The space bet
Practice As Research
Practice Led Research - methods, problems, strategies, wrangling my wild creative wayfaring into a path....
Suddenly a key issue is the role of the research question in my work. To be ruled by the question means sticking to a path. Without the limit of the question the project lacks reason. Something in my personality won't commit to a question. It might tie me down. Now I'm questioning using questions.
What on earth is my research question?
between reason and intuition.
After a whole afternoon programmed to accelerate some kind of resolution to our individual proposal questions I am more lost than ever. I was frustrated and desperate after that day. I began to feel too chaotic and reached for structure but there was no structure to be found. Suddenly all the theory existed on its own: free-floating without being located in practice. I haven't been making and I found myself in the dreaded frozen zone of stuckness, just not moving at all, I needed a guide a route to follow. A map. The paradox being - I am the one who has to make the map..... so I just carried on making my maps of the shopping walks. There is obviously a richness to being inbetween the research and the practice but I haven't exactly found the sweet spot, more of a paradoxical nightmare..
Some questions I'm playing with...
How can my concept of pedestrianism extend to drawing?
How can drawing demonstrate the relationship between logic and intuition?
How does drawing facilitate a grip on reality...
How are linear systems played out in drawing?
How useful is habitual practice in drawing?
What is lost when drawing is constrained?
What is lost when drawing is liberated from linear culture?
How can we understand linear culture through creative chaos?
Is drawing concrete? (after Murdo Macdonald)
If drawing is an act of abstraction what is concrete?
What new knowledge is there in the (newish) genre of drawing and walking?
A chance meeting with a friend using walking and drawing in her PhD enlightens me. She pulls out Delueze from what I'm saying. I've been avoiding Rhizomatic thinking as theory because it's complicated and I get ungrounded when I go there but she leads me back safely to biting off a bit at a time and I know now how I can't not use him. The other idea that gets pulled out from our chat is space and she recommends Doreen Massey. I've been looking at Thibaud and others who discuss space and I'm thinking about systems of space as extensions of linear culture somehow. Like a shift away from the psychology of linear thinking to psychogeography. And I'm still confused but there's a nebulous thread to follow (and I'm going to colour it pink on a drawing of a map). And Delueze says Rhizomes are maps not traces........ but one person's map is another person's trace.... like my desire lines.
Help me.
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