I have been invited to contribute to the forthcoming publication The
Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice eds. Katja Hilevaara and
Emily Orley.
This edited collection
brings together a range of examples of how to write about one’s own (art)work
in a creative yet academically rigorous way. In a world where
practice-as-research is becoming increasingly recognised and valued,
artistic-researchers are always looking for ways to discuss and analyse their
own work without compromising the creative drive that inspired them in the
first place. The collection will comprise of sample writings (which will be
introduced and contextualised) by leading researcher-practitioners and emerging
artists alike, which will serve as examples for students and independent
practitioners interested in writing and thinking about their own work in a
creative yet critical, alternative yet theoretically rigorous way.
Writing without Writing:
Conversation as Material
My proposed
contribution shares and elaborates a method of ‘writing without writing’
that I have developed through a number of practice-based collaborations, where
conversation is conceived as both the site and the material for
the construction of inter-subjective and immanent modes of linguistic
sense-making. I propose to present examples (in the form of artists’ pages)
from various collaborative projects, reflecting on the different ways that
conversation-as-material functions therein as a means for producing writing
as/in dialogue with practice. Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a
not-yet-known vocabulary emerging synchronous to the situation it seeks to
articulate, formed through the co-production of a language rolled around
in the mouth until it starts to yield or give. In this process, meaning does
not exist prior to the event of utterance; rather, it is discovered (often
retrospectively) through a dialogic process, moreover, through the
transcription and distillation of recorded conversation towards
an emergent poetics.