materials of the foreshore
The aesthetic version of my PhD thesis operates as an artist’s book comprised of a slipcase filled with paper pocket volumes of intertwined scholarly writing, poetry, and visual image. These different elements are presented in such a way that might disrupt traditional hierarchies that often emerge between different kinds of text and image. The form challenges conventional notions of what a thesis can be, how it functions, and how these constraints might be expanded to better engage a practice-as-research approach to place-based arts research. The intent is to open up space for dialogue - between the reader, myself the author, and the materials - which acts as an invitation for myriad responses from all engaged.
Waiting to be discovered is a wildness which is smaller, darker, more complex and interesting, not a place to stride over but a force requiring constant negotiation. 1
-Kathleen Jamie
Through a series of iterative material and place-based encounters, this thesis offers a methodology of Explicit Ambiguity, which, when engaged in the creation and dissemination of arts research, provides an intimate and attentive viewpoint through which to consider sited practice. The foreshore, which lies between high and low tide, acts as a geographical location for research and an analogy for this practice research journey. To be ambiguous is not to be ambivalent nor vague; in the context of practice research, it is the speculative nature of ambiguity that is central to this exploration. There is an extreme care in this form of intentional ambiguity; it is not performed as a provocation but as an invitation.
The exegesis seeks to flatten the hierarchies between text and images to make the separations perceived between research and practice indivisible. Elements of image, poetry, and reflective response are interwoven throughout a series of volumes which focus on entwined research methods: modes of gathering in situ, iterative acts of making in the studio, and the responsieve nature of reflexive praxis. The space between the volumes is punctuated with case studies focused on specific examples of sited practice, which explore different interpretations of a foreshore, with moments of respite through material encounters held within pockets of gathered and composed material.
As an evocation of Jamie’s complex force embedded within a wildness, this methodology embraces the ambiguous nature of material encounters. These encounters inform multi-iterative responses that counteract the perils of the singular perspective or interpretation of place-based arts responses. 2
1. Kathleen Jamie, 'A Lone Enraptured Male', London Review of Books, 6 March 2008, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n05/kathleen-jamie/a-lone-enraptured-male.
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota, 2019), 34.
Photo credits to Alan Richardson and Nick Toner.