Art/Research International (Journal)
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272 research outputs found
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The Art of Silence: Researching the Role of Silence in Nature Based Expressive Arts
No full textThis paper journeys into the aesthetics of silence in nature-based expressive arts practice and research. Explored is how nature-based expressive arts (EXA) therapy can help cultivate an embodied sense of silence to nourish and support frontline mental health workers in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, easing the stresses of assisting a population in the midst of an opioid and overdose crisis. The transformational effects of EXA are discussed as they relate to a short series of workshops with frontline mental health workers from Vancouver’s PHS Community Services Society. We collectively experienced how the phenomenon of silence can help provide a rich resource to care providers and, in turn, inform the nature of our research in vulnerable communities.
 
The Needle as Medium: Using Embroidery to Speak to Ghosts
No full textAs an adoptee, I am haunted by what Lifton (2009) calls the Ghost Kingdom, a place filled with the spectres of the ancestors I have been disconnected from. Derrida (1993), with his notion of hauntology, tells us that we must learn to speak to ghosts, and that by doing so we will learn to live. I am on a journey to speak to the ancestors of my birth father who were Ngāi Tahu (Māori), and through this, to make meaning in my present and future (Carsten, 2000). I am using embroidery as a medium to speak to, and with, my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Fitzpatrick & Bell, 2016), working in a craft vernacular that would have been deeply familiar to her. This paper will discuss how the methodology of autoethnography, informed by adoption scholarship and feminist studies of craft, has led me to stitch work that engages with craft tradition, and speaks to loss, identity and belonging.
Beadworking as an Indigenous Research Paradigm
No full textIn this article, I outline three principles that form the conceptual basis of an emerging Indigenous research paradigm that I call beadworking. I then relate how beadworking informs my understanding of and engagement with an Indigenous research methodology. Beadworking addresses how Indigenous Peoples’ creation of beadwork can be used to help Indigenous researchers navigate the research process, while being grounded from within an Indigenous worldview. It is my hope that in sharing my research paradigm, it will inspire other Indigenous researchers to define and articulate their own research paradigms through the unique positionality of their own Indigenous People
Pākehā Sampler wherein the Crafter Seams Research: An Ekphrastic Review of Christine Rogers\u27s “The Needle as Medium: Using Embroidery to Speak to Ghosts”
No full textThis poem is an ekphrastic response to Rogers’s sampler. The author began by studying a photo of the sampler, and then wrote the first and last line of the poem using the following prompt: “Start by noting the emotional state of the artwork and conclude by looking back at the artwork and describing the pervading color.” The author considered their own use of knitting as a way to feel connected to kin, and how knitting as a form of crafting is a way to tell family stories (Faulkner, 2014). The author studied the photo more and wrote more lines that spoke to crafting as research method, imagining the artist as researcher as family story teller. The poem is an embodied presentation of the author’s response to Rogers, as poetry is the author’s art medium, words and language their paintbrush
A Review of Patricia Leavy\u27s "Spark"
No full textPatricia Leavy’s latest novel, Spark, takes us on a journey to the wild landscapes of Iceland, alongside a diverse group of characters described as some of the world’s greatest thinkers. Through their discussions, debates, conversations over shared meals and sightseeing adventures, we explore some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, by considering what it means to think, question and research. Spark presents academic ideas at their most accessible, and Leavy’s artful writing shows us how fiction can not only communicate research ideas, but also has the power to change hearts and minds
Quilt/cARTography: Using Craftivism to Explore Food Insecurity on a College Campus
No full textQuilt/cARTography emerged from an arts-based inquiry method for research dissemination. I used quilt-making as an embodied craft and metaphor to illustrate how crafting research is similar to piecing together neighborhood food environment data in an undergraduate social statistics course. As an innovative pedagogical tool, cARTographical quilts transform data into accessible tactile mediums that cross disciplinary boundaries and educational levels to explore hunger on a college campus
Craft, Relational Aesthetics and Ethics of Care
No full textA conceptual framework for looking and listening operates within aesthetic and affective moments when crafting objects. Assembling and modifying Sea Balls into arranged composition is my craft process that I use to access a state of mind play. Each found and modified object represents a key theoretical framework that I connect and re-organize in relation to each other to produce new ways of perceiving. Considerations of Massumi, Fish and Jameson’s (2002) notion of perception and how I experience affect through embodiment in the moment of re-crafting and re-assembling items is central to the practice. Emergent ideas occur through re-crafting found objects in conjunction with broader considerations of relational aesthetics.
Interweaving Contemporary Art and “Traditional” Crafts in Ethnographic Research
No full textThis article presents a fieldwork collaboration between contemporary art, “traditional” craft, and ethnographic research in which community engagement plays a key role. Two decades after the abandonment of weaving in a depopulated mountainous village of Crete, Greece, a group of researchers invite an artist to turn the village’s old school into a weaving studio. Aiming at the active participation of the local community in weaving heritage interpretation, and the interdisciplinary collaboration of art and anthropology, the weaving studio experience provides a fertile ground for discussing the relationships between disciplines, the difficulties of crossing the boundaries of these disciplines and the challenges of community participation in managing knowledge production. Here we discuss our experience working with an artist in a project between art and research, including various observations, different approaches, and challenges
Staging the Shadow: Writing, Academic Subjectivities, and Hidden Selves
No full textIn this paper we explore our writing selves through the metaphors of concealment and display. We discovered the metaphoric possibilities opened up by Jung’s notions of persona and shadow and his emphasis on a rich psychic life that was animated by archetypes and symbolic meaning. This process helped us to glimpse alternative selves, that somehow live within us but are, like the shadow, neglected or pushed aside either due to institutional pressures to conceal or due to our own self-concept and our preferences for displaying certain identity types. Using poetic inquiry to access our unconscious feelings, we engaged in a process of writing that resulted in poetry and poetic vignettes. This type of arts-based practice helped us to disrupt the normative rationalist expectations surrounding academic work and intellectual production, and enabled us to create a space where agency and self-exploration were more accessible and transformative
