Publication: When Seams Become Audible

My interview with artist Katharina Fitz is now published in her new book When Seams Become Audible: Sculpture and Photography 2013-2022 (Beam Editions, 2022).

 

About the book: "This book focuses on the artist’s major installation ‘When Seams Become Audible’, which is brilliantly unpacked by Sarah Tutt’s insightful writing. The book also shows the artist's journey from photography to sculpture through related works made between 2017 and 2022. Tutt demonstrates how the artist’s work and process are inseparable and its conceptual and poetic resonants. Jennifer Higgie’s contribution connects the artist’s early photographic practice with her current engagement with sculpture, while relating it’s position within art history. Emma Cocker’s interview explores the artist’s working methods and how the artist investigates the limits of materials, how photography has informed her practice and the boundaries between the process and the finished artwork. These essays unpack the work of Katharina Fitz but perhaps more importantly, alongside a series of details, installations and artworks in transition, provide a lens by which to observe the material world. A reminder of the need for humans to remain connected to process and materiality in a world facing profound change". Introduction by Jonathan Casciani, Director Beam Editions

 

Read more and order a copy here.

1. "When Seams Become Audible" is a quote from Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Site Gallery, 2016)

Visit: ARC in the North

In November, I will be in Groningen, Netherlands, invited by the Not Knowing Core of ARC in the North. Together we will be exploring dimenions of 'not knowing' within artistic research and practice. About ARC in the North: ARC, the Artistic Research Community, is a dialectic umbrella organization for explorative research-creation, composed by a network of researchers and knowledge institutions in the north of the Netherlands. The network aims to stimulate artistic and explorative research practices and its impact by focusing on: How different forms of artistic research can be performed, articulated, presented and documented. How artistic research practice can offer novel ways of producing knowledge, applicable to various fields, as well as how such practices might catalyze new forms of knowing and producing knowledge in ways that sidestep traditional dichotomies existing between art (technê) and science (epistêmê). More to follow soon. https://artisticresearchinthenorth.nl/

Event: Open Studios, Exchange Place

On 19 - 20 November 2022, I will be opening my studio at Exchange Place Studios in Sheffield as part of Yorkshire Artspace's annual Open Studio weekend. Tickets to attend the Open Studios event are free but need to be booked in advance via Eventbrite here.

Journal Article: Conversation-as-material

My article 'Conversation-as-material' is now published in the Special Issue, 'Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research, Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 17 (2022), No.1, pp.193-223. See here.

Abstract

Conversation-as-material is a language-based artistic research practice for attempting to speak from within the experience of collaborative artistic exploration, a linguistic practice attentive to the lived experience of aesthetic co-creation. The practice of conversation-as-material, which forms the basis of this article, has evolved through tentative exploration of the questions: How can the shared act of conversation bring into reflective awareness the live and lived, yet often hidden or undisclosed, experience of artistic practice and process, especially within collaboration? How can the event of conversation be developed as an artistic research practice for attempting to give tangibility, whilst also remaining in fidelity, to the pre-reflective aspects of this lived experience? Considered less as a means for talking about, conversation-as-material may be understood as a practice for inviting immanent, inter-subjective modes of verbal-linguistic sense-making emerging through different voices enmeshed in live exchange. Conversation —from con- meaning ‘with, together’ and versare, ‘to turn, bend’; or else, from conversare — ‘to turn about, to turn about with’. Conversation-as-material has emerged as a practice of collaborative writing, which unfolds through the interplay of different voices ‘turning about’ together in conversation. In this sense, the practice can be differentiated from that of interview —for in the practice of conversation-as-material there is no researcher/researched dichotomy. Within the practice, an attempt is made to develop an approach to writing that finds expression first through verbal conversation, which is then subsequently distilled, even densified, towards poetic text. Conversation-as-material involves the gradual revelation of an artistic-poetic, perhaps even phenomenological, mode of emergent writing for speaking from the experience of collaborative co-creation, where linguistic content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges in and through the lived working-with of language. The practice of conversation-as-material thus comprises a quadripartite process of conversation, transcription, distillation, and presentation, where each part involves the activation of a particular aesthetic or poetic mode of attention, perhaps even a specific phenomenological attitude or disposition.

 

Keywords: conversation, artistic research, phenomenological writing, collaboration, inceptual thinking.

 

 

Journal Special Issue: Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research

The Special Issue of Phenomenology & Practice, Vol. 17 No. 1 (2022) on 'Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research', (eds.) Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Juha Himanka, Erika Goble, is now published online here.

This Special Issue explores existing and possible connections between two different sets of practices: phenomenological research practice and artistic research practice. On the one hand, both sets of practices share a basic aspect: they approach their object of research as phenomena, that is, through their phenomenal presences. On the other hand, these sets of practice are configured by different forms of action developed in different media —among many others, written or oral language, drawing, video, photography, sound or body movement.

 

How do the commonalities between practices of artistic and phenomenological research manifest? How can phenomenological research be accomplished in artistic media and by artistic means? How can artistic research extend the scope of phenomenology as a field of research practices? In turn, how can phenomenology contribute to further develop artistic research practices?

 

The focus of this Special Issue goes beyond traditional views of the relationships between art and phenomenology by considering both as fields of research, or more specifically, as ways of researching through phenomena. For the purposes of this Special Issue, art was not approached as an object of research for phenomenologists and phenomenology was not treated as a theoretical reference for artists producing art works. Accordingly, we neither focused on inquiry into practices of artistic production based in or inspired by phenomenology nor on phenomenological theories of art. Instead, we focused on research practices developed through the influence, combination, and even hybridization of phenomenological and artistic approaches in order to advance the methodological development of both fields.

 

This Special Issue is understood as a continuation of the work initiated by Through Phenomena Themselves, one of the research cells within the Research Pavilion #3, a catalyst of emerging cooperations in the field of artistic research hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki in the framework of the Venice Biennale, 2019 (www.researchpavilion.fi).

 

Including contributions from Alex Arteaga, Michael Biggs, Emma Cocker, Michael Croft, Maria Gil Ulldemolins and Kris Pint, Katja Hock, Esa Kirkkopelto, Rebecca Lloyd, Edvin Østergaard, Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir and Stefan Östersjö.