdf
Lange-Berndt Petra (205) Materiality Documents of Contemporary Art Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press. Introduction/How to be Complicit with Materials (p 12 – 23)
Le Guin, Ursula. (1988) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction First published by Ignota, 2019. At: ebook pdf SCRIBD (Accessed January 2023).
Myers, Natasha. (2020) Knots and Knowings – Anthropologist as Transducer in a Field of Affects. The University of Alberta Press. At: Read as ebook on SCRIBD ( pg 97 -126) Accessed April 2023).
Sullivan, Graeme. 2006. Research Acts in Art Practice A Journal of Issues and Research, 2006. At: https://aboutjstor.ort/terms. (Accessed on 25 July 2023).
Tsing, Anna L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins Princeton University Press. Read online as Ebook pdf SCRIBD. (Accessed December 2022).
Tsing, Anna L. (2010) Arts of Inclusion, or How to love a mushroom. Unviversity of Hawai’i Press Manoa, Vol. 22. No 2, At: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41479491 (Accessed May 2023)