EMBEDDING THE UNKNOWN | KENDALL COWLE | Presentation
This paper will discuss explorations into embedding the unknown within a research methodology to facilitate the investigation of neurodivergent visual perception. The author has a Cerebral Visual Impairment and frequently considers the ‘unknown process’, the ‘unknown space’ (Fortnum, 2013) and the act of photography in relation to her creative practice and within her research surrounding her experiential perception of living with a CVI (Cowle, 2018).
The author embeds the unknown within her creative practice to promote questions and search for knowledge but does not claim to seek absolute resolve in her answers and this paper will discuss how she approaches her research explorations. She defines ‘the unknown space’ as the artist’s studio and its form characterised by the environment that the artist has created to assist their creative practice and will look at how her disorderly accumulation of physical objects facilitate the kind of exploration that takes her research in directions which does not ‘limit possible initiatives’ (Barthelme,1997).
The author will discuss ‘the unknown process’ as a heuristic approach to the way in which an artist encounters the act of making and interacts with their working materials. She will explore the concept of ‘thinking-with-tools’ (Jyrki Siukonen, 2015) and how, when she is engaged with her creative practice, her thinking takes on a very different form that allows her to explore and communicate her neurodivergent experiential perception. It will acknowledge a harmony between the unknown process and the unknown space and will discuss that by thinking of art as ‘a place where things can happen’ rather than ‘a thing in the world’ (Fisher, 2013) it is possible, to go beyond the physical encounters of creative materials and spaces, to seek knowledge in ways that are not possible by means of verbal and literary communications alone.
Barthelme, D. Herzinger, K. ed (1997) Not Knowing: The essays and interviews of Donald Barthelme. New York: Random House
Cowle, K. (2018) The Relationship Between Abstraction and Illusion: A Study of Photography and Visual Experience, Dissertation, University of Worcester, Institutes of Humanities and Creative Arts.
Fisher, E. Fortnum, R. eds (2013) On not knowing, how artists think. Cambridge: Black dog publishing.
Siukonen, Jyrki. (2015) Hammer and Silence A Short introduction to the philosophy of tools. Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Helsinki.
Home for artistic research; or how does a snail do it? | Jakub Ceglarz | Presentation
To grass, or leaf, or fruit, or wall, The snail sticks close, nor fears to fall, As if he grew there, house and all Together. (…) Who seeks him must be worse than blind, (He and his house are so combined,) If, finding it, he fails to find Its master.
William Cowper, The Snail, 1764.
Housing-as-hiding-as-home: mutant knowledge, shape shifting to fit the needs of its inhabitants.
Johnny Golding, INTERVENTIONs (it’s a wonderful life), 2003.
In this presentation, I want to explore a specific type of portable space, or rather a sense of the space, which is needed in the practice of artistic research. This emerges from my practice-led investigation of the palimpsest and the material, methodological and conceptual framework that it presents. Through this presentation, I argue that there is an inherent problem of finding a ‘home’ for artistic research, not only within art and academic spaces but also in negotiating the exquisiteness of the work and sense it produces. This, in turn, requires an artistic researcher to become a new type of critical maker-animal. A hybrid, queer, post- human and almost cyborgian creature (D. Harraway, 1985), that constantly and bravely deploys their work as to startle and perturb, with the goal of carving a little bit of space (never safe) for themselves.
By using a metaphor of a snail, a slimy small animal that is often portrayed as carrying and being a part of its own house, I aim to problematise the necessity of space (both actual and as a temporal experience) as a necessary enactment in the practice of artistic research. Through my research on palimpsest (2014 – 2017), I developed a Model of Palimpsestuousness 2.0 (2017), which is a wearable structure that functions as a methodology for artistic research and a product and space of the research itself. This enactment, in turn, allowed me to challenge the normative ways of relationality created at the intersection of art practice and academic research.
A Lost Ontology: Paintings That I Never Made | Sally Bailey | Presentation
I am a painter.
I am a painter who does not paint paintings.
I am a painter researching messy processes and messier thinking, materialness, performativity and language through the act of painting, and not painting.
I am a painter in/between. I am embedded within the interfaces and interstices existing and emerging between painting/painter/Painting.
I am a painter seeking extra-painterly explanations.
And if there are none?
I am not a painter.
Material Encounters 
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