Performing in the spaces between: an a/r/tographic inquiry into practice

Julie Heron

Bachelor of Arts Urban Studies (Footscray Institute of Technology) Diploma of Education Secondary (La Trobe University, Bendigo)

Bachelor of Arts Visual Arts (Hons)(University of Ballarat) Master of Arts Visual Arts (University of Ballarat)

Partial fulfillment of requirements for Doctor of Philosophy

Arts Academy University of Ballarat

PO Box 663 University Drive, Mt Helen

Ballarat, Victoria 3353 Australia

April, 2010

Julie Heron, View of Revelation & Disguise exhibition featuring Unfinished Project, No/wh/ere and Wealth of Meaning, 2006, sanitary liners, pads and tampons, brass safety pins, steel pins, terracotta stand, artificial flowers, coir matting, wire basket, pearls, jewellery stands, notions, dimensions variable.

Abstract

This practice-based, auto/ethnographic inquiry proceeds from and returns to, an ongoing questioning of the relevance and direction of my creative practices within the rapidly changing social environment of the early 21st century. It is also responsive to my changing roles as artist, educator and researcher.

At the heart of this research is a body of art work made during the initial phase of what was then framed as an inquiry into post/menopause. Textile sculptures, constructed from readymade materials, were publically exhibited on several occasions early in the research, and as a result of the exhibition process, accumulated a range of associated documentary images. They were also accompanied by a number of works which remained unfinished or un-shown. The work and its showing became a catalyst for further questioning about issues of identity and practice. The research in its present iteration, emerges from rhizomatic inquiries and reflexive re/encounters with this existing material.

Performing in the spaces between ‘I can’ and ‘I cannot’, I draw on research approaches emerging from the field of a/r/tography; philosophical writings by Nicholas Bourriaud, and the framing of art as installation advanced by Peter Osborne. As a result of this investigation I have chosen to re/represent my research through creative writing and as installation, using auto/ethnographic and installation practices.

An engagement with the intricate entanglements of my practices as artist/researcher/teacher-educator and writer, threads through these re/encounters, emerging as ‘un/professional performances’ of artwork and text, installation and exegesis. The previous relationships between art and text, thesis and exegesis have been enlivened and challenged by these performances which test the boundaries between the professional and unprofessional. New openings have been created through which my creative practices are addressed and through which possibilities for future research and teaching practice have been set in motion.

Working auto/ethnographically I contend that while my research matters to me, it also matters for others. In focusing on artistic and research processes, I invite conversation with a range of audiences including, but not limited to artists, academic peers, and arts/education students.

Acknowledgements This research could not have been accomplished without the generosity and patience of a number of

important people. It is my extended family and friends, who have borne the brunt of the research experience, supporting me in

various ways through many hours of uncertainty. In the course of this inquiry I and they have forgone many potentially precious moments in my drive toward academia. My mum June Phillips, my daughter and my grandson Rebekah and Riley Spark have gracefully accepted my lack of physical presence in their lives, and sufficed themselves with long-distance communication when we would rather have been spending time face to face. Moreover, they have found within themselves the ongoing capacity to be proud and encouraging of my endeavours, even though it is far removed from their experience. My brother Jeffoire, less tolerant of my academic sacrifices, has been alternately a goad and a playmate, keeping art and play dangling carrot-like in front of me even when I persisted with my books. He has provided a model of everyday creativity for me.

I want to particularly thank my sister-in-law Judy Sleight for opening her house and her heart to me during a complicated and difficult period which could have easily seen me abandon the project altogether.

My partner, Eric Cahill invariably expressed his faith in what I was doing, both verbally and through a generous provision of nurture, even when I seemed oblivious to his generosity. I could not have done it without him.

Thanks are also due to my dear friends Robyn Bowker and Sara Warren who have never given up on me, while attempting to remind me from time to time that there is more to life than study. I also want to thank Glenda Mears, Fiona Morgan, Carole Wilson, Maryanne Coutts, Rosalind Lawson, Jehan Anu, Ken Cahill, Luke di Ludovico, Delphine Cruikshank, Karl Liffman, and Robin Spark, for their support. I owe Paul Mears a debt of gratitude for his help in the first eighteen months of the life of this project, and especially for assistance in setting up the 2006 Ballarat Fine Art Gallery exhibition.

As a researcher working in the spaces between art and education, I have occasion to thank various colleagues, friends and associates within the Arts Academy and the School of Education at the University of Ballarat. This includes both Peter Matthews and Lawrie Angus; Heads of these respective Schools, who have supported my research financially and professionally and gone in to bat for me on more than one occasion. I appreciate the efforts of Lawrie, Melanie Coffey and Fiona Bryant in enabling me to exhibit and attend the INSEA Conference in Seoul, South Korea in 2007. In the course of that visit I met many of the educational researchers who have become my luminaries, including Rita Irwin from British Columbia University, who generously talked to me for some time about my research methodology. I am grateful to the organisers of that conference for their hospitality. Thanks are also due to various folk I spent time with at that event who encouraged me in my research and gave me the pleasure of their company. I especially thank Geetha Bhlat and Donn Ratana whose gifts have helped make my study a tolerable place to work.

To my supervisors Loris Button and Jennifer Jones-O’Neill I owe many thanks for their patience, forbearance, feedback and practical help throughout the project.

Genee Marks has also played an important part in this project, providing chocolate, rescue remedy, good humour, advice and solidarity when times were tough and equally when they were more relaxed. She has generously mentored me in both a formal and informal sense.

Also thanks to Allan Mann, Jim Sillitoe, Dianne Clingin and staff at RAGSO for support and encouragement in my postgraduate studies.

Karen Felstead, Jenene Burke, Pauline Rogers, Lynne Noone, Annette Foley and Jacquie Wilson have all provided practical advice and encouragement when I needed it. The co-ordinators of the various teaching programs in which I play a part, both past and present have also been affirming of my work, and have encouraged me (nicely) to get on with it. I refer here to Maxine Cooper, Robyn Brandenburg, James O’Meara and Rob Davis. Thanks are also due to Clem Barnett and Pat Smith who have mentored me in various ways at various times. Without them I would not be teaching now.

I had not anticipated meeting and working with the loving, generous kindred spirits of Linda Zibell and Wendy Warren, colleagues who have become dear friends. They have often coerced me into play and relieved me of teaching burdens when I most needed it. At times they have fed me, opened their homes to me and invited my attendance at various conferences, exhibitions and performances when they sensed my need for some distance and freedom. Importantly they have shared stories with me, and allowed me to reciprocate. Friends like these should be prescribed for every post-graduate researcher!

Staff at the University at both Mt Helen and SMB libraries especially Jill Nicholls and Marilyn Jeffs have always helped and inquired about my research, while chivvying me about my tendency to return books late.

This work has been exhibited in a range of spaces, and in doing so has been subject to considerable curatorial support and advice. I particularly want to thank Mardie Nowak from Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery for giving me the opportunity to mount my first professional exhibition. Thanks are also due to Gail Ramsay, Anne Rowland, Ben Cox, and Gordon Morrison from the Art Gallery of Ballarat, and to Hyungsook Kim from Seoul University, who curated the InSEA exhibition.Some of the art I have made would not have been possible without the careful labour of the artisans at the Silver Locket, and Mr Minit. I also want to acknowledge the work of Phil Berry in relation to preparation and laying down of the textual component of the final exhibition.

Finally thanks to singer-songwriters Beth Neilson Chapman (Beth Neilson Chapman), K.D. Lang (Hymns to

the 49th Parallel) and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu (Gurrumu,) whose spirits, voices and words accompanied me iteratively, throughout different stages of this journey.

Contents Front Matter Abstract Statement of Authorship Acknowledgements List of figures viii Preface: Notes Regarding the Text xiv Invocation xx

Performing in the spaces between: an a/r/tographic inquiry into practice

1

Background 1 Research focus 10

Approaches and processes 14

Rationale for use of auto/ethnography 14 Research structuring and lines of inquiry 22 Contingent objects and art as iteration 24 Re-iterating No/w/here 29 Scrambling boundaries: working as post-producer 40 Working with co-performers 44

Literature Review: Un/pinning relational performances

48

Un/pinning relational performances 48 Co-performing as being-in-common 58

Literature Review: Art as installation/as relational performance

60

Installation/art/as installation 60 Performing materiality and material relationships 63 The Artist as archivist/curator/consumer 68 Between Installation and Museum 70

Performative texts 80

An un/professional performance in two parts (2007 - 2010)

82

Notes in preparation for art as installation 96

Concluding Remarks and Future Directions 117

End matter 123

Appendix One 123 Glossary 149 References 150

viii

List of Figures page

Front cover

Heron, J. [artist]. (2005). View of Revelation & Disguise exhibition featuring Unfinished project, No/wh/ere and Wealth of Meaning. [Digital photograph. Ballarat: Ballarat Gallery].

Figure 1 Heron, J. [artist]. (2007/2010). Unpublished Journal entry: rhizomes. [Scanned image, journal entry, 2007].

23

Figure 2 Berkowitz, L. [artist]. (2006). Demeter’s Garden. [Image of installation, Heidelberg: Heide Museum of Modern Art]. Retrieved from: http://www.laurenberkowitz.com.au/work_32.html

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Figure 3

Rogoff, I. & Naik, D. [artists]. (2006). Sounding Difference. [Image of installation, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven]. Retrieved from: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/18

27

Figures 4a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher] (2005). Experimental works, Bullarook studio. [Digital photographs].

29

Figure 5 Heron, J. [artist/researcher] (2005). Unpublished Journal entry, 2005. [Scanned image: Journal entry].

29

Figure 6 Heron, J. [artist]. (2005). Nowhere. [Digital photograph. Ballarat: Post Office Gallery, University of Ballarat, 2005].

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Figure 7 Heron, J. [artist]. (2005). Nowhere. In situ, opening night, Invisible Language exhibition. [Digital photograph: Eric Cahill, Invisible Language Exhibition, Hawthorn: Town Hall Gallery, 2005].

31

Figure 8 Heron, J. [artist]. (2005). Side view of Nowhere at Town Hall Gallery, showing details of spacing between works, three dimensional structure, shadow, and pinning. Partial view of Untitled in the background. [Digital photograph: Sara Warren, Invisible Language exhibition, Hawthorn: Town Hall Gallery, 2005].

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Figure 9 Heron, J. [artist]. (2005). View of Nowhere with Invisible Flowers: Carefree in front, Invisible Language exhibition. [Digital photograph: Eric Cahill, Invisible Language exhibition, Hawthorn: Town Hall Gallery, 2005].

32

Figure 10a & 10b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2005/2006). Preparing Nowhere for Revelation and Disguise exhibition. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 11

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2005/2006). Nowhere in situ immediately after hanging. [Digital photograph: Revelation and Disguise exhibition, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, 2006].

34

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Figure 12 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2005/2006).Nowhere, Post- Menopausal Ornament (pedestal) and Fluster (wall behind). [Digital photograph: Revelation and Disguise exhibition, Ballarat: Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, 2006].

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Figure 13 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2006). Sketch of unrealised work including Nowhere and a corresponding work on the floor below. [Scanned image: Unpublished journal entry].

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Figure 14

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2005/2006/2007). No/w/here in Seoul. [Digital photograph: Julie Heron, textile sculpture in situ, conference exhibition: Crossing Borders: Between creation and communication: InSEA Asia Regional Congress. Korea: Woosuk Hall, Seoul University, 2007].

36

Figure 15 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2008). Re/construction of No/w/here, School of Education, July 2008. [Digital photograph].

37

Figure 16 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2009). Exploratory sketch for Performing in the Space Between installation, 2010. [scanned image: unpublished journal entry].

38

Figure 17 Heron, J. (2008). Untitled Mandala, University Open Day. [Digital photograph].

39

Figure 18

Gonzalez -Torres, F. [artist]. (2005). Untitled – (Placebo - Landscape for Roni)

[Image of installation, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales]. Retrieved from: http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/issue4/sydbitxt.html.

50

Figure 19 Wilson (Kind), S. [artist]. (2003). Mendings. [reiterated Wilson & Springgay, (2003) in Desire, Disgust and Disrepair: The Body in Education]. [On-line] Educational Insights, 8(2)].

Retrieved from: http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/ v08n02/exhibits/index.html

51

Figure 20

Berkowitz, L. [artist] (2005-06). Karakarook’s Garden [Image of installation: John Gollings [photographer] Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art]. Retrieved from: http://www.laurenberkowitz.com.au

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Figure 21 Gonzalez -Torres, F. [artist]. (1991) Untitled (Public Opinion). [Image of installation: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Program 91.3969]. Retrieved from:http://artscurriculum.guggenheim.org/

lessons/sf_gonzalez_torres_dl.php

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Figure 22 Springgay, S. [artist]. (2001). Artifact/archive. [reiterated Wilson & Springgay, (2003) in Desire, Disgust and Disrepair [On- line], in Educational Insights, 8(2)]. Retrieved from:http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/ insights/v08n02/exhibits/index.html

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Figure 23 Honeywill, G. [artist] (2003) Anthology of Sadness. [Image of Installation, Bendigo: Bendigo Art Gallery] Retrieved from: http://www.greerhoneywill. com/gallery- anthologyofsadness.html

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Figure 24 Man, P. [artist] (1996). A Present for Her Growth 1, [Image showing detail of installation, Hong Kong: Gallery unknown]. Retrieved from: http://www.cyman.net/fball.htm

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Figure 25 Bott. K. [artist] (2007). Museum of Life. [image showing detail of installation. Norwich: Norwich Castle Museum Gallery] Retrieved from: http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/

71

Figure 26 Bott, K. [artist]. (1991-1996). One of each (detail). [image of installation]. Retrieved from:http://www2b.ac-lille.fr/

arts-plastiques/lecon_2005/college/collegethumerie/camus3.htm

72

Figure 27 Wilson, F. [artist]. (1992 - 1993). Modes of Transport 1770- 1910. (detail: image of Installation: Mining the Museum, The Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD]. Retrieved from: academic.evergreen.edu/ curricular/ artlocal/MiningtheMuseum.ppt

75

Figure 28 Kondratowicz, A. [artist]. (2008). Trash: anycoloryoulike [image of intervention, Harlem, New York]. Retrieved from: http://anycoloryoulike.biz/arp/

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Figure 29 Hammer, M & Kecskes, A. [artists]. (2009). Rainbow. [Image of street installation, Sydney: Lightwalk]. Retrieved from: http://vividsydney.com/light-walk/

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Figure 30 Heron. J. [artist/researcher] (2010) Considering placement of artificial flowers used in previous works, within the space marked out for glass cabinets. (Planning for installation, Performing in the spaces… between) [Digital photograph].

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Figure 31 Heron. J. [artist/researcher] (2010) Testing placement of studio table using newspaper. (Planning for installation, Performing in the spaces… between). [Digital photograph].

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Figure 32 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Exploring text size and position using overhead projector. (Planning for Performing in the spaces between installation, Post Office Gallery), [Digital photograph].

100

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Figure 33 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2006). Unpublished journal entry: flower. [Scanned image of drawing, 2006].

102

Figure 34 Heron, J. [artist/researcher] (2010 ) Laying out stored items on the gallery floor to check their condition. Post Office Gallery, trial run for Performing in the spaces… between installation. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 35 Heron, J. [artist/researcher] (2006). Studio, Arts Academy during the development of Unfinished Project, 2006. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 36 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2006). Work in progress, showing cardboard form, incontinence panty, thread, plastic bait fish with hooks. [Digital photograph].

108

Figures 37a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher] (2010 )Trialling elliptical shapes as a potential means of hanging incontinence panties on masonry walls, Post Office Gallery. [Digital photograph]

109

Figure 38

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2006). Unshown works, Silver plated sanitary napkins. [Digital photograph].

111

Figure 39 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2008). Plastic magnifying glass engraved with the word bristle. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 40 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2006). Rear view, Unfinished Project in situ, Revelation & Disguise exhibition. [Digital photograph, Ballarat Gallery: Ballarat].

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Figure 41 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2007). Slide from UB Conference powerpoint presentation, Performing … in the spaces between. [Screen capture].

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Figure 42 Heron, J. (2006) [artist/researcher]. List of relevant concepts. [Unpublished word document].

114 -116

Figure 43 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2005/2010) View from footpath, reiteration of N/o/w/here (2005/2010) in situ. [Digital photograph].

123

Figure 44 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010) View from exterior window looking toward main gallery space. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 45 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View from interior looking into small exhibition space, window on left. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 46 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View from the gallery entrance. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 47 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Exhibition title and additional text. [Digital photograph].

125

Figure 48 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View of studio table in situ. [Digital photograph].

126

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Figures 49a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Artificial flowers suspended above studio table. [Digital photograph].

127

Figure 50 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Sample book with silver plated napkins behind. [Digital photograph].

128

Figures 51a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Details of wooden boxes on table. [Digital photograph].

129

Figures 52a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Details of wooden boxes on table. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 53

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010) Creative prose and embellished incontinence panty entitled Mutton Done Up as Lamb (20067/2010) from previously un-shown series Recent Understandings, in situ. [Digital photograph].

131

Figure 54 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010) Hanging arrangement, Mutton Done Up as Lamb (2006/2010). [Digital photograph].

131

Figures 55a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010) The Parable of the Ant and the Cricket (2006/2010) from Recent Understandings series, in situ. [Digital photograph].

132

Figures 56a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Glass cabinet containing works from the reconfigured series Wealth of Meaning (2006/2010). [Digital photograph].

133

Figure 57 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Glass cabinet containing works from the reconfigured series Wealth of Meaning (2006/2010). [Digital photograph].

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Figures 58a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Detail of individual works in situ. [Digital photograph].

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Figures 59a, b & c

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Detail of individual works from Wealth of Meaning series (2006/2010). [Digital photograph].

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Figures 60a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Detail of individual works from Wealth of Meaning series (2006/2010). [Digital photograph].

136

Figures 61a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View of the rear wall showing glass cabinet, wall text and large works. Digital photograph].

137

Figures 62a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View from the centre of the gallery. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 63 Heron, J. [artist/researcher].(2010) Poise (desire for flight) (2005/2010) in situ. [Digital photograph].

139

Figure 64 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010) Carefree (2005/2010) in situ. [Digital photograph].

139

Figures 65a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Glass cabinet featuring unrealised, un-shown and incomplete work [Digital photograph].

140

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Figures 66a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Detail of contents of glass cabinet. Digital photograph].

141

Figures 67a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Detail of top shelf featuring samples [Digital photograph].

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Figure 68 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View of researchers desk and glass cabinet from rear of main gallery. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 69 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Butterfly (2006/2010) in situ. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 70 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Last Rose of Summer (2006/2010) in situ. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 71 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Last Rose of Summer (2006/2010), detail of construction. [Digital photograph].

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Figures 72 a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Poppy Show (2006/2010) in situ. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 73 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). View of Pinning (2009/2010) with No/w/here (2005/2010) visible in the smaller gallery beyond. No/w/here (2005/2010) was mounted on an angle in order to allow it to be viewed externally and internally. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 74 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Selected pages from the exegesis referred to development, previous configuration and exhibition of No/w/here between 2005/2010. [Digital photograph].

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Figures 75a & b

Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Internal view and detail of 2010 No/w/here (2005/2010) installation configuration featuring floor circle and suspended components including magnifying glasses. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 76 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Close up of No/w/here (2005/2010) showing construction of suspended component. [Digital photograph].

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Figure 77 Heron, J. [artist/researcher]. (2010). Close up of engraved magnifying glass in situ. [Digital photograph].

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xiv

Preface: Notes regarding the text I am not being merely incoherent. I haven’t ‘lost my thread’… I need more than one string for a fabric.

Ezra Pound1

10/1/2007, 03/03/2007, 10/03/2007, 12/03/2007, 2/12/2009, 09/12/2009, 31/12/2009, 29/01/2010

14/02/2010, 09/04/2010 The writing and deployment of this exegesis does not always

conform in appearance, tone or content to mainstream academic writing and

convention.2 Rather I draw on creative, self-referential writing approaches employed

within areas of practice-based and qualitative research. I do so convinced by the use

of evocative writing as a means to “attempt to capture and evoke the complex,

paradoxical, and mysterious qualities of subjectivity” (Ellis & Flaherty, 1992, p. 5),

engage in “enacted living inquiries” (Springgay, et al, 2005, p. 899), and address

material which has special meaning for particular audiences (Lincoln, 1997, p.38)..

The use of creative self-referential language is a means to voice the interplay of

fragmented identities, embodied experiences and everyday performances which

shapes and underpins my own academic and/or creative inquiries. 24/01/2007,

25/01/2007, 26/01/2007, 27/01/2007, 28/01/2007, 01/02/2007, 20/02/2007, 19/08/2008, 2/12/2009 09/12/2009,

10/12/2009 Therefore while this text is attached to the artworks of this research, I am

not setting out to explain them. In turn the art is not an illustration of this exegesis.

Recursive, close, mutually supportive and self-questioning, they perform separately

and together as creative inquiry, cross-fertilization, individual and social meaning-

making and complementary means of generating and communicating research

outcomes to others. 23/11/2008, 24/11/2008, 2/12/2008, 31/12/2009, 01/02/2010, 04/02/2010, 14/02/2010, 22/02/2010

While this writing is part of an arts-based research practice, it is also informed by my

engagement within teacher-education. Like the practices through which it is

threaded, the writing is simultaneously a product and performance. As such it not

only addresses the ostensible subject matter of this research, but re/constructs

1 Quoted in Hall, Nor (1980) The Moon and the Virgin: reflections on the archetypal feminine New York : Harper & Row, p. 164. 2 An immediate example of such writing practices includes the accumulation of dates which heads each paragraph in this preface and elsewhere in this research. Details of specific reasons for using this particular writing practice herein are discussed under the subheading “Interruptive Acts”.

xv

fragmented everyday experiences and practices through the written word from

sources such as journal entries, previous drafts, exhibition comments books,

conference presentations and memory. As such it simultaneously takes part in what

may be regarded as professional and unprofessional performances being an

outcome of the research process, rather than simply a means of conveying

outcomes. As research outcome, it offers a response to what a/r/tographers

Stephanie Springgay and Rita Irwin (2008) refer to as “the challenging practices of

learning to perceive differently within our everyday practices” (2008, p. xxiii).

Within the present research these ‘un/professional performances’ are voiced

through a mixture or métissage of academic writing, mythic narrative, autobiographic

insets, journal entries, photographs, drawings, lists, reflections, speculations and

works of art. I take up the term métissage; in common usage by researchers

associated with the University of British Columbia who refer to themselves as

a/r/tographers,3 to signal the manner in which the writings and artworks perform in

this inquiry. As mixed performances they interweave and butt up against each other,

working to enhance, converse with, subvert or interrupt the nature of the art work,

the manner of its making, and/or this accompanying writing. With the challenge of

learning to perceive differently in mind I move away from the extensive use of mythic

narrative which was characteristic of my previous research writing. The construction

of the present text is deliberately more fragmented, and self-consciously

performative. This is particularly evident in a series of creative writings which pierce

the academic text at various points throughout the exegesis. These performative

writings are conceptually pinned to the material and physical basis and outcomes of

the art making process. Along with selected text within the exhibition they link past,

present and future practice.

My use of the term métissage, distinguishes this eclectic approach from the

more familiar current terms hybrid and bricolage. Hybrid forms and bricolage

combines fragments together to make a third thing, métissage favours the fragment

and the spaces between, insisting on perpetuation of interrelationships and

3 (A)rtist/(R)esearcher/(T)eacher/(writer)Graphy. See Springgay, Irwin & Kind, (2005); Springgay,

Irwin, Leggo & Gouzouasis, (2008) for more on this.

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exchange. Throughout this research the loose associations of métissage are given

form and presence through the use of pins and pinning as recurring techniques,

motifs and metaphors. The pin acts as an aide de memoir, a remembrance of the

spirit of this research invoked earlier, a reminder to loosen up, to let go, to unpin, to

tend to the gap, to refuse certainty.

10/1/2007, 03/03/2007, 10/03/2007, 12/03/2007, 08/12/2009, 10/12/2009, 22/02/2010, 23/02/2010 I further use the pin-like slash (/) throughout this text as a point of articulation; a

means of simultaneously conjoining and opening out two parts which are normally

conceived as separate (Springgay, Irwin & Wilson Kind, 2005 p. 904). This should be

regarded however, not simply as an indicator of binary relationships between ideas,

but as a device to highlight, problematise and activate these conjunctions (Davies et

al, 2004; Allen, 2000). The slash punctuates and re/pins terms such as

‘un/professional’ indicating that these words, like this text and these artwork/s, may

be read and performed in a number of ways.4 Words so indicated denote both

separation and/or togetherness, and neither is intended as superior or lesser to the

other. Therefore ‘un/professional’ may be understood as signifying professional and

un-professional, professional or un-professional; as an indication of a creative,

re/membered, experiential and emotive interplay between the words, as well as the

in/definable moment when one shades into the other. Through conjunctions such as

these I attend to the gaps between my expectations and experiences, seeking ways

to unsettle my taken for granted perceptions and familiar ways of writing and

constructing research material. The deployment of a pin not only joins, it subtly

draws attention to the juncture, or seam, interrupting tendencies toward perfection

and seamlessness. Even though much of what is constructed here appears ordered

and coherent, it is a coherence made possible through juxtaposing, penetration,

layering and iteration of fragmentary, ephemeral and changing experiences. Taking

issue with the perpetuation of seamlessness, perfection and chronology in my own

work I have struggled to allow the seams to remain visible. Consequently I have

moved away from the extensive use of mythic narrative which was characteristic of

4 See Pope (2005) for an illuminating discussion of the use of slashes, dots and arrows in text to indicate complex, ambiguous and creative openings.

xvii

my previous research writing. The construction of the present text is deliberately

more fragmented, and self-consciously performative.

Written material inset5 into the fabric of the larger text of this research

provides opportunities to engage with ephemeral or normally discarded

writings/voicings/displays. Several writings ‘let in’ in this manner pre-date the

commencement of candidature by several years. As artist, as artist/researcher I

hoard, and play with words and ideas sensually and hermeneutically. This practice

offers the possibility to return to something and encounter it playfully, and

disruptively, with fresh eyes.

Interruptive acts 02/12/2009, 16/03/2010 Within this exegesis, certain images and creative

performative texts disrupt and fragment the formalities of academic text, as well as

the ease and familiarity of reading; opening spaces between expectation and

experience. 06/04/2006, 10/03/2007, 16/03/2007 Printed on art paper they perform as tactile

and visual disruptions, bringing into question divisions between artworks and

exegesis, between academic, reflexive and creative works, and the spaces in which

such works are shared. These deliberate conjunctions of image and text perform

what Elizabeth Ellsworth refers to in Teaching Positions (2005) as an interruptive

act, literally and metaphorically pricking awareness. Interruptive acts are, I contend,

performances of research in action; they show rather than tell (Richardson, 1994).6

The presence of such material within this research writing is intended to expand

possibilities, set ideas in motion and generate small epiphanies through

encouragement of active imaginative connections. Rather than a sustained

onslaught, these deliberate, momentary cheeky transgressions, are un/professional

performances which turn back on the performer as well as the audience. As such

5 Insets in garments may be ‘set in’ to provide easement and freer movement, to change the shaping, direction and fit of what is worn. Often ‘let into’ a seam (see Springgay 2003 for the importance of a seam in her work), inserts are placed in positions that relate to body articulation such as the waist or shoulders. This articulation – known as a gusset, is normally placed so that it is not readily apparent – in the armpit or on the side of the waist, like a footnote in a text. Some insets are deliberately made more apparent... 6 For this reason, I have not listed these particular images as figures in the normal fashion; although I will include image details in the accompanying text.

xviii

they offer glimpses of what, ostensibly, should not be seen, gain effect through the

intrusion of momentary playful elements into an apparently serious agenda. They

have, I suggest, the capacity to reveal pre-existing perceptions and cultural frames

of reference.

Along with insets which fleetingly interrupt the text are more sustained

creative performances. The first of these longer works explores the use of iteration in

this research. It traces one particular artwork, entitled No/w/here, throughout the

research period, using auto-ethnographic text and photographs. Later inclusions are

grouped within a chapter of research outcomes. They include a creative

performance of question and response addressing material and conceptual

underpinnings of the initial artworks; reflective journaling of the selection process in

the lead up to the final installation, followed by a photo-documentation of practical

inquiries within the gallery space.

20/02/2007, 03/03/2007, 12/02/2007, 10/12/2009, 13/12/2009 Another interruptive act in this

writing involves the inclusion of accumulated dates which head up parts of this

exegesis. Since it is my desire to address the experience of bewilderment which

accompanies the initial task of research writing in the face of so much polished

narrative, the dates are by way of small sig(h)nposts, traces of where the text has

been pinned together then re/pinned, fragments added or taken away to serve

academic purposes. It is a reminder of the constructed nature of this writing, a small

resistance, a deliberate disruption of my own narrative and perfectionist tendencies,

and of the weight of academic protocols.

I accept Stephanie Springgay and Rita Irwin’s consideration that part of the

ongoing dialogue between artists, researchers and teachers involves the

acknowledgement and dissemination of the work of others through their own

citations. The furthering of connectivity, they suggest, is as important as the

maintenance of academic validity (2008, xxv). For these reasons, the full names and

titles of books are routinely introduced in the body of this text, not simply included in

the usual citation formula. The citation method employed here is a métissage of APA

and Chicago systems. I primarily employ the APA system used within the School of

Education in which I currently work. However, this system was not designed for arts

xix

researchers and proves a cumbersome and inadequate tool for such purposes.

Functioning as artist with a concern for the detail of materials, dimensions and

spaces of art, I find the APA’s neglect of what I regard as vital information

problematic. Accordingly I provide this information in the captions beneath the

artwork, while adhering to the standard APA format under the list of figures.

22/02/2010 Another disruption, not directly concerned with text per se, is the use

of coloured text, transparent overlays and specialist papers. While not commonplace

within academia, as artist, I find such materials entirely appropriate. They serve to

locate artistic sensibilities within the practice of academic writing, just as texts locate

the voices of artist, researcher and teacher with the arts outcomes of this inquiry.

xx

Invocation to the un/professional performer

I begin this tale with a story which itself begins with the abduction of the nubile

goddess Persephone, and the subsequent search and mourning responses engaged in

by her middle-aged mother, the goddess Demeter.

After some time and searching, having discovered the whereabouts of her missing child

trapped and forcibly wedded to the god Hades in the Underworld, Demeter enters a

period of intense grief that sets her wandering aimlessly around the countryside. In her

travels she eventually comes to a house and there seeks employment as a nurse to the

noble family’s young child.

Upon entering the dwelling, Demeter is offered comfortable rest and bounteous

sustenance by the lady of the house, Metanira, who despite Demeter’s appearance to

the contrary perceives something of her divinity. The goddess refuses her largesse,

but when an elderly nurse known variously as Iambe or Baubo offers her a fleece

covered stool, she accepts.

Demeter then sits listlessly on the stool for some time, and Baubo in an apparent

effort to relieve her suffering begins to tell jokes and clown around. The goddess

begins to respond to this foolish behaviour, and Baubo provides the ultimate

punchline through the action of raising her skirt and exposing her ageing genitals, in a

gesture known as anasyrma.

Whereupon the goddess began to laugh….

xxi

Demeter’s laugh

not only refuses to

discriminate

between a baby

and shit, the

sacred and

profane, but

insists on

understanding

them together…

Lara Merlin 2003

(my emphasis)

1

Performing in the spaces between: an a/r/tographic inquiry into practice Background

While remaining a creature of the arts academy which has fostered this

research, the present inquiry is shaped by contemporary research evident within and

between a range of fields including fine art, arts education and the social sciences.

These include inquiries into arts practice, visual communication, arts education, self-

study and interdisciplinary methods. I proceed from the perception that there is a

need to converse about, and find ways to address evolving practices and creative

urgencies in and of the twenty-first century, through interdisciplinary arts/research.

An emerging form of research conversation involves inquiry into one’s own

practices in order to share ideas and examine in detail that which has been taken for

granted or overlooked. The present research is informed by this approach,

commonly referred to as self-study or ‘auto/ethnography’ (spelt variously as

autoethnography and auto-ethnography). My use of the terms ‘auto/ethnography’

and ‘auto/ethnographic’ indicates an approach which is self-referential, reflective and

reflexive (Brandenburg & Senese, 2008; Davies, 1992; Weber & Mitchell, 2004,

Mitchell & Weber, 2005). This is not to deny the autobiographic underpinnings of

such work. I agree with Laura Jewett, when she writes in A delicate dance:

Autoethnography, curriculum and the semblance of intimacy, that “in a pragmatic

sense, most works claiming to be autoethnography probably count as

autobiography” (2006, p. 60). What ostensibly distinguishes the two is a deliberate

movement away from immersion in personal history, to a focus on the performance

of personal history within larger social and historical movements and moments.

Auto/ethnographic research inquiries became evident in higher education in

the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in areas such as health, social

sciences, education and the arts (Barrett, & Bolt, 2007; Bochner & Ellis, 2003;

Denzin, & Lincoln 1998; 2003; Ellis & Flaherty, 1992; Irwin & de Cousson, 2004;

McNiff,1998; McLaren, 2001; Manke & Allen 2006; Mitchell, Weber & O'Reilly-

Scanlon, 2005; Moustakas, 1990; Roth, 2005; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo &

Gouzouasis, 2008; Sullivan, 2005; Tidwell & Fitzgerald 2006). Currently in play, are

2

a range of self study forms emerging through practice based disciplinary studies and

interdisciplinary research, with an emphasis on qualitative methodologies. These

forms include self study and narrative (Braud & Anderson, 1998; Bochner & Ellis,

2003; Ellis & Flaherty, 1992; Manke & Allen 2006; Mitchell, Weber & O'Reilly-

Scanlon, 2005; Roth, 2005; Tidwell & Fitzgerald 2006); creative, arts-based, arts-led,

arts-informed and practice-based approaches, including a/r/tography (Barrett, & Bolt,

2007; Irwin & de Cousson, 2004; McNiff,1998; Nelson, 2009; Springgay et al 2008;

Sullivan, 2005) and organic, immersive and heuristic research methods (Braud &

Anderson, 1998; Denzin, & Lincoln 1998; 2003; Moustakas, 1990).

The creative practice based approach of a/r/tography is particularly relevant to

the present inquiry. The term a/r/tography reflects its interdisciplinary genesis in arts,

research, teaching and writing (Springgay et al, 2005). It also reflects post-

structuralist ideas of identity as constructed, fluid, fragmented and performative,

rather than the unified self of humanist theorising (Griffiths, 2005).

Within the present inquiry I engage in practices which reflect processes,

functions and performances as artist/researcher/teacher-educator/writer. These

‘un/professional performances’, situated in time and place; are shaped by gender,

race, ethnicity, age, socio-economic background, but also by affiliation, desire,

choice, interaction and encounters with the unexpected. Therefore although the art

which emerges from my practice is professionally exhibited and has aesthetic and

(increasingly tenuous) commercial functions, it proceeds from the interplay of

imperatives which are not always evident in the completed work. Fragmented

urgencies of the self and the social interact with each other. These urgencies further

interact with communicative necessities and institutional parameters of exhibition,

audience and presentation within the present inquiry. A network of embodied

interaction, unexpected situations and choices not only underpins my practice, but

has, I contend, the potential to open up new perspectives, and set unlooked for

opportunities in motion (Ellsworth, 1997).

My creative practices typically emerge from urgencies such those elucidated

by auto/ethnographer Carolyn Ellis who states: “I write when my world falls apart or

the meaning I have constructed for myself is in danger of doing so” (2004, p. 33).

3

My body is changing.

The hot flushes and mood swings have largely abated.

My skin is dry, my joints ache, my waist has thickened

and my knickers remain unstained.

I smell different.

I keep a jar of lubricant by the bed.

My post/menopausal bladder control leaves

a bit to be desired. ‘Liberty’ ‘Freedom’ and ‘discrete protection’ are returning in a new guise. These are things I need to

express. Through whispered

conversations in the staff room, and rueful laughter

over coffee or wine, it becomes clear these are

also things that need to be shared between women

experiencing these changes.

Julie Heron 2003/2009

4

Such an approach is not about going out into the community looking for research,

but rather relies on observing, connecting and re/representing research “moments”

which come to light within the ordinary and everyday. As

such they invite questions relating to value, whilst

valuing uncertainty. Re- examination of the

familiar invites consideration as to the

sort of research performances which

may emerge from such an approach. Loss,

hope, desire and the quest for individual

relevance within the broader social milieu,

pierce the fabric of this research; raising the

possibility of what such mundane research

performances might let loose in the world.5

Such queries have been a ghostly

presence in this research since its

inception. Prior to formally commencing

this inquiry, the future direction of the arts

practice which had been a feature of my

life for nearly ten years was already in

question.6 In a paper delivered to a research

conference in Rockhampton,

Queensland; entitled Is it Hot in Here or Is It

Just Me? I voiced my growing awareness of

a “relentless self- questioning” I

associated at that time with midlife and

post/menopause (Heron 2003). As part of this

evaluation, my practice also came under urgent scrutiny.

Deciding to undertake the present inquiry was a direct result

of my intention to find new ways of working. 5 In asking this I take up and paraphrase Elizabeth Ellsworth’s comment, made in relation to pedagogy; “what does this reading let loose in the world?” (Ellsworth, 1997, p.128) 6 See for example: Heron, (2000; 2003).

5

This research attracts and repels me.

Despite bodily changes that still have the

power to

shock there are times

when I experience myself as yet another parasite

on the bandwagon of western ageing…

Am I now simply performing

post/menopause rather than living it?

And if so – who am I

performing this show for?

And to what ends?

Julie Heron, 2005

6

Through such means I sought to lay the persistent emotive and artistic

obsessions concerning my own ageing to rest. Consequently, in the face of some

lingering misgivings, I began to make, then exhibit, a series of

textile based artworks which were distinctly different from

my previous arts and research outcomes.

These works emerged from practice based

inquiry, referencing the fabrication of women’s

ageing. At the same time they generated an

intrigue with the possibilities of the

materials I employed. These new works,

apparently successful within the arts

community, were countered by a growing

disassociation from the emotional basis of the

work, exacerbated by an unexpected,

welcome appointment within the university

education faculty. Previously as

artist/researcher, my career prospects were

embedded in studio practices, fine arts

structures and establishments, and

the in/securities of part- time tutoring within the

arts faculty which had fostered my previous

studies. In the wake of my education

appointment, much of my available time and

energy was taken up with teaching. Almost

inevitably my creative practice also changed,

becoming linked to the writing process and my

teaching practice rather than making further works of art. From this change of focus

a re/iteration of the existing research emerged, through a series of creative writings.

This reflected an interest in shaping this exegesis with an artistic eye, along with

providing ready access to material through which to further my research.

7

Teaching exposed me to new ways of thinking about the arts, and with it my

research. I now appreciated the irony of Graeme Sullivan’s observation that at a

point in time when fine arts research is beginning to analyse practice, sectors of

education research are taking up creative practice as a means of generating

research outcomes.7 My reading into both areas confirms Sullivan’s reflection that

education often positions the arts and therefore arts research, as specialized and

separate ways of knowing, whereas arts research is generally far more concerned

with minimising this distinction (2005, pp. 59-62).

Floundering in the spaces between art, research, education and writing I

sought ways to acknowledge the tensions I felt relating to the underlying premises of

my initial research, while simultaneously relocating the work within my newly

expanded professional practice. Ar/to/graphic writings by Stephanie Springgay, Rita

Irwin and their colleagues became baffling but fascinating, initiatory texts, advancing

conjunctions and interplays of art and text.8 The teaching philosophies espoused by

Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997, 2005) were already shaping my new teaching practice. I

was also taken by the idea of evocative reflexive auto/ethnographic research which

allows acknowledgement of complex, often competing or contradictory influences,

discourses and subject positions (Davies, 1992). Puzzling over how to take these

approaches further I encountered Revealing the diverse self in self-study (2006) by

educators Mary Phillips Manke and Jerry Allender. Intrigued by their advancement of

the validity “of returning to a fork in one’s developmental road and trying to find a

different path in one’s practice” (2006, p. 251), the intention gradually crystallised, to

undertake just such a metaphorical return. Such an approach is advocated by

Marjitta Saarnivaara (2003) as a means to “identify… ossified practices… or at least

demonstrat[e] their limitations”, p. 587). Accordingly, this research emerges from and

returns to previous questioning of the relevance of my creative practices in a

changing environment. As such, this self-study moves in the spaces between “I can”

and “I cannot” (Rogoff, 2009, p 7). 7 An example of this is evident in the writings of prominent educator Elliot Eisner (2004) who asks the question: What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education? 8 See for example: Irwin & de Cousson,(2004); Irwin, (2004); Irwin, (2008); La Jevic & Springgay (2008); Sinner et al,(2006); Springgay, S. (2003); Springgay, S., Irwin, R., & Kind, S. (2005); Springgay et al (2008); Wilson, (2003)

8

you say you want a question, I have many questions… Which one do you want?

Post/menopausal woman What does it feel like, what does it mean, to be embodied, gendered and of a particular age? What can arts-based research show me about the way I construct personal meaning(s) of post/menopause? Can arts-based research change my understanding of the nature and process of post/menopause, and to what ends? Who is my community? What do I and can I know about myself and about post/menopause, through research, that I didn’t know before?

Post/menopausal woman/artist/researcher What can arts-based research show me about the meanings I construct around my

post/menopause, as woman, artist, educator, researcher? What is the purpose/value in such an endeavour?

What effects will the autobiographic focus of this research have on my art making? What effects will the autobiographic focus of this research have on my exhibiting?

When do I perform as artist, as researcher or both? Who is my community?

Artist How do I make meaning through artistic inquiry? What informs the content of the artworks? What materials and methods of art making can I use in this research? What do the materials and methods I use for this inquiry signal to an audience? Which audience? Why does this matter? Who is my community? Am I committed to being involved in the contemporary gallery system and why? What alternatives are there? By what means and materials can I make such inquiries? What is the purpose/value of exhibiting such art?

9

Does the meaning or value I attach to the artwork change in relation to its physical site and the context of the presentation? How can this research move my understanding of what it means to make art, engage in research, be an arts educator? Where can I make art? Does the way I make art change as the environment in which it is created changes?

Artist/researcher What do I want my research to do?

What meanings have other artists attributed to post/menopause in their work? What artistic methods have they used in their work?

Does the choice of material matter to the meanings they and I have made? What is the relationship between thesis and exegesis?

Who is my audience?

Researcher/writer What can the exegesis do? How can I write “otherwise”? What can writing otherwise do? Who speaks? Who is my audience? Who is my community? What relationships are possible between art and text within a research context?

Post/menopausal woman/arts educator Can this research inform my practice as arts educator?

What about my arts/research and education practice is congruent? In what ways do they differ?

How can I make art when my time is preoccupied with teaching? When can I conduct research?

What does it mean for me as academic to make, exhibit, write about autobiographical research relating to post/menopause and discuss it publically in academic forums?

Who is my audience? Who is my community?

14/3/2007, 22/02/2010

10

Research Focus Moved by possibility of re/generating my practice through auto/ethnographic

inquiry, I question whether the textile based works which emerged from the initial

stages of the present research, can provide the focus through which to do so? Will

re/consideration and questioning of the making, selection and public exhibition of this

body of work reveal aspects of my artistic practice which have previously escaped

my attention? Furthermore, in what ways might such an inquiry shape my ongoing

practices and performances as artist, researcher, teacher-educator and writer?

My intention to engage in self-study raises concerns regarding the nexus of

written material and art works. The interplay between the creative and the scholarly,

art work and exegesis has been a matter for discussion since arts based research

communities emerged from the incorporation of the arts into higher education

research from the early 1980s onward in Australia (Strand, 1998). During this time

interested parties had the challenge of addressing overarching questions such as

the necessity and capacity of the artwork to carry the role of thesis, (Rubidge, 2005)

and the need, desirability and work of an accompanying written exegesis (Barrett &

Bolt, 2007; de Frietas, 2002; Fletcher & Mann, 2005; McLeod, 2000; MiIlech, 2004,

Nelson, 2004). As a result of such discussions, a thesis model involving artwork and

written exegesis is now common in many universities here and overseas, although

the actual conditions of such research vary.9 Implicit in this model is the assumption

that research culminates in a creative product which is publicly exhibited.

The present inquiry is underpinned by the model discussed above. In light of

this, and given the auto/ethnographic, performative and interdisciplinary focus of this

research, I question the necessity to present a fully materialised and ‘coherent’ body

of art work for examination in the present research. Is it feasible to exhibit

incomplete, discarded or ephemeral works as well as associated materials and texts

as major components of successful research exhibition? To perform creative work

within the exegesis? What constitutes a ‘body of work’ in this instance, and in what

manner might the outcomes be exhibited? In what ways might practice and process

9 These matters are made evident in the following works: Barrett & Bolt, 2007; Brown, 2000, Finley, 2003; McLeod, 2000; Sava & Nuutinen, 2003; Sullivan, 2005.

11

be feasibly addressed not only within the exegesis, or as exhibition backup material,

but as part of the exhibition process?

A broader question concerns the relevance and value of the present inquiry to

the wider research community. It is my aim to add my voice to the growing swell of

researchers from across a number of disciplines, whose reflexive inquiries are by no

means homogenous, but are underpinned by the clear desire to develop individual

and professional practice.10 As successful research completions accumulate, the

aforementioned matters continue to stimulate ongoing conversations within arts

research.11 These discussions not only provide common ground for arts researchers

to address new challenges and possibilities, but also to connect with researchers

from other discipline areas who use the arts as a means of exploring and generating

research outcomes. I regard entry into these diverse conversations as an important

objective of this research inquiry.

As researcher/writer I find it instructive to consider how others live through,

conceptualise, contextualise and relate stories of their individual research inquiries.

As teacher-educator I consider the documentation of individual arts practice valuable

in highlighting the processes and practice of creativity. In light of the mixed academic

heritage of this research, I have begun to identify interdisciplinary research

communities and lines of inquiry to which the present study may relate, especially

those addressing combinations of artistic practice, research practice and teaching

practice.

Accordingly, I ask the further question: in what ways can this research

contribute to the process, already underway, of re/evaluating, re/connecting and

revaluing creativity as a major player in twenty-first century global culture?12

10 See for example: Trahar (2009); Brandenburg & Senese, (2008); Duncan, 2004). 11 The literature is considerable. Examples include: Beach, 2001; Berridge, 2007; Bickel, 2008; Bird, 2000; Finley, 2003; Gray, 2003; Irwin & de Cousson, 2004; Reilly, 2002; Rubidge, 2005; Sinner et al, 2008; Springgay et al 2008; Stewart, 2003 Sullivan, 2005. 12 Recent Australian Government research and policy, including the Federal Government’s National Curriculum, also addresses this focus. See for example: Australia Council for the Arts (2006); Davis (2008). Richard Florida, (2003), has also made some interesting observations relating to the relevance of creativity and tolerant and diverse communities.

12

Pinning

is a way of fastening, without holding fast, a means of securing

but not security,

of promise,

of safety and of release.

The pin pierces, holds, encircles, adorns.

A pin has the ability to hold a position and to release it;

it can be used to pin down, unpin, pin through and underpin.

Pins have an ancient history, long associated with stories of textiles and the feminine.

As the daughter of a dressmaker, as a woman whose embodied experiences have

included the pinning of menstrual rags to underwear with tiny “gold” pins, as a mother who

has pinned together nappies, made her own clothing, saved time and disguised telltale

gaps in ill-fitting garments, pins have been an essential but often undervalued item in my

households.

There is a rare frustration in needing a pin and not having one.

Julie Heron. (2008). Still from video documenting remaking of No/w/here.

13

14

Approaches and processes Rationale for auto/ethnographic approach

The present chapter lays out a rationale for the methodological premises, key

terms and working methods which inform this research. My inquiry is situated within

qualitative and practice based research methods which have emerged in the wake of

post-structuralist, feminist and post-modern theorising. Specifically I engage in a

mixed method approach, which draws on practice led arts-based auto/ethnographic

practices, which are shaped by reflection in and on action (Schön, 1983) but are also

iterative and reflexive.

I refer to this inquiry as practice-led to indicate that the practice comes first.

Like a/r/tographer Sylvia Wilson, the only way I know how to make art (or teach), is

to just start it and see what happens (Pinar, 2002, p.10). I also employ the terms

‘reflection’ and ‘reflexion’ in this research. Using Donald Schön’s concept of

“reflection in action” (1983) I denote both the conscious thought and “tacit

knowledge” (Polanyi, 1966) which is employed in the doing. Tacit knowledge as I

understand it relates to knowing by doing. It involves embodied individual

performances, which are internalised over time, immersion and the socialisation

processes of everyday rehearsal. Largely disappearing from conscious awareness,

such knowledge is potentially accessible through moments of epiphany, reflection

and reflexion. I also take up Schön’s concept of “reflection on action” explored in The

reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action (1983) to denote the thinking

which occurs afterward with a view to instituting changes in the practice as a

practice. I use the term reflexion to indicate a process of re-analysis (Manke &

Allender, 2006) through which I examine the ongoing relevance of the work in the

larger scheme of things. Carolyn Ellis and Art Bocher define auto-ethnographic

reflexivity as autobiographical research that:

displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth auto-ethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of the personal experience; then they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract and resist cultural interpretations (2000, p. 739).

15

The present research proceeds from a premise that contemporary society is

ontologically uncertain, complex, fragmented and relational; accordingly I do not

seek to understand an existing and fixed situation with a view to finding a solution.

Instead I use inductive reasoning to explore tacit connections and interplays

between my creative practices and existing research outcomes, with a view to

challenging existing understandings and generating knowledge which is ‘new to me’

(Brandenburg & Senese, 2008).

As researcher I talk back to processes which have emerged retrospectively

from ‘behind the scenes’ of my arts practice, a process which may be characterised

as re/search. Re/searching my existing practices, performances and perspectives is

a means through which I will locate and address “that which I did not know and/or

consciously consider prior to conducting my self-study” (Brandenburg, Berry &

Senese; 2008, p. 27). In taking this approach I heed Graeme Sullivan’s call in Art

practice as research: inquiry in the visual arts for research which moves beyond the

realm of critique, to “knowledge that can be acted upon” (2005, p. 80).

While undoubtedly self-serving,13 auto-ethnographic approaches address

matters that are germane to others involved in researching and/or re-evaluating their

arts practices in some form. Within the present research, as suggested in the

introductory remarks, I will also look for that which will have ongoing practical

consequences for my future teaching. As Anita Sinner and her a/r/tographic

colleagues, point out, quoting Cynthia Chambers (2004): “Researchers situating their

research questions in living inquiry are engaged in research that matters to them but

that also matters for others” (2008, p. 1238).

A potent use for auto/ethnography, one that matters for others, is advanced

by Graeme Sullivan. Sullivan suggests that this approach allows practitioners to

speak from within discipline areas which have previously been the subject of

associated external study and research. Applying this within the discipline areas of

fine or visual arts he includes areas such as art histories, theories, criticism and

philosophy (2005, p. 87). 13 Indeed auto/ethnographer Debra Manning in a recent paper entitled Auto/ethnography: a journey of self/indulgence, claimed that such terminology points to a position which is both enlightening and essential for ethical research.

16

Arts based research also has the potential for exchange and conversation

beyond the academy, as in this inquiry. There is increased recognition in the

research literature of hybrid roles such as artist/educators, artists/therapists and

artist/teachers (Chalmers, 2004; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; McNiff, 1998; Porter,

2005). At the same time there is advocacy for broadening practice and discourse

within and across a range of arts related and arts informed disciplines. This

generates further possibilities for sharing experiences, practices and perspectives

across discipline boundaries (McNiff, 1998; Sullivan, 2005). Such research not only

informs the researcher, but also allows sharing of complex experiences and

processes which shape social perceptions of identity, professional practice and

research engagements (Bolt, 2000; Ellis & Flaherty, 1992; Gray, 2003; McNiff, 1998;

Manke & Allender, 2006; Mitchell & Weber, 2005; Ronai, 1992).

A major focus of discussion within contemporary research practice, and which

has proved testing for auto/ethnographic writing in particular, is the question: when

can what is done be characterised as research?

This question has been directed at both arts-based and auto/ethnographic

research approaches which have been criticised for their examination and sharing of

mundane, personal experiences. Robert Bullough Jnr and Steffinee Pinnegar, writing

in Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research (2001)

suggest that what emerges from contemporary research discussion is the need to

strike a balance between a confessional tale and traditional research. Discussing

ways in which research might be successful from a self-study point of view, they

argue that “such study does not focus on the self per se but on the space between

self and the practice engaged in” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001).

Estelle Barrett also takes up this question as a focus of investigation for the

“artist/researcher” within contemporary higher degree arts research. In her essay

Towards a critical discourse of practice as research, Barrett convincingly advances

the idea of “artist function” (2007, p. 136). She compares and reapplies the notion of

“author function” proposed by Michel Foucault in his text What is an author? (1991),

to the practice of arts/research. Her adaptation paves the way for a research focus

17

within the arts on practice, performativity and relationships rather than identity and

artwork.

Ar/tographers also emphasise practice rather than identity. They submit that

in practice “a shift occurs from questioning who an artist, researcher or educator

might be, or what art, research or education is, to when is a person an artist,

researcher or educator and when is an experience art, research or education” (Irwin

et al, 2008, p. 205). The a/r/tographic writings of Stephanie Springgay, Rita Irwin &

Sylvia Kind (2005) advance the idea that researching the seams of one’s own

professional practice is close inquiry. By this they mean that the self who

researches; whose studio practices are the focus of the research, are fragments of

the same embodied entity, who performs as artist/researcher/teacher/writer.

I use the terms performance, performative and performativity in this research

in the first instance to refer to that which is done with the intention to set something

in motion. However, through my affinity with post-structuralist approaches in the

overall context of this research, I indicate awareness of the idea that identity itself is

socially constructed and performed. By this I refer to un/conscious performances of

socialised behaviour evident in and shaped by everyday acts of speech and

interactions. These matters have been notably theorised by J.L. Austin, Jacques

Derrida and Judith Butler, and have over time filtered into a range of academic and

popular discourses.14 Butler’s theorising around the social construction and

performance of gender, has been explicitly and implicitly referenced within the

14 Contemporary interest in concepts of performance and performativity are evident across a range of academic disciplines, including performance studies (Auslander, 2003; Loxley, 2006; Phelan, 1993), anthropology (Conquergood, 2003), sociology (Goffman, 1959), the arts, (Bloom, 2003; Gray, 2003; Jackson, 2004; Melina, 2008) philosophy (Derrida (1978; Butler 1990), education (Alexander, Anderson, & Gallegos 2005; Ellsworth, 2005; Pineau, 2005) and literary theory (Austin (2003), Bahktin). James Loxley, writing in his survey work Performativity (2006) suggests that the term ‘performative’ has a doubled history; on the one hand rooted in theatre and performance studies, and on the other in aggregations of literary theory, philosophy and anthropology. These histories have, he suggests, “an ever-closer proximity without a final, resolving convergence” (2006, p.140). Loxley begins by pointing to the grammatical and contextual differences between the foundational use of the term “performative” employed by philosopher J.L. Austin, and the manner in which it is used in performance studies. In its most basic sense Loxley notes, Austin employs the word ‘performative’ as a noun or adjective within a specialized context, whereas within performance studies it is used as an adjective to point to a generalized sense of performance (2006, p.140). The latter is of more relevance here.

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creative arts by artists, arts theorists and critics including Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith,

Helen Chadwick, Marsha Meskimmon and Johanna Frueh.15

Relevant to the development of my understanding of ways in which women’s

embodiment has been previously addressed through the arts, are an increasing

number of works which highlight the construction and performance of menopause

and women’s ageing. While many of these are the work of painters, the use of

installation and live performance are also evident.16 American critic and artist

Johanna Frueh not only engages in her own stage performances, but has been

particularly prolific in theorising the re/construction of ageing in the work of American

feminist artists (1991, 1994, 1994a, 1998). Frueh’s performances and writing

explicitly confronts the social normalising of women’s bodies through highlighting

that which does not appear to conform. Specifically, she explores and celebrates

‘excess’ in the form of the monstrous and the grotesque.17 These art discourses and

performances of excess run parallel to expressions of excess in academic research,

including auto/ethnography and a/r/tography (Ellis, 2004; Bickel, 2008; Ronai, 1992;

Springgay, 2003). While not addressing excess per se, these ideas emerge in the

form of iterative, repetitive and performative aspects of the present research.

Focusing on practice and the manner in which it is performed, loosens

identification with discipline boundaries, facilitating and exacerbating the movement

between disciplines and professions. Emphasising functions which emerge through

more than one discipline base has the capacity to blur and also open up spaces

between boundaries, to set diverse ‘un/professional’ performances in motion. As Rita

15 Sherman in Morris, 1999, Smith in Weitman (2003), Chadwick in MacRitchie (2005). See also Frueh (1991, 1994, 1994a, 1998) 16 These include works such as Joan Semmel’s Overlay series (Frueh, 1998); socio-political figurative paintings by Ida Appleborg (Appelborg, n.d), and Arpita Singh (Tuli, 1998; Sheik, 2003); self-portraits by Rosalba Carriera, Kathé Kollwitz and Suzanne Valdon (Borzello,1998). There are also a number of anonymous Australian artists represented in Rosemary McLaren’s published thesis Menopause, Art and the Body (2001). Installation, multi-media and live performance are represented in Mary Kelly’s Interim (Kelly, 1994), Mona Hatoum’s Measure’s of Distance (Tate On-line, n.d.) and the performances of Bailey Doogan (Doogan, n.d.) 17 Monstrous in the sense of being uncontainable, grotesque, amorphous, excessive, persistent, changeable and hard to pin down. For further discussion of these concepts and their applicability to contemporary artistic work see for example: Russo, M. (1995) The female grotesque: Risk, excess, and modernity New York: Routledge.

19

Irwin notes: “when one recognises the need to exhibit works of a/r/t as theory as

métissage, the relationship between author/artist and audience takes on a

pedagogical turn” (2004, p. 33). This is an observation which has gained credence

for me as I have engaged in the present inquiry. These un/professional

performances not only create bridges between boundaries, performing acts of

bricolage, but also “undo competencies” (Féral, 2003 p. 215) through acts of

métissage, intersection, abutment, contradiction, fragmentation and tearing away

from each other. As Carolyn Ellis suggests: “Often you confront things about yourself

that are less than flattering… Then there’s the vulnerability of revealing yourself, not

being able to take back what you’ve written or having any control over how your

readers interpret your story” (2004 p. xviii).

Research in this un/professional arena, is referred to by Stephanie Springgay

and her colleagues as “enacted living inquiry” (Springgay et al, 2005. p. 899).

Springgay writes that the process of engaging in enacted living inquiry occurs in the

seams of experience, when the researcher is moved to acknowledge and address

competing social imperatives and responsibilities, as in the journal entry below. In

the process of researching, they themselves are changed to a greater or lesser

degree (Springgay et al, 2005).

Further, the researcher becomes aware that s/he is at once a singular being

and an intrinsic part of the surrounding physical and social as well as research

environments; a “being singular/plural” (Irwin, 2008, p. 72).

22/03/2006, 12/01/2010 We sit on the bricks of the amphitheatre lured there by the promise of early afternoon sun. The outdoor stage forces us as a group to lower our voices, even as the sunlight narrows our gazes to a squint. Together the small group of students and I, their rookie tutor are grappling with ideas of identity. I am trying to get them to think about diversity, rather than difference. This is heavy going not simply because it challenges the groups’ understanding, and some of them are resentful; but because what I have been asked to teach challenges the underlying premises of my research, and I can feel the ground shifting even as I speak. [re/constructed journal entry]

20

Despite the difficulties of such research, existing self-studies continue to

move in the spaces between the arts, arts and narrative therapies, education and the

social sciences. This continuity signals the growth of critical re/appraisal of

auto/ethnographic and arts-based research; it indicates the ongoing desire amongst

researchers to distinguish, re/connect and invite the interplay of research

approaches, practices and pedagogies across and between disciplines and

communities (Irwin et al, 2004; McNiff, 1998; Mitchell, Weber & O’Reilly-Scanlon,

2005; Park, 2007; Sinner et al, 2006; Springgay, et al, 2008).

An example of this is Rosemary McLaren’s eclectic research Menopause, art

and the body: Contemporary tales from the daughters of hysteria (2001). McLaren’s

comprehensive work features, amongst other things, interviews with a group of

Australian artists who have addressed their experience of menopause through art

making. The motivations of a number of her co-respondents echo my own impulses

as artist. McLaren, working as creative researcher and writer, takes up and

re/shapes these interviews into poetic form; doing so in order to better capture the

emotional tenor of the interview, and the experiences behind it including the silences

and gaps. She also documents her own experiences as researcher/writer, turning

an intermittent auto/ethnographic lens on her own experiences and development as

researcher.

Half a world away, but closer in time and intent, Sylvia Wilson’s a/r/tographic

research Collecting rocks, leaves and seeds: A journey through loss (2002)

re/shapes her own parental losses from the conjoint positions of

artist/researcher/teacher and writer. Wilson literally handles her bereavement

through touch, repetitive art making and the reworking of words as creative research.

Her research outcomes; like my own, involves the manipulation and repetition of

both textiles and text.

Wilson’s auto/ethnographic inquiry is typical of a growing research interest in

the manner in which words may be metaphorically linked to and manipulated as

textiles. Approaching text through textile metaphors emphasises its written (Luce-

Kapler, 2004), performative (Denzin, 1994) and aesthetic construction. Researchers

suggest a number of ways that words may perform as fabric and fabrication. These

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include being woven together (Derrida in Davies, 1994, p. 40), braided (Sullivan,

2005), threaded (Lymburner, 2004), un/folded, frayed, cut, slit, torn and distressed

(Springgay et al, 2005), worked through, embroidered and pieced together

(Vaughan, 2005).

As the research of both McLaren and Wilson demonstrates, written material

inset into the fabric of research texts provides opportunities to engage with

ephemeral, reconstructed or normally discarded writings/voicings/displays, whilst

simultaneously interrupting the familiar and deceptively seamless pattern of the

academic narrative. Implicit in both these studies is the intention to invite change or

act as a change agent, whether in reference to their own practice or to a broader

agenda. This is to suggest that they are not only or simply performances of writing,

art-making and research, but also active in producing change. My own MA research,

The art of homecoming (Heron, 2002), not only used art making as a means of

expressing experiences and tensions of homecoming, but actively shaped and

negotiated homecoming processes. Similarly Barbara Bickel’s research Unveiling a

sacred aesthetic: A/r/tography as ritual (2008) addresses, develops and performs

individual and community rituals with the intention of reconnecting with the sacred.

Irit Rogoff also advocates the need for research works which imagine

alternatives through challenges to everyday activities. She queries what she refers to

as an “educational turn within the arts” (2008, para. 1) calling for works which involve

“low-key” transformative processes, “express urgency rather than emergency” and

create “access not accessibility” (2008, para. 26, 33, 34). This approach to the arts

may be regarded as small ‘e’ or “weak education” (Rogoff, 2008, para. 26). Weak

education, as Rogoff defines it includes the valuing of uncertainty, and the relational

spaces between ‘I can’ and ‘I cannot’ (2008, para. 32).

Rogoff’s openness to fallibility as a form of knowledge production, rather than

simply a cause for disappointment (2008, para.7), offers theoretical support for the

manner in which I have restructured this inquiry in the wake of my inability to

continue my early focus on menopause per se. Openness to fallibility, the capacity to

learn from what has gone before and to find unlooked for outcomes are valued and

familiar artistic processes.

22

Correspondingly, accepting that knowledge production within academic

research may also arise from fallibility, allows me to work with the existing research

artworks rather than attempting to overcome, turn away from or cover over the

seams. The previously mentioned seams which have emerged between “I can” and

“I cannot” (Rogoff, 2008) are liminal spaces in which new and old perspectives and

performances can be pinned together reflexively. As such auto/ethnographic

approaches in research have created a pathway for the foregrounding of fallible

artistic practice within the exegesis, maintaining the integrity of the artistic product

which is exhibited while contributing to public awareness of artistic practice.

The re/representation of artistic fallibility as well as accomplishment, within a

research exhibition, is, I suggest, an un/professional performance which takes place

in the spaces between ‘I can’ and “I cannot’. Preparing for such a performance

enables me to look backwards in order to see alternative perspectives which have

the capacity to set new things in motion in my interdisciplinary practice.18

I turn now to key concepts which have emerged as relevant to this research

inquiry. These concepts include the idea of research structuring as a rhizomatic

process; consideration of the contingency of the art object; the use of iteration as

means of re/approaching existing research through analysis and example and

consideration of co-performers within artistic practices and performances.

Research structuring and lines of inquiry

The connective nature, flattened structure and multiple lines of inquiry of

auto/ethnographic research, has been referred to by post/structuralist researchers

Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as “rhizomatic” (1987, p. 4).19 They compare

lateral, rhizomatic growth with the hierarchical structure of a tree, drawing analogies

between these vegetative structures, and western knowledge systems. Rhizomatic

ways of working link ideas together organically, they “have to do with surveying,

18 This approach is discussed in some depth in the following: Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000; Manke and Allender, 2006; Tidwell and Fitzgerald, 2006; Stronach, Garratt, Pearce & Piper, 2007. 19 Deleuze and Guattari point to the following rhizomatic principles in their analogy: connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity and a-signifying rupture (the capacity of a rhizome to create offshoots from any point despite damage or partial removal) (1987)

23

Figure 1. Julie Heron. Unpublished Journal entry: Rhizomes. 2007.Journal entry/scanned image.

mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (1987: p. 4-5). Proceeding from a

central point they radiate outwards building on circumstance and possibility (Irwin et

al, 2006). Deleuze and Guattari clearly distinguish mapping from tracing As I

understand their exposition (1987: p. 4-5), tracing involves traversing familiar and

linear paths and sequences, whereas mapping is aimed at opening up the unfamiliar

through non-linear inquiry, and the creation of networks. Rhizomatic thinking as

proposed by these researchers has the capacity to make connections outside and

between the lines; it has the potential to bring something new into being or into

consciousness (Fig. 1).

The reflexive practice of re/tracing

“one’s developmental road and trying to find

a different path in one’s practice” (Manke

and Allender, 2006, p. 251) involves both

tracing and mapping. It is a process of

contiguity which engages with both the

familiar and the unknown (Springggay et al,

2005, p. 900). This doubling of focus or

folding, creates openings or spaces

between. As Jasmina Sermijn, Patrick

Devlieger and Gerrit Loots (2008) suggest,

the value of rhizomatic research

approaches involves the presence,

revelation and generation of multiple entries

and points of departure.

As applied to the present research, a rhizomatic approach has the potential to

engage relationships and spaces between objects and people which occur within,

alongside and outside the staging of the initial exhibitions of this research, offering

points of entry and departure which are new to me. I also consider fluid relationships

between objects and viewer over time and situation.

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Contingent objects and art as iteration ‘Is this reading true or false, right or wrong, good or bad?’ is a question that drives toward closure, status and the fixing of knowledge. But the question ‘What has this reading performed or let loose in the world?’ sends us out on an exploration.

Elizabeth Ellsworth20

Using critical reflection and/or reflexion and imagination as tools for

engagement in individual and social research is advanced in education and social

science literature, as offering viable ways to attend to overt manifestations in

conversation, interaction, text and bodies of artwork. It also supports the intent to

engage through research with what is not said, shown, felt, addressed and/or

theorised (Derry, 2005; Ellsworth, 1997, 2005; Greene, 1995; Kharoud, 2006;

Mazzei, 2003; May, 2005; Polanyi, 1998; Porter, 2005, Weber & Mitchell, 2004). This premise is borne out in various ways in the research emerging from arts

related disciplines including fine arts, (Barrett & Bolt, 2007; Sullivan, 2005) arts-

therapy (McNiff, 1998), architecture (Yaneva, 2006) and arts education (Jewett,

2006; Porter, 2005; Slattery, 2001). Indeed, addressing the capacity of an artwork to

carry the in/visible, in/tangible and un/materialised, Sullivan refers to such creative

manifestations as “…loaded text[s] that carr[y] all sorts of references and inferences”

(2005, p. 173).

Works of art in their many forms are not only imbued with a range of

references and inferences, but are contingent on conditions such as time, artistic

intent, audience interaction and social mores, space and site, and the proximity to

other works, objects and texts. Paul Carter (2004) theorises convincingly in Material

thinking that art works and objects materialise and dematerialise through repeated,

reflexive iterations and visitations. He suggests that over time these objects gain an

ephemeral quality, a ghostly presence, performing or resonating with different

meanings at different times and from within differing contexts and perspectives or

subject positions. Such a perspective further allows that they may be approached as

“contingent objects” (Diamond, 2004; Neidderer, 2004; Pakes, 2004) “artefact(s)”

(Manke & Allen, 2006) and/or a form of “data” (Sullivan, 2005, p. 173).

20 (1997 p. 127).

25

Figure 2. Lauren Berkowitz. Demeter’s Garden, 2006. Indigenous, native and exotic plants, hardwood, 430.0 x 170.0 cm. Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

Contextualised as such they perform as sites for research dialogue (McNiff, 1998)

during which they may be approached, addressed and engaged with reflexively or

iteratively. This is an approach taken by art historians and curators seeking

information through examination of the material, conceptual and social properties

and associations which surround a work.

As contingent objects, artworks perform in various ways. The capacity of

specific works of art to evoke, demand or provoke meaningful emotion and physical

responses in a range of audiences is clearly evident in theoretical writing and shapes

popular appeal (de Bolla, 2001). This was apparent in the responses to the research

artwork when initially exhibited and discussed. From an artistic perspective I sought

to position the work variously as having a contemporary edge, as a self-referential

response to menopause, a deliberate feminist provocation, and as an instance of

arts or practice based research. However as Elizabeth Ellsworth observes, the

auto/ethnographer as artist/researcher, enacts the task of critical reflexive

engagement not to verify original intent, but to engage with and generate alternative

responses, inquiring “what does this reading let loose on the world?” (1997, p. 127).

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS.

26

Therefore while the cerebral processes of reflection and reflexivity remove me

from creative immersion, iteration using artwork, text and performance has emerged

as a means through which this inquiry brings my attention back to previously

overlooked detail.

Philosopher Nicholas Bourriaud likens an artwork to “a narrative that extends

and re-interprets preceding narratives” (2002, p.19). He continues:

“Each exhibition encloses within it the script of another; each work may be inserted into different programs and used for different scenarios. The artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions” (2002, pp.19–20). Applying an iterative approach to Lauren Berkowitz’s Demeter’s Garden

(2007, Fig. 2), it is possible to readily locate the artwork variously as: concept/plan;

site-specific installation; installation views (over time) as photograph, photograph as

illustration on various web pages and catalogue illustration.

In a more complex fashion, and on a larger scale, a museum based work

Academy (2007) by Irit Rogoff and Deepa Naim was a component of a large-scale

collaboration between 22 artists, enacted over three museum sites. Academy

emerged from and extended into associated teaching institutions, and generated a

“non-aligned conference” entitled Summit: Non-aligned initiatives in education

culture (Rogoff, 2007, 2008). The emphasis on non-alignment signalled the

importance of conversations between people from a range of backgrounds seeking

to “produce meaning through [trans-disciplinary] relations with one another and

through the temporality of the event” (Rogoff, 2007, para. 15).

The installations which resulted from their inquiries turn on the question What

can we learn from the museum? however Rogoff points out that the project was “not

focused on the museum’s expertise, what it owns and how it displays it, conserves it,

historicises it [but rather on its] unmarked and unseen possibilities” (2009, para. 7).

Working in teams, the artists involved sought to identify and bring into view these

unmarked and unseen possibilities, focusing on the interactions, performances and

27

experiences of people who visited and worked there. They sought a-typical

interactions with the collection, as well as conceptual and physical spaces and

pathways through and outward from the museum. The inhabitation of the museum

by Rogoff and her colleagues resulted in installations which drew on everyday

interactions and accoutrements, and were characterised by Rogoff as “weak

education” (Rogoff, 2007). The works evoked questioning through text, everyday

technologies and presence (Fig. 3).

The summit which framed Academy, also functioned “as [a] field… of

possibilities” bringing together “different audiences in different cultural circumstances

and wildly divergent moods, to produce [a range of] significances” (Rogoff, 2007).

These significances included a number of other exhibitions and various publications,

including a book also entitled Academy edited by Irit Rogoff and Angelika Nollert

(Rogoff, 2007).

In a similar fashion Stephanie Springgay and her a/r/tography colleagues

employ gallery based exhibition and site-specific installation, but also maintain a

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS.

Figure 3. Irit Rogoff & Deepa Naik. Sounding Difference, 2006. N.D. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

28

substantial web-presence.21 They engage in on-going research ‘performances’,

collaborations and ‘conversations’ in local, national and international conferences,

and produce an array of text-based publications. Each of these sites marks an

iteration of an art idea, which may be regarded as a/r/tographic, interdisciplinary and

inter-textual vehicles, which have the potential to generate social exchange and

relationships. Each is linked to the other contiguously, and each reverberates or

resonates in some way with the other. This reverberation is not a new thing. What is

new is the perceptual shift that the artwork has a life outside the frame of the gallery

system and even a place outside the art world.

Iteration has emerged rhizomatically as a means through which this research

inquiry loops back on the artworks as contingent objects, made during the initial

phase of the research. The first phase of this research involved the making of the

artworks which are the touchstone of this research. The second, an iteration of

conceptual and practical processes which attend the making and exhibition of these

works through creative text, includes the preface, the various performances which

interrupt the academic writing of this exegesis as well as the creative performances

which are evident in the chapter on research outcomes. The third iteration involves

various research performances within academia which were in some instances

documented audio/visually. Some of this audiovisual material will be evident within

the concluding phase of this research which involves the re/representation of

components of the arts research as installation.

Examples of iteration and contingency applied to an individual work

No/w/here (2005 -2010) are demonstrated in the following pages (Figs. 4–16).

21 See the following website for further details of a/r/tography research practices. http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/Artography/

29

Figure 4a & b. (left) Julie Heron. Experimental works, Bullarook studio, (2005). Sanitary liners (Carefree), pins. These trial works are the forerunners of Nowhere, which was made in 2005 for the exhibition Invisible Language at Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery. Their relationship with the later work is clearly evident. Figure 5. (top right) Julie Heron. Unpublished Journal entry, 2005. Scanned image. At this point I was experimenting with methods of joining; with shape and form. Individual panty liners were made into flowers, which were in turn pinned together using brass pins. The flowers and pins together became building blocks as I experimented with different configurations. I did experiment with other ways of fastening, but always preferred the fineness of the brass. Later works have stainless steel pins for a sturdier construction.

Re-iterating No/w/here

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Figure 6. Julie Heron. Nowhere, 2005. Digital photograph. Post Office Gallery, Ballarat. The photograph of Nowhere in gallery setting, was taken for promotional use at Post Office Gallery Arts Academy, University of Ballarat Friday, 28 January 2005, 10:03:42 AM. The work was hung with the assistance of Eric Cahill and Loris Button. Nowhere is one of the first research works made. It was never photographed in my home studio, owing to the dim light, and pin marked walls. The title at this point was unpunctuated. Circular piece: 405 Carefree panty liners (pink backing) 6263 brass pins Approx 23 plastic push pins Cushion: 40 sanitary napkins Hand sewn Dacron stuffing 4 Libra tampons

No where now here now where

Meditation Stillness/energy

Mandala Apple blossom/Aphrodite

Body shape pattern (goddess) on sanitary napkins Fabricated beauty/fading beauty

31

12/10/2009 A. I also became interested in how they worked three dimensionally – how they occupied space. But I didn’t push that as far as I would have liked to...

Q. Were there reasons for that apart from the issues you’ve covered earlier? Did you have ideas in mind?

A. Yes there were other reasons. I began to see that my interest in the materials themselves had begun to outstrip my interest in menopause. I was not sure that I could sustain the connection, and by the time I was clear that it didn’t matter, I was doing other things. I had quite a few ideas. For instance: I would have liked to explore interactions between the works and the shadows further or perhaps suspend the work from the ceiling. I had the big work - Nowhere in mind for this.

Reconstructed Interview fragment

Figure 7. Julie Heron. Nowhere. In situ, opening night, Invisible Language exhibition, 2005. Sanitary napkins, liners, tampons, brass and steel pins, dacron fibre. Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne.

32

Figure 8. Julie Heron. Side view of Nowhere at Town Hall Gallery, showing details of spacings between works, three dimensional structure, shadows and pinning. Partial view of Untitled in the background, 2006.Digital photograph.

Figure 9. Julie Heron. View of Nowhere with Invisible Flowers: Carefree in front, Invisible Language exhibition, 2005. Digital photograph.

33

Figures 10a & 10b. Julie Heron. Preparing Nowhere for Revelation and Disguise exhibition, 2006. Digital photograph. The work had been stored untouched in this black cardboard box for nearly 12 months. While most of it is intact, the flowers which had taken the weight need replacing, their fabric torn, pins loosened or bent. The blue cushion is necessary, as repairs; done from a sitting position, take about three-quarters of an hour. The photograph was taken in a studio at the Arts Academy, the only place I find in which to lay out such a large piece cleanly. Laid out on the floor the works their likeness to flowers growing in a field (Persephone’s Field?) is deliciously plausible. I visualise filling a room with them. What a way to farewell youth! I begin to imagine how this could, practically, be manifested. How many boxes of liners, how many pins, where to store them, how long would it take to make? What would it cost? What is its value? What would it do?

Re/constructed journal entry

34

Figure 11. Julie Heron. Nowhere in situ immediately after hanging, Revelation & Disguise exhibition, 2006. Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat. Digital photograph.

020/01/2010 We have been working all morning, and the pinning of Nowhere -the last big task, takes place after a hasty lunch.

The work lies on a pink sheet some distance from the wall, as three staff and I, engage in animated discussion about the most effective way to position it on the wall. Eventually we fold the sheet back onto itself, pinning it into a pocket to cocoon the bulk of the work. A tower and a tall a-frame ladder are positioned on either side, the work is raised to a height we agree is suitable and the top flowers pinned. I position myself to one side peering between the ladders and try to direct the placement. Standing on the ladders my co-performers take great care and considerable effort spacing the flowers, choosing appropriate pins, re/pinning each flower until they achieve a strong arc at the top.

The sheet becomes a hindrance and we eventually allow the work to take its own weight. The tension pulls some of flower pins loose, and there are anxious moments, hasty repairs and collective sighs of relief when this makeshift triage holds.

Once in place, the loose bottom part looks too short and slightly skewed. My co-workers go on with their daily routines elsewhere, as I pin and repin, remaking this section in situ. In the end I find it impossible to achieve the effect of previous hangings, and reluctantly declare it done. Wearing protective gloves, given to me by the more experienced curatorial staff, I lift the cushion onto a square of protective film, cut earlier.

Re/constructed journal entry

35

Figure 12. (left) Julie Heron. Nowhere in situ, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. Post-Menopausal Ornament (pedestal) and Fluster (wall) behind, 2006. Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat. Digital photograph. Fluster was one of two pieces - both of which were “fans”, sold over this and the previous exhibition. Figure 13. (below) Sketch of unrealised work including Nowhere and a corresponding work on the floor below. Unpublished journal entry. Planned but not executed owing to lack of time, and concern about difficulties holding the springy flowers in place. While the sketch pre-dated the 2006 Revelation and Disguise exhibition the possibility of doing this was suggested by staff observing the work on the floor immediately prior to hanging.

36

Figure 14. Julie Heron, No/w/here in Seoul, 2007. Woosuk Hall, Seoul University, Seoul. Digital photograph. The work, re-entitled No/w/here and accompanied by written and drawn instructions and photographs was shipped to Korea, and hung by curator Hyungsook Kim. Korea September, 2007

‘It is very romantic’ the curator remarked. I turned and looked again at the work. “Yes, I agreed, yes it is…” The box was delivered to the front desk of the hostel. I picked it up, bowing thanks, “Kamsa Hamnida”, as I did so. Returning to my room carrying the bulky package, I realised I had no idea how much money was left in the bank, nor how to go about posting the artworks back to Australia. But most importantly I had come to a decision. I didn’t want to dismiss the importance of this phase of research or the way it had acted as catalyst to my thinking, but I no longer wanted nor needed to continue making and marketing this difficult beauty. I placed the box carefully beside the waste bin, wondering as I did so what the cleaning women would make of it.

Re/constructed journal entry/extract from confirmation performance

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Figure 15. Reconstruction of No/w/here, School of Education, July 2008, 2008. Digital photograph. 03/01/2010 I reluctantly remade No/w/here with the intention of documenting the process for inclusion in my belated confirmation. At this stage I was working more literally with the idea of performance. The projected venture into video production was also an attempt to bring my art, research and teaching closer. With no studio space available I remake the bulk of the work in the science lab at the School of Education. The pinning of work, necessary to construct the shape, is facilitated by using a soft surface, hence the use of an available pin board. The white circle behind is a plastic sheet used to minimise visual distraction. It was not until I viewed this photograph after the work was complete, that I realised that the backing of the pads was different. The irony of the disappearance of the pink glow does not escape me.

Re/constructed journal entry

Number Crunching: 48 per packet = 9.3 packets

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Figure 16. Julie Heron. Exploratory sketch for Performing in the Space Between installation, 2010. Unpublished Journal entry. In the sketch No/w/here is situated in the small room at the top. Texts are projected onto the surface from a data projector situated in the main gallery? Studio, study and office furniture and materials are intermingled with existing work.

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Figure 17. Julie Heron. Untitled Mandala, University Open Day, 2008. Digital photograph. 31/08/2008 University of Ballarat Open Day. Today a group of us; students and visiting children made an ephemeral work. It consciously referenced the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy and Lauren Berkowitz, who are much on my mind of late. Although I did not mention it to the students, I was aware that the work also resonates with the floral, ephemeral and circular influences of No/w/here.

We used natural materials gleaned from my garden and the university grounds, laid out on a plastic cloth on the floor. The materials include lavender, rose petals, pine needles and rosemary. By the end of the day the large room is filled with heavy perfume. It was, as someone remarks, an allergy nightmare. Luckily none of us were affected, and the stream of visitors, seem oblivious.

Open Day provides me with an opportunity to engage in an un/professional performance as teacher-educator/artist. One of the few non-research moments I have to work creatively, it is also a chance to extend my ‘teaching time’ with the handful of students who are able and willing to take part.

Since I am ostensibly representing the department, the creative act is regularly broken as I speak to would-be students and their parents about the course. My co-performers however, continue to work readily without my input. It takes us approximately 5 hours, as we work, individually at first, in our patch, then as co-performers. I revel in the concentration the activity invokes, I miss this.

As I take photographs to document the process, I notice how automatic this process has now become. At the end of the day, I take one last photograph, and there are voices raised in regret as we slide the work carefully into the bin.

Re/constructed journal entry

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Scrambling boundaries: working as post-producer Attending to one’s own work iteratively as auto/ethnographer, positions

the practice of artist/researcher and indeed of teacher simultaneously as

audience, reader, co-performer or as Nicholas Bourriaud suggests, “post-

producer.” Working as post-producer, he continues, one scrambles the

boundaries between production and consumption (2002, p. 90). It is with this

act of métissage in mind that an interest in the function of the reader,

audience, consumer or co-performer comes into play in my research.

Interest in such everyday performances and functions have become

evident within and across contemporary research; including media theory,

visual communication, the visual arts, and some areas of arts education, and

have a clear role in shaping my own inquiry (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Luce-

Kapler, 2004); Carter & Geczy, 2006; Ellsworth 2005; Wright 2003).

Academic courses such as media theory, as well as academic researchers

posit the figure of a ‘model reader’ who is, covertly or overtly, addressed

through the work (Carter and Geczy, 2006; p. 145). Education theorist

Elisabeth Ellsworth draws on her media studies background to explore and

advance the complementary idea of “mode of address” (2005). This term

relates to an implied connection with an ‘ideal’ audience or reader to whom

the media, cultural artefact, teaching encounter and/or artwork is explicitly or

implicitly addressed or coded (2005).

Ellsworth’s development and use of mode of address (2005), provides

a counterpoint to Yvonna Lincoln’s urging for researchers in the social

sciences to: “speak in narrative voices which… may have special meaning for

particular audiences” (1997, p 38). Mode of address implies the generation of

spaces and relationships or ‘co-performances’ as I refer to it here; between for

example, teacher and student, artist and audience.

Co-performance poses the questions: who do I think you are?

And who do I think I am?

These questions relate to un/conscious performances of socialised

behaviour evident in such everyday speech acts (Austin, 2003), embodied

performances (Butler, 1990) and social inter/actions. They also, I suggest,

inform the making of artwork and/or research which is intended to be shared

with an audience. I am not referring to the idea of performance undertaken as

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artwork here, but rather to the underlying performance of relationship or

interaction which underpins the intent to address another through or about an

artwork. Performances of relationship which underpin mode of address, and

which have occurred within the specific ambit of the present research, include

gallery floor talks, a media interview, conference presentations, informal

presentations to peers and colleagues, the confirmation of candidature

process, and the examination exhibition. As arts educator I, like my

colleagues along with students, routinely enter into performances of

relationship within the lecture theatre and tutorial. Each of us, individually,

makes assumptions about the other before, during and after these

engagements. Circumstances of time and space frame these performances,

by intent and/or design, as Ellsworth also makes clear (2005).

Performing co-performance Looking out over the small group of people before me I note they are mostly

women. There are two men present, occupying chairs at the back of the gathering, one of whom I have already met. He is a reporter intent on doing an article on my

“courageous work”. The other man, older than he by some thirty years is unknown. Seated in the second row to one side I recognize a colleague, and smile in gratitude at

her welcome presence. We are in the gallery space, surrounded by my work. I am here to give a floor talk, my first, about my research. The curator maintains a vigilant but

friendly presence to one side of the podium where I stand.

Five days before I paced these floors nervously; adjusting, photographing, posing self-consciously before the exhibition title, anticipating my solo debut as artist. The photographs I have of this event capture my ebullient presence, slightly drunk on red wine, chatting with folk who have come out and come far on this cool evening. They record my presence at this same podium, performing necessary heartfelt acknowledgements. Three days prior to that, in the company of the curatorial staff I was arranging, rearranging, hanging works from early in the morning until after 6 at night.

Now I perform as artist/researcher. Taking a deep breath I turn smiling, to address the audience, and begin.

I have no photographs of this floor talk, there is nothing to record the moment when I realize I will need to pronounce the self-revealing words “vaginal atrophy” in front of

the audience which had mysteriously, shrunk down to one unknown man.

At that moment rifts open between my cosy identification with the audience, the assumptions I have about the value of the work, what it might feasibly do in the world,

and the image I have of myself as artist and researcher.

It is, literally, a breathtaking moment of anasyrma.

Julie Heron. Specimen flower: Core value (detail) (2005) Anchovies, pins, sanitary liners. Invisible Language exhibition. Hawthorn: Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery

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Working with co-performers In the course of this research I have become newly aware of “multifarious

combinations” (Holert, 2009, para. 3) of individuals who surround the making and

sharing of artwork within a contemporary practice of arts research. I have

encountered many of the co-performers identified by Tom Holert in an on-line article

entitled Art in the Knowledge-based Polis. Holert notes the presence of the following:

“artists, teachers, students, critics, curators, editors, educators, funders,

policymakers, technicians, historians, dealers, auctioneers, caterers, gallery

assistants, and so on” (2009, para.3). These individuals and groups, he goes on to

suggest; “embody specific skills and competences, highly unique ways and styles of

knowing and operating in the flexibilized, networked sphere of production and

consumption” (2009, para. 3). They also inhabit differing power-bases and wield

varying degrees of influence within the various systems of relationship which

surround the work of art.

The present research has allowed me to enter into a range of such co-

performances, including those I refer to as acts of co-creation, or co-creative

performances. Co-creative performances relate directly to the materialisation of an

artwork, include the crafting of components of a work to specification, creating an

entire work to specification, as well as limited (eg. for the life of a single project) and

more permanent creative partnerships.

Co-creation opens up opportunities for entering into relationships with artisans,

experts and technicians whose work may provide creative contributions great and

small. Active within the developmental processes of the work, these co-performers

are not simply production assistants but also play a part in shaping its outcomes

(Sheehy, 2006). Such arrangements may be partly attributed to the contemporary

artist’s desire to use atypical materials and techniques, as in, for example my own

employment of a silversmith, an engraver and a signwriter for the current research.

The function of the individual artist in these instances may be expanded to include

co-creative, managerial and design attributes amongst others.

Co-creative performances within an arts/research context may reference the

production and editing of text, as well as co-operative research performances which

relate directly or tangentially to the primary focus of the research. For example,

during the present inquiry, while defining my thinking around the idea of

un/professional performances, I took part in a joint presentation with a colleague on

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another matter. Together we wrote and performed a script relating to an aspect of

our teaching. This co-creation expanded both of our respective research approaches,

whilst concentrating on a third matter, in what was effectively liminal space.

In the research conducted by Tom Holert (2009) cited above, he refers to

those who function as gatekeepers and facilitators in relation to art works and arts

research. These may include gallery directors and curators, community and

governmental arts bodies, and media representatives.23 Interactions between myself

and various co-performers who fit this definition took place within the present inquiry

during negotiations to exhibit in 2005, 2006 2007 and again in 2010. At particular

points within these negotiations I dealt with directors and curators. These individuals

not only had the power to accept or reject my work in the first instance, but also to

apply standards and frameworks relevant to the overall direction and focus of the

gallery. They also took on the negotiation of press releases and publicity material for

the exhibition itself and in some instances took charge of catering. This everyday

functioning served to facilitate the professional execution of the exhibition process. It

ostensibly freed me to perform as professional artist, while demarking and

maintaining discrete boundaries between the two. The maintenance of boundaries

which were and are from the gallery perspective reasonable, served to obscure and

in some instances limit or thwart my desire to work rhizomatically as researcher. An

example of this occurred when I requested copies from the gallery comments book in

the aftermath of the first exhibition, Invisible Language (2005). Information was

provided, but in summary form, rather than verbatim, thereby losing an opportunity to

use the information more effectively. As beginning researcher, it was all too easy to

let the opportunity slip, with the staff obviously occupied with other matters.

During the same exhibition however, the gallery did facilitate contact with the

owner of the sole independent sanitary manufacturer in Australia, who was

interested in commissioning work and subsequently provided me with some free

sanitary materials to continue my research; with another businesswoman intent on

creating lecture tours aimed at menopausal women, and some time later the writer of

a book on menopause who was interested in attaining an artists’ view of these

matters. These contacts provided further unrealised opportunities to expand my work

23 See for example Albena Yaneva’s account of the negotiation between temporary and permanent players in Chalk Steps on the Museum Floor: The ‘pulses’ of objects in art installation (2003).

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rhizomatically. Ongoing teaching commitments and research deadlines kept such

possibilities in check.

This highlights the point that as artist/researcher a network of institutional

gatekeepers is also in play. The previously mentioned group of gatekeepers and

facilitators expands to include supervisors, departmental heads, higher research

bodies, ethics committees, funding bodies as well as the wider academic community.

Each of these individuals and bodies shapes the arts research to a greater or lesser

degree, defining guidelines, targets and deadlines to be met. Research (and

teaching) budgets, existing research profiles and government definitions and

rankings of research publications are all matters which serve to limit or expand

research inquiries, and subsequent knowledge production.

These are matters which incline Tom Holert to inquire into networks of power

relations within the research process. In the previously mentioned article, Holert

observes that, “the discursive formats of the extended library-cum-seminar-cum-

workshop-cum-symposium-cum-exhibition have become pre-eminent modes of

address and forms of knowledge production [in arts research]” (2009, para. 29). This

in itself means that the artist researcher is, of necessity, taking part in a performance

in the spaces between art and text, art, text and voice, researcher, institution and

government funding bodies.

The complexity of the systems of relationship in which the practicing artist is

enmeshed, is highlighted by Albena Yaneva in a compelling article, entitled Chalk

Steps on the Museum Floor: The ‘pulses’ of objects in art installation (2003). Yaneva

highlights relationships, performances and interactions as they occur within the

context of negotiating the exhibition of an installation work within an Arts museum.

This has been of considerable interest to me not only as I reflected on my earlier

gallery experiences, but also as I began to consider installation as a potential means

of re/representing this research. Yaneva refers to the interaction surrounding the

making of the installation in question, as a process of “becoming art stabilized in a

nexus of relations” (2003, p. 176). Her inquiry supports and supplements the notion

of “multifarious combinations” of surrounding individuals, referred to by Tom Holert.

She advances a framework in which she refers to artists as “temporary actors” who

perform within the commonplace yet complex social and political networks of a

functional arts institution, which houses an array of “permanent actors” (2003, p. 7).

The highlighting of this system by Yaneva (2003) goes beyond the notion of

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installation as artwork complete within itself, to address wider implications, processes

and associations within the gallery or art museum, or indeed the academy as Holert

(2009, para. 3) suggests.

What is not evident in Yaneva’s research is the interaction of fragmented

practices and functions in which the artist simultaneous performs as researcher, and

therefore writer, and perhaps as educator. This is a gap addressed by

auto/ethnographic research, and specifically by the previously discussed approach of

a/r/tography. All of the aforementioned systems of relationship are not widely

acknowledged, yet they serve to shape the outcome and the experiencing of an

installation. Consequently the highlighting of their presence is, I suggest, a credible

and vital part of arts based research which may usefully be made evident within the

public spaces of an installation.

Going further as artist/researcher, I suggest that outcomes which attend to the

spaces between ‘I can’ and ‘I cannot’ should not only include complete works but

also that which is not evident in complete works or academic research writing, nor in

data extrapolated or fitted into pre-existing themes. These include unresolved,

unselected and unmade works, re/creative text and the day to day activities which

attend the research process, as well as referencing the ephemeral, apparently

simple interactions between artist, audience, research communities and other

stakeholders which have emerged as matters of interest from the rhizomatic and

iterative processes of this inquiry.

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Literature Review: Un/pinning relational performances

The artist’s practice and his behaviour as producer, determines the relationship that will be struck up with his work. In other words what he produces, first and foremost, is relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects.

Nicholas Bourriaud24

In his publication Site-specific art: Performance, place and documentation

Nick Kaye (2000) advances the idea of audience performance as necessary in

the successful completion of installation art.25 By ‘completion’ he refers not to

material processes or placement of the work, but rather to what amounts to a

relational circuit. To complete this relational circuit the audience or co-performer

plays a part; is physically, psychologically, socially or emotionally immersed in,

engaged or activated. In a similar vein, in her introduction to From margin to

centre, Julie Reiss notes that “There is always a reciprocal relationship of some

kind between the viewer and the work, the work and the space, and the space

and the viewer… the spectator is in some way regarded as integral to the

completion of the work” (1999 xiii). By including the surrounding space in her

equation, Reiss invokes the idea that completion goes beyond the act of looking,

to one which involves larger embodied interaction. For this reason she goes on to

suggest that there is an overlapping of installation with other areas of

contemporary art including performance.

Echoing Reiss’s idea of completion, Claire Bishop writing in Installation art:

A critical history (2005) posits an “activated spectator [who is] addressed directly

[through] sensory immediacy … physical participation… and awareness of

others” within the spaces of the installation (2005, p.11). Her particular interest in

this instance lies in the potential for change arising from such engagements.

Bishop’s delineation of activated spectatorship is subject to critique in a recent

on-line publication by Graham Coulter-Smith (2006) entitled Deconstructing

installation art. Coulter-Smith suggests that activated spectatorship as defined by

Bishop simply amounts to a process of immersion. Immersion, he suggests,

works against audience activation and hence change, since it lacks distance. 24 Bourriaud (2002, p. 42). 25 Kaye (2000) explicitly addresses the idea of site specific practices, which he identifies with the ‘working over of the production, definition and performance of place... [He goes on] where the location of the signifier may be read as being performed by the reader, then the function of language provides an initial model for the performance of place” (p.3).

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What Coulter-Smith seems to be suggesting, is that critically reflective

engagement must take place immediately, during the encounter. Yet as educator

Donald Schön demonstrates, reflection may take place not only during, but after

an experience or event (1987, p.26). Further, as Mary Phillips Manke and Jerry

Allender (2006) propose, an initial response to a work may need time and

reflection, before reflexion can occur. This point is taken up by Susan Finley

(2003) in her journal article Art-based inquiry in QI: Seven years from crisis to

guerrilla warfare. Reminiscing about her own experiences Finley states: “We may

not always realise that we are learning and making meaning of experience until

long after the fact and not until we have some need of the concept” (2003, p. 292).

The possibility that we may have the experience without realising it,

accords with Coulter-Smith’s concerns about immersion (2006), while at the

same time pointing to the possibility of further re/engagements over time and

upon reflection as suggested by Finley (2003). An example of such a process

occurred within the present research, as I, attuned to experiences of menopause

and familiar arts practices found it difficult to see or seize research opportunities

as they occurred. Attuning to research practices I lost sight of the artwork.

Working iteratively has given me the wherewithal to make meaning of the

experience retrospectively.

Therefore while I take the point that critical distance is important in

activating engagement, I question Coulter-Smith’s critique of Bishop’s position on

audience activation. Bishop does not imply a total loss of consciousness, since

her remarks regarding awareness of fellow participants indicate a degree at least,

of implied awareness. Moreover in emphasising sensory encounters, Bishop is

allowing for embodied responses. To discount embodied or tacit responses is to

discount important information. The privileging of thought over embodiment is a

contested legacy of rationalism, yet the response of the body may be equally

telling. Immersion and critical reflection are both necessary, I suggest, to activate

the co-performances of artist and/as audience.

Furthermore, I suggest that the physical immersion and sensation of the

co-performer parallel and stand in place of, the embodiments of touch and

handling employed by the artist as producer. Memory, desire and imagination

offer further means through which the audience may invest in the installation over

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what is typically a short period of time. Using objects already in existence talks

back to, iterates and plays with the original function.

The presence of such objects in

unexpected situations, contexts,

conjunctions and configurations of

installation, serve to throw familiar

use and expectations into relief. This

is borne out by the use of ordinary

objects in the work of Cuban born

artist Felix Gonzales-Torres. Torres

also explicitly makes the necessity for

a co-performer clear. Discussing his

installation Untitled (Placebo–

Landscape–For Roni) (1996, Fig. 18)

he states: “I need the viewer. I need

the public interaction. Without a

public these works are nothing,

nothing. I need the public to

complete the work” (Spector, 1995, p.

13). Audience participation is

solicited by inviting them to remove

and savour the sweets which comprise the work, ensuring that the supply is

regularly replenished throughout the duration of an exhibition.

Similarly, but more implicitly Canadian a/r/tographer Sylvia Wilson

addressing works from her MA research entitled Fragments, invokes the co-

performance of others in relation to the work. She states:

I… see this precisely as the wonder of image/art-based research, that the reader/viewer’s own stories can be woven in with mine, images and text resonating not just with each other but with the viewer as well, inviting him/her in as a participant in the process (2004, p. 50). Wilson’s use of scraps of fabric create reminders of times in my childhood

spent under cutting tables and beside sewing machines with my dressmaker

mother; learning properties of new cloth from the scraps that littered floor; their

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR

COPYRIGHT REASONS.

Figure 18. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Untitled (Placebo- Landscape-for Roni, 2005. Candies, individually wrapped in gold cellophane, endless supply dimensions variable, ideal weight: 1,200 lbs.

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Figure 19. Sylvia Wilson (Kind). Mendings (2001), reiterated in The Body Knowing: A Visual Art Installation as Educational Research, 2003. On-line.

texture, weight, bias, transparency (no wonder textiles prove so apt as metaphor

for research). Wilson’s re-fabrication of handkerchiefs gleaned from the effects of

her dead parents (Fig. 19), remind me of personal encounters with emotionally

laden clothing and textiles, even as they resonate with my own research

purposes and activities. Furthermore, Wilson’s discussion of these matters,

accompanied by images of her work also activates my response as researcher,

writer and as educator, as I ponder the import of her writing for my own inquiries.

Although the examples above suggest differences in the ways in which the

co-performer (whether artist, researcher or audience in a more traditional sense)

is activated, neither example relies on passive spectatorship or indeed

connoisseurship – despite their strong aesthetic dimension. Wilson is reliant on

the capacity of participants to link imaginatively to the present work through their

own experiences, whereas Gonzales-Torres goes beyond empathy to envision an

embodied interaction through the act of removing and ingesting part of the art

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS.

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Figure 20. Lauren Berkowitz. Karakarook’s Garden, 2005-06. indigenous plants and Dromana toppings, 12 x 7m. Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

work. In both instances processes of rapprochement which involves imaginative

identification, connection and empathy, are set in motion.26

While what is being referred to here relates to conceptions of an audience

in the traditional sense of aesthetic or material consumer, I maintain that much of

what is being advanced can also apply to the artist or artist/researcher as

‘audience’. As audience, s/he approaches the work relationally, consciously or

not, as an embodiment of an investment of time, energy and emotion. Likewise

there is an investment in the audience and their response.

In this fashion, individual works, and the audience addressed through the

work, become either implicitly or explicitly, co-performers. Co-performance as

outlined here goes beyond a distanced spectatorship. It rests on a premise of

intellectual and emotional encounter or affect; between artist, and audience

through the artwork and the associations it activates.

I find the notion of offering the potential for rich and complex engagements

for both audience and artist/researcher compelling. For this reason I return to a

26 The idea of Rapprochement as applied by Mark Rosenthal to art installation will be discussed in the following chapter.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS.

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handful of artists with curiosity and appreciation, discovering new connections

and possibilities as I do so. A series of works which have become important

sources of inspiration for this inquiry, and indeed within my teaching practice are

the botanical installations of Australian artist Lauren Berkowitz including

Demeter’s Garden and Karakarook’s Garden (Figs. 2, 20). These installations

mirror yet do not mimic each other. The former is alive and growing, the latter,

tellingly uses harvested plants. Each involves the sensory impact of smell, as well

as visual and tactile beauty. They are part of a matrix which includes changing

vegetative states, and various combinations of plant materials.

The ephemeral materials and objects in Berkowitcz’s installations perform

as sensory activators, yet their immediacy often gives way to questioning,

re/activation of memories and of previous socialisation. This is evident in the

manner in which Berkowitz employs the use of the Victorian language of flowers

in Heartsease (1995) to invoke personal and public memory, a device

investigated for similar purposes in my own research. Heartsease (1995) taps

into diverse layers of memory, juxtaposing Victorian plants, symbol systems and

colours with melaleuca plants deployed in ways which further reference

indigenous painting and symbology, notably that of the hearth or sacred site. The

concentric circle of this installation, placed strategically between the shrine of

Remembrance and the Botanical gardens, allows the co-respondent to approach

thereby opening up the possibility for audiences to physically and imaginatively

engage with the works from a range of conceptually and physically divergent

positions (King, 2000). Each piece of additional input addresses, challenges and

interacts with previously established understandings, socialisation and embodied

responses.

The socialisation and education of artists includes the learning of

specialised transmitted knowledge, including references to art histories and

traditions of art, but also techniques, skill in material productivities (Bolt, 2007);

creative and material thinking (Carter, 2004).27 Berkowitz’s previously mentioned

installations draw on these artistic ways of knowing as well as the individual

knowledge bases of the co-performer. At the same time however, childhood 27 Barbara Bolt (2007) in The Magic is in Handling (pp. 29-30 ) distinguishes between her own concept of “material productivity” and that of “material thinking” proposed by Paul Carter (2004). Material productivity involves the conjunction of hand, eye and material in the practice of doing, whereas Carter’s term references the conceptualisation of material relationships in order to do.

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Figure 21. Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled (Public Opinion), 1991. Black rod licorice candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply, ideal weight: 700 lbs (317.5 kg), dimensions variable. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

memories, tacit knowledge, collective wisdom, specialised horticultural lore,

remembrances embodied in the physicality of gardeners, individual passions for

colour, scent, and texture are activated through memory, desire and surreptitious

touch.

Ephemeral work has the potential to generate emotional and conceptual

resonances relating not only to any ostensible subject matter, but to their

transitory nature. Unable to be reverified by repeat experience, they tease

perception and memory generating ghostly impressions which linger long after

the works themselves are only publicly documented through print and digital

media. At the same time they have the capacity to return, to be replicated, with

changes emerging from the conditions of the site, shifts in time and critical

understanding and the awareness of the co-respondent.

This is especially evident in the work of Felix Gonzales-Torres (Figs. 18,

21). His poetically ephemeral installations simultaneously perform both presence

and absence. This was territory explicitly explored by Torres during his life,

through the use of

transitory objects such

as sweets, strings of

light bulbs, billboards

and paired clocks.

Moreover he ensured

the perpetuation of his

works after his death,

via specific trusts which

allow the works to be

continually re-

configured and

replenished.

Sylvia Wilson’s

work, along with that of

Felix Gonzales-Torres

and Lauren Berkowitz simultaneously invokes the endurance and elusiveness of

memory, a foreshadowing of change, loss, and uncertain fragile hopes for the

future. All three artists employ the use of ephemeral, delicate and fragile

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS.

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materials, repetition, serialisation, volume and a minimalist aesthetic to give

substance to a materially insubstantial matter. Each of these previously

mentioned works, like my own, is formed in relation to existing materials which,

through association, generate multiple psychological and social resonances.

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Performing co-performance as beings in common

In 2007 as part of this research I encounter a work by Felix Gonzales-Torres outside the

covers of a publication or the illuminated images of the internet for the first time.

The work, ‘Untitled’ (Public Opinion), one of Gonzales-Torres signature installations of a

pile of sweets, is exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria alongside other internationally

celebrated minimalist works from the Guggenheim museum.

In this environment, modest in its visual impact, dislocated from its original context and set

apart from other works of a similar ilk (which presumably added to the power of the original

exhibitions), surrounded by signature works created by other contemporary greats and a

swelling mid-morning crowd, I rely largely on my own limited inside knowledge to flesh it out.

My self-conscious performance as informed participant allows me to scoop up, unwrap and

slowly consume the offering, deliberately thinking of the artist, his losses, my own losses, the

intricacies of the world he addressed - acutely aware of being touched by a spectral hand. Yet

I am also conscious of other performances, of the incongruity of such an act in the midst of the

bustle of a blockbuster exhibition, aware of other performers and performances including the

gallery staff policing the exhibition. I am ready to protest in the name of authenticity should my

gesture be challenged, but there is no challenge and I trace disappointment in my response.

As a confirmed collector I fight the urge to take another sweet for posterity – a piece of Felix

and his passion for life and love. As a sugar-addict I fight the urge to pick up another, to

maintain my awareness of the artistic purposes of the glimmering pile before me.

My presence here as researcher imbues my interaction with a need for purposefulness which

was is at odds with what I imagine the artist had in mind. Fidgety, I take out a visual diary make

brief notes, itching for a camera, unsure of what to draw. I openly observe responses to the

work, noticing that few people stop for long and even fewer take sweets. I want to cheer when

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a young woman walks boldly across to the work, and performs the ritual, conferring with her

companion for long moments before moving on. I speak to the gallery staffer, “Do they renew

the work every night?” “Do many people take sweets?”

Knowing that I may never again encounter this work makes me want to linger perhaps hoping

for an epiphany; yet in the process of lingering the work becomes just a pile of sweets on a

gallery floor.

Eventually I join the rest of crowd walking toward the next room.

2008 -2010

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Co-performing as being-in-common The theatrical deployments, mundane objects, shiny surfaces, evocative

textures, the tactile, olfactory, alimentary and kinaesthetic pleasures and terrors

of installation art therefore emerge from and reference deeper questions. These

deeper questions are concerned with relationships and spaces between

individual, social and material experiences and histories. Not only does art as

installation implicitly position artist and/or audience as singular beings, it also

positions them as functioning members of virtual or actual communities.

Claire Bishop positions those whom she refers to as viewing subjects

within alternate ideas of community, as “beings in communion” or as “being-in-

common” (2005, p. 115). In doing so she takes up ideas formulated by French

philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). Nancy’s theorising has also been a powerful

influence on the work of contemporary a/r/tographers (Irwin et al, 2008).

According to Bishop the idea of “beings in communion” occurs when an

individual enters into a sense of unity with others through the assumption of

shared experiences, values or conceptual frameworks when encountering a work

(2005, p.115). Artists positioning their audience as beings in communion also

consciously or not, make presumptions regarding their immutable identity. Identity

framed in this manner has a limited range of referents such as gender, race and

ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and socio-economic status. Co-performers

positioned within this humanist approach may be defined further, as being in

agreement or opposition to these variables and hence the works themselves.

Assumptions about the fixity of gender and age were un/intentionally re-

enforced and later undercut in my initial research works. By this I mean that I had

made the work assuming that menopause as it is positioned and discussed in

much of western medical and psychological research, popular culture and

advertising was universal if excessive. I assumed a common audience

background, divided along lines of gender and age, deliberately using materials I

divined could engender performances of empathy, acceptance, celebration,

shame and outrage. Judging by what was recorded in the comments book I

routinely employed at the Ballarat Gallery exhibition Revelation and Disguise

(2006), these responses did occur. Yet my increasing unease at being self-

identified with a group defined primarily by western-centric images of gender and

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age at a point when my affiliations were increasingly framed within professional

practice, simultaneously undercut my sense of being in communion. This

generated situations of mismatch and acute discomfort as I sought to give an

account of my work to disparate gallery and academic audiences.

At this point, awareness of the fragmented state of my research, along with

an increasing identification with practice, made it feasible, indeed desirable to

change my approach as researcher to a position Bishop refers to as ‘”being-in-

common” (2005, p. 115). Being-in-common emphasises the incompleteness of

the co-performer along with the uncertainties of the milieu in which he or she

performs. It is in keeping with post-structuralist views of decentred, fragmented or

‘monstrous’ subjects, and at odds with humanist ideals of perfection, unification

and perfectibility.

Despite this Bishop makes the further point that experiencing the

installation the co-performer temporarily exists as a “being-in-common” (2005, p.

115), or as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it as “being-singular plural” (2000). Commonality

emerges not from a presumed shared identity, but from the sharing of similar

reference points or interests; “an ecology of art” (Kwon, 2005, p. 13).

An important outcome of this research has been a shift in my research

approach from the fixed parameters of “beings in communion”, to the looser

affiliations of “being-in-common”, discussed in the present chapter. This shift has

not only enabled me to move beyond the identification with age, gender and a

fixed educative purpose, which both shaped and hampered the development of

the initial works, but has opened up the possibility for auto-ethnographic and

interdisciplinary research. I am now able to re-engage, re-conceptualise and re-

represent the existing body of work in new ways, through installation. In doing so,

I am able to address the ephemeral nature of the original works and their focus

on menopause, fleeting co-performances which have occurred in the making of

the work, and my own embodiment as artist/researcher/teacher and writer.

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Literature Review: Art as installation/as relational performance Works hunger for participation in innumerable orders of relevance that locate and shape the life history of the work… The object itself is not the work but the system of relationships

George Alexander 28

Installation/art/as installation In this chapter I analyse concepts and examples of what is commonly

referred to as ‘installation art’. From here on I use the noun ‘installation’, in

preference to ‘installation art’ to refer to the whole, assemblage, textile sculpture

and media where appropriate to refer to the individual components. I also employ

the terms ‘installation art’ and ‘art as installation’, referencing either the formal or

conceptual approaches taken by specific theorists.

While there is broad agreement among arts theorists about the emergence

of installation as a practice of making and exhibiting art in the twentieth century,

there is similarly agreement that its specifics are hard to conceptualise, address

and pin down (Bishop, 2005; Archer, 2000; Geczy & Genocchio, 2001; Reiss,

1999; Rosenthal, 2003). Consequently it has been described in terms of excess,

hybridity (Rosenthal, 2003); hunger (Alexander, 1999); instability, fluidity (Geczy

& Genocchio, 2001) and elusiveness (Bishop, 2005).

In his publication Understanding installation art: From Duchamp to Holzer,

curator Mark Rosenthal proposes, somewhat uneasily, that installation art

threatens to become the predominant mode of expression for the twenty-first

century (2003, p. 25). 29 This prediction taken together with the previously

mentioned descriptive terms, suggests the possibility that art installations have

the ability to overspill, be excessive, open up and perhaps consume established

ideas of what constitutes art. Indeed Jonathon Crary (2003), writing in the

foreword to Installation art in the new millennium: The empire of the senses

explicitly addresses the notion of excess pointing to the “stunning diversity of

materials and practices” characteristic of contemporary installation. In this they

mirror the “patchwork, composite character of contemporary experience” (Crary,

28 Alexander, G. (2001). Thrift store alchemy: Notes on installation. In A. Geczy & B. Genocchio (Eds.) What is installation: An anthology of writings on Australian installation art. (p. 66). Sydney: Power Publications. 29 In a similar vein, Archer suggests that “the widespread adoption of installation as a method of art production has led to a situation in which it is fast coming to seem the conventional way to do things” (2000, p. 30).

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2003, p. 7). Mark Rosenthal also points to the capacity of this form of art to

address and elaborate the complexities of the present age, noting that

“installation art” along with other post-modern approaches, abandons the

characteristic modernist approach which focuses on the integrity and sanctity of a

single work. Instead, it addresses “a multiplicity of objects, images and

experiences which spew forth without regard for isolation” (2003, p. 25). Indeed a

perceived capacity for addressing complex and fragmented experiences is a

deciding factor in my choice to develop an installation as a means of sharing the

outcomes of this research through artwork.

The lack of isolation Rosenthal identifies applies not only within the arts,

but takes installation across into other academic and social areas and blurs

previously established discipline boundaries. Thus artist/teacher-educator Patrick

Slattery employs installation as a means to investigate and invoke his own

experiences in relation to the school based regulation of the human body and

human sexuality in the 1960s (2001). Slattery’s use of installation art emerges

from the need to effectively re/search, bring together and communicate the ideas,

embodied experiences, and his professional expertise as artist, researcher and

teacher-educator. Occupying physical space and using pre-existing objects, he

metaphorically sets out to bring his audience into the picture. This is not to

suggest that he eschews the importance of the aesthetic imagination in

developing his installation tableaux, but rather that the two work in relationship

(Slattery, 2006, p. 264). The pre-existing furniture and objects he selects to

construct the installation, like those included in my own installation, are those

which he perceives have the capacity to resonate with other people’s experiences

on a number of levels. They not only reference the prior experience of the artist,

but also have the capacity to resonate with and relate to the audience through

associations they bring to individual components of the installation and the work

in its entirety.

Advancing the concept of installation as relational, George Alexander

writes in Thrift store alchemy: Notes on installation that: “objects, images and

experiences… [participate in] innumerable orders of reference” (Alexander, 2001,

p. 66). These contingent objects may relate to a range of categories which go

beyond their ostensible purpose, function or appearance. They invoke

relationships which include references to materials and/or media used in the

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production of the work, to other objects and/or artworks, its conceptual,

ethnographic and historical connections, as well as the brand, company, maker

and/or artist. Taking such an inter-textual approach, signals a substantive change

in the way art in contemporary times is approached and conceptualised.

Addressing art as ‘relational’ creates perceptual shifts which go beyond art

making and material outcomes, regardless of the form such outcomes take.

Peter Osborne takes up these matters in his paper Installation,

performance, or what (2001, p.150). Osborne suggests is that what is at issue

here goes beyond simply posing challenges to classification within arts’ history

and theory. Rather, he convincingly raises questions of ontology. What emerges,

he proposes, is not a new genre, ‘installation art’, but instead what should be

regarded as instantiations of art ideas, or art as installation (italics added).

Osborne’s proposition amplifies Alexander’s statement quoted earlier that “the

object itself is not the work but the system of relationships” (Alexander, 2001, p.

66). As a system of relationships; art, whether in the form of installation or not,

may also be regarded as loaded texts which “carry all sorts of references and

inferences” (Sullivan 2005, p.173). As such they provide complex, visible and

tangible markers of individual, psycho/social and cultural imperatives, histories

and understandings. Referring to this system of relationships as the

‘”quintessence” of the arts, Bourriaud suggests that: “The artist’s practice and his

behaviour as producer, determines the relationship that will be struck up with his

work. In other words what he produces, first and foremost, is [sic] relations

between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects” (2002, p. 42). I

interpret this to mean that a vital artistic function is to set the system of

relationships in motion.

The conceptual approach outlined above moves the emphasis from formal

considerations or object-hood, in other words ‘installation art’; to questioning what

‘art as installation’ does, under what circumstances, for what purposes and in

relation to whom?

It is this that is of interest to me here, since my concluding exhibition takes

the form of an installation because I regard this as the most effective means of

materialising and performing the ideas, outcomes and relationships emerging

from this inquiry.

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The present research has an affiliation with a contemporary function of art

which is referred to by Nicholas Bourriaud in Relational aesthetics, as a “culture

of use” (2002). Bourriaud visualises art work as active, having agency (2002, p.

20). He goes on to suggest that agency in the sense in which he deploys it, is

not to be found in the oppositional didactic citation, appropriation and inter-

textuality between artworks prominent in the 1980s.30 Rather it emerges through

the reuse of existing cultural materials and objects in the context of

contemporary art making (2002, p. 35-37).31 Performing materiality and material relationships

Despite the conceptual and performative bent of this inquiry and my earlier

repudiation of formal approaches, I am also concerned with materiality. By this I

mean that as artist I relate not only to ideas and to the creative process, but also

to materials and the way they perform and relate to me as artist through what is

an embodied practice. By this I mean that my body moves in relation to and

interacts with materials as I look at, smell, touch, listen to and manipulate

properties, appearances and surfaces, seeking tactile, functional, psychological

and social resonances. My fingers search out texture. They apply pressure to pin,

to write, to fold. My eyes appreciate, evaluate and compare surfaces, patterns,

the play of light and shadow. The long muscles of my back and legs stretch and

compress shifting in response to the task at hand. Repetition creates pain and

rigidity, as well as arts outcomes. My body is the interface between present, past

and future as I aim to highlight the capacity of the object to connect and convey

diverse, layered metaphorical ideas, histories and possibilities.

Questions of materiality are emerging as a contemporary focus in the arts

and in arts based research (Bolt, 2007; Carter, 2004; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004;

Springgay, 2001; Slattery, 2003). Implicit in these approaches is the awareness

that materials are not simply inert, but have their own distinct properties and

possibilities, which may be highlighted or emerge in relationship with the physical

attention and mindfulness of the artist. Barbara Bolt (2007) in her evocatively

30 Or indeed which is characteristic of the approach Bourriaud attaches to the idea of beings in communion, discussed in the previous chapter. 31 Bourriaud cites the work of three artists in particular. These artists Mike Bidlo, Elaine Sturtevant and Sherry Levine, each have appropriated in various ways existing works by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, both of whom appropriated their own material in the first instance (2002, p.87).

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Figure 22. Stephanie Springgay. Artefact/archive, reiterated in The Body Knowing: A Visual Art Installation as Educational Research, 2001. On-line.

titled chapter: The magic is in the handling, advances the idea that “material

productivity… involves a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the

intelligence of materials and processes in practice”, (p. 30, italics added).

Relationships which emerge in practice between artist and materials generate

further areas of research within that focus, and these in turn are matters that form

a substantial part of this inquiry. Examples of this advanced by Bolt, refer to the

use of familiar art materials such as paint and charcoal. These materials not only

underpin established artistic and discipline knowledge, but also challenge existing

knowledge, through practice, as research. What emerges from this material

productivity is a “performative understanding of art” (Bolt, 2007, p. 33).

Performative understandings

of art can be traced in detail, if

somewhat differently, in the

installation work of

a/r/tographer Stephanie

Springgay (2004). Springgay

activates concepts of gender

socialisation, and employs

embodied and tacit knowledge

when she traces the outline of

a hand in silver onto rose

petals she has slowly, painstakingly, sewn together as part of her post-graduate

installation (Fig. 22). Yet she is also activating materials in new ways and in

unfamiliar conjunctions: “Rose petals scar. Tracks left by the weight of the

machine’s foot require me to abandon the orderly appearance in exchange for

red, loopy, irregular stitches. Hand stitches” (Springgay, 2004, p.69).

Developing art as installation the artist relates not only to the materiality of

singular materials, but also to singular materials in relation to each other.

Installation work is always relational as materials are conjoined, configured or

juxtaposed with each other either to highlight their physical properties or ‘thing-

ness’32 or to infer or carry “all sorts of references and inferences” (Sullivan, 2005,

32 See Bolt (2004) for an elucidation of Martin Heidegger’s concept ‘thingness of things’ as applied to the arts.

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p.173). In addition to “the magic of handling” (Bolt, 2007) such works often exhibit

a “thrift store alchemy” (Alexander, 1999).

The use of diverse and eclectic components, including in some instances

readymade objects, coupled with the spatial nature of installation, brings material

performances and artistic challenges to the fore. Combinations of scale and

spatial dimension,33 use of ephemeral materials and where applicable, replication

of material components, pose issues of selection, sourcing and storage and

produce shifts in artistic observation, choices and practices which more nearly

approach museum practices rather than that of the traditional studio.

Everyday practice within arts, research and education increasingly

involves the use of media as a form of visual documentation, which supplements

and extends a text (Rose, 2007; Weber & Mitchell, 2004; Wright, 2003). Camera

and video used archivally are aimed at recording that which at the time seems

memorable or important. These archival materials may also play the part of

artwork either in their raw state, or when digitally manipulated or edited. While

the documents which are created may include moments of spontaneity and play,

the deliberate use of camera or video material has the potential to generate, I

suggest, a degree of self-awareness and un/conscious performance. This is to

say, that the reflexive artist/researcher, takes on double or triple functions as

archivist, artist, and indeed artist/researcher.

If, as Graeme Sullivan (2005, p. 81) suggests, the studio is an appropriate

and necessary site for arts research to take place, then increasing numbers of

people engaging in higher education research in the arts may find themselves

occupying these multiple positions, and consequently curatorial spaces between

that of artist/photographer and researcher/documenter. This is a position which

has emerged unexpectedly in the present research, as I plan for my final

exhibition. The placement of this documentation, informed by questions of how it

would or should be regarded within the assessable sharing of arts-based

research outcomes, becomes of interest.

33 As in, for example Anthony Gormley’s on-going installation Field which consists of thousands of small clay figures, re/made co-creatively with people local to the area in which the work is sited in any particular instance. See the following websites for details and examples: http://www.antonygormley.com/; http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-art-sculpture-antony-gormley-asian-field.htm

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Back in the studio, I seize a knife, slit open the new packets, anxious to reveal their

contents. I open the black ones first.

My fingers encounter plastic. Drawn from the box, the

napkin swells slightly. The embossed patterns catch the light, as I test the pliability of

this new material, bending, folding, twisting.

Turning it over I discover small blue flowers (tulips?)

scintillating against the black background.

Recalling my own noctural fumblings, the difference in texture between front and

back is functional. I stroke the plasticised surface,

hearing a faint crackle. I ask the question others will ask in

my hearing, why black???

Then I set to work with the pins

Julie Heron. Loyal (Impossibility of flight) in situ, 2005. Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne.

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The artist as archivist/curator/consumer Curatorial work of necessity, involves a physical and conceptual handling

of material objects, during which new relationships become possible. The

formation of relationships with objects is discussed in depth by Daniel Miller in

Material culture and mass consumption (1992). He makes the point that the

acquisition of a particular item by a consumer, creates a contrast with all the other

goods it is not. This is, he notes:

the start of a long and complex process. by which the consumer works upon the object … and re-contextualises it, until it is… transformed by its intimate association with a particular individual or social group, or with the relationship between these (1992, pp.190-191). Through this transformative process the consumer in turn becomes a

producer, or more aptly, a ‘post-producer’ (Bourriaud, 2000). Such a process has

become evident in the iterative approach I have taken in the present research.

Miller’s (1992) intent is to discuss the relationship between the individual

purchaser and the original object produced and marketed through processes of

mass consumption. However, the process still holds good, regardless of whether

the object is new or not, whether it is an object of mass production or artistic

production, and whether the relationship is forged by a consumer in his/her daily

life or an artist/curator within a specific site, project or practice. As Nicholas

Bourriaud (2002) affirms, what the artist produces first and foremost, are

“relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects” (p. 42). In

the case of those objects, which are referred to in the arts as readymades, the

intention of the artist is to re-invest or transform the object through association.

These associations form a new layer of relationships which highlight,

countermand and/or subsume the existing ones.

As mentioned earlier, the embodied artist is part of this process, and like

the everyday consumer, uses touch and the handling of objects to connect. In

doing so imagination, desire, tacit knowledge and memory, as well as his or her

awareness of existing relationships are brought into play. In addition, as artist

s/he may employ tools such as critical association and evaluation, intense focus,

immersion and deconstruction to invest the object with alternative possibilities.

It is credible that similar dynamics inform the museum-like approaches of

specific artists who utilise mixed functions as curator/creator in their practice

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(Putnam, 2000, pp.132-153). Collectively they employ a range of museum-like

educative techniques including gathering materials from a range of sources,

making inventories and establishing provenances, ordering displays, juxtaposing

of items to create counter/narratives, and employing photographs and texts which

provide information and highlight relationships. Practices such as these have

emerged in my own work as I move in the spaces between art, research and

pedagogy, and currently toward an exhibition which ostensibly marks the end of

the present research, in which I now play a curatorial role.

Artistic function as curator/creator may, I suggest address, unpin, further

accentuate, and reconfigure existing relationships within and surrounding the

framework of an installation. Various theorists (Archer, 2000; Bishop, 2005; Kaye,

2000; Reiss, 1999; Rosenthal, 2003) have focused on relationships within an

installation, advancing ways in which the artwork might be activated, and may in

turn activate an audience with a view to fermenting social change. In doing so,

they consider not only the performances of the artist but a range of co-

performances which occur in the process. While Miller (1992) is concerned with

relationships generated in relation to a single object, Bourriaud (2000) theorises

about systems of relationships which are mediated by a class of objects, namely

artworks.

Whether in the classroom or gallery, working with ethnographic techniques

has the potential to open up a dynamic web of relationships and associations

which include situated historical, socio-cultural, political, educational and

aesthetically informed curatorial and institutional practices.

James Putnam writing in Art and artifact: The museum as medium (2001)

cross references diverse material practices and performances of installation and

museology. The conjunction of installation and museology is one in which an

auto/ethnography focus readily comes into play. In this artistic alchemy, materials

may be blended and/or remain separate, items collected, amassed and

assembled, the relationships between components, to scale, space and the

positioning and performance of the audience made evident to varying degrees.

The objects may not only have material presence, but through the use of multi-

media gain a virtual presence as well. In the following pages, I draw on

conceptual frameworks advanced by Mark Rosenthal (2003) to further locate my

own work.

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Figure 23. Greer Honeywill. Anthology of Sadness, 2003. Huon pine, American cherry wood, ceramic, cotton/polyester, plastic, metal, hooks, projectors (five elements). Bendigo Art Gallery: Bendigo.

Between Installation and Museum Rosenthal considers ‘installation art’ in the first instance, as space-filling or

site-specific (2003, p.28). Space filling works are those which could ostensibly

occupy any designated exhibition area without specific reference to the

surrounding environments. Site-specific are those installations which have

particular connections to, or which reference the specific site at which the

exhibition takes place. He divides these two categories into further sub-categories

which frame the overall performance of the work. He designates these sub-

categories respectively as: ‘Enchantment’, ‘Impersonations’ (space-filling),

‘Interventions’ and ‘Rapprochement’ (site-specific)

Greer Honeywill’s Anthology of Sadness (Fig. 23) conforms to the

theatrical typology Rosenthal labels ‘Enchantment’ (2003). Honeywill achieves a

polished seamless look through repetition and minimalist aesthetic order. A series

of well-made wooden structures, piled up ready-made shirts and plates, come

together like a stage set, through which the audience is free to wander and

wonder imaginatively and figuratively locating themselves in the artistic story.

Deployed in the gallery space in

a purposeful manner, the

installation is enhanced by light

and shadow which creates

depth, the suggestion of story

and magic.

‘Enchantments’ not only

address the audience through

beauty and order, they act,

Rosenthal suggests, as

confirmations of the specialist

nature of the gallery, separate

from society (2003, pp. 33-43).

They also affirm the specialist

practice, training and identity of

the artist, as artist. This applies regardless of whether the work is crafted by the

artist, or artisans are employed to realise a concept which s/he has developed.

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Figure 24. Phoebe Man. A Present for Her Growth 1, (detail: installation view), 1996. Sanitary napkins, dyed egg shells, sparkling red egg bulb, 3 x 3 x 0.6m. Gallery unknown: Hong Kong.

Figure 25. Karsten Bott. Museum of Life, 2007. Found objects, size variable. Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich.

Another example of

Enchantment, which may be

seen to relate materially and

conceptually to my initial

research artworks, are the

theatrical installations of Phoebe

Man (Fig. 24). Like my own

investigations, Man’s works

refer to women’s embodied

experiences of menstruation

and fertility, through the use of

sanitary textiles. These textiles,

joined into sculptural forms fill

the rooms in which they are

sited, with an organic,

(orgasmic?), celebratory field. They employ inexpensive, ephemeral, everyday

materials en masse, drawing parallels with the embodied experiences they

reference. The titles serve to reinforce the inevitability of the experience.

Karsten Bott’s installations

(Figs. 25, 26) invoke a sense of

order, wonder, materiality and site,

albeit somewhat differently. His

works highlight a fascination with the

accumulated debris of everyday life.

The eclecticism of his installations

such as Museum of Life (2007) and

One of Each (1993) resonates with

the accumulated materials which

attended the development of my

works.

Another aspect of Bott’s work

is the manner in which the works are conceptualised, and perform in tension with

specialist functions of both art gallery and museum; approximating the idea of

Wunderkammer. These ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’, as they are alternatively known,

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Figure 26. Karsten Bott. One of Each, (detail, installation), 1993. Found objects, 10 x 30 m. Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz.

flourished according to Putnam, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth

century, before being superseded by the rationalist order of the contemporary

scientific museum. Unlike contemporary museums they exhibit “an apparent lack

of rational classification, [a] bizarre sense of accumulation and juxtaposition”

(Putnam, 2000, p. 8).

Links between Wunderkammen and contemporary museology are evident

in the development and exhibition of Bott’s installations as the “most obsolete,

broken and trivial everyday items are

meticulously ordered in rows”

(Putnam, 2001, p. 39). In the course

of Bott’s everyday practice ordinary

objects are gathered by the artist and

placed into crated labelled storage.

When preparing for a particular

exhibition he then selects from the

stored materials. Thus despite the

apparent randomness of Bott’s work,

which Putnam characterises as a

“bricolage of mass-produced

utilitarian objects of varied material,

colour and form, divided into various

groups” (2001, p. 39); the resultant

installations are the result of museum

like procedures.

Curatorial practices which

include the ongoing processes of

connection, textual and visual listing of materials, an apparent randomness,

which nevertheless relies on selection, are all evident in my own research

outcomes.

The installations produced by Karsten Bott occupy conceptual spaces

between Rosenthal’s category of Enchantment and another he refers to as

‘Impersonations’ (Rosenthal, 2003, p. 47). According to Rosenthal,

Impersonations challenge the separateness and connoisseurship of fine art by

the ordinariness of the materials used, their housing and the positioning of

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audience (2003, pp. 47-59). Citing Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Fountain (1917), as

a progenitor of this approach, Rosenthal points to the use of the displaced

readymade and re-contextualised commercial and mundane materials in such

installations. He goes on to suggest that such works position the audience or co-

respondent as questioner, concerned with the nature and purpose of the

experience. This approach accords with my desire to engage the audience in

processes of meaning making rather than simply confirming existing meaning.

While Bott’s installations turn the gaze of the audience back on to

relationships with cast-off things, another group of installations rely on a ready

exploitation of the material and natural world. An example of this can be found in

Damian Hirst’s (2001, 2004) vitrines and exhibits including Away from the flock

(1994) and Naked, (1994) which perform as pseudo-scientific exhibits within a

fine art situation. Installations such as Hirst’s bring the fine line between curiosity

and intrigue, deliberate provocation and sensationalism into play.

Dead and preserved marine life, albeit on a much smaller scale than that

used by Hirst, were used when making a number of my own works, exhibited in

the Invisible Language exhibition (2005). In making these works I relied on the

use of natural materials including a variety of dried sea creatures. These were

juxtaposed with sanitised, artificial materials to invoke two orders of the real.

Their fishiness and fleshiness shaded the works into abjection, toying like Hirst,

with simultaneous impulses of disgust, fear and curiosity.

The installations which fall into Rosenthal’s category of Impersonation,

activate questions relating to the status of the work in particular, and the nature

and purpose of the arts in general. Such works play off against the expectations

and experiences of critical audiences and artistic traditions. They certainly

challenge and extend the notion of what art might be or become, but in the

process may also engender a new style of connoisseurship. Intentionally or

otherwise, they highlight relationships between the artist, the gallery system, the

audience and material consumption. These are matters which have created

additional tension at particular times in this research, as I have questioned my

own use of unsustainable ready made materials, balancing this against my desire

to complete a research project already well underway.

While works which employ unusual or abject materials invite audience

curiosity, claims that installations employing readymades and mundane materials

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“break… open the ‘artistic realm’… making it one with social space” (Archer, 2000,

p.13) are highly debateable. While this may be the intention of the artist, the

outcomes suggest otherwise. Indeed Graham Coulter-Smith in Deconstructing

installation art (2006) suggests that far from breaking open the artistic realm, the

construction of such installations merely opens up new opportunities to continue

what he refers to as “artist’s games” (ch.3, p. 1). He supports his argument by

pointing to the manner in which works such as Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), also

used by Rosenthal (2003) as an example, have become sanctioned, promoted

and commodified by the art world itself.

Coulter-Smith’s argument is persuasive however, the breaching of art

boundaries is not the only function of such contemporary installations.

Installations which are intended to invite questioning of the nature and purpose of

the arts, point to and counterbalance the social narrowing/normalising of choice,

through a refusal of choice. They deliberately highlight what Stephanie Springgay

refers to as “the seam” (2003). This is to say that they bring into question matters

such as taste and value, or as Lara Merlin so pithily puts it “the baby and the shit”

(Merlin, 2003, p. 143). They have the where-with-all to address the

commodification of objects and artworks, along with perceived tensions between

the two, and in the process, bring into question established conventions of the

gallery and/or museum.

This deliberately challenging approach to installation, to arts institutions,

and to audience sensibilities; is referred to by Mark Rosenthal as ‘Intervention’.

Interventions are, he suggests, often deliberately provocative and critical, with

physically elusive borders (2003, p. 73). Rather than focusing on the art

installation as object, he contends that they address a range of contemporary

issues and familiar social interactions and relationships. Consequently the

specific sites chosen for ‘Intervention’ are typically outside the gallery or museum.

They may, however, also take place within these locales if the artist’s intention is

to reference or confront their social and educational functions or “institutional

character” (Rosenthal, 2003, p. 61) up to the point where the physical structure

itself is deliberately compromised or altered (de Oliveira, 2003). My choice to

exhibit my research outcomes at a gallery which is attached to an educational

institution is not entirely a matter of convenience, although the convenience

cannot be ignored. The function of the gallery as an educational space provides a

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Figure 27. Fred Wilson. Modes of Transport 1770-1910, detail: Mining the Museum installation, 1992 – 1993. Various media, dimensions variable. The Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD.

link to my work as educator as well as artist/researcher, thereby making it

preferable to the selection of a commercial gallery.

The museum focused practices

of artist Fred Wilson, potentially

challenge not only the specific

museums he uses for his art, but also

the historical underpinnings of

museum practice per se (Buhmann,

2004; Putnam, 2001). Wilson’s work

(Fig. 27) deconstructs racial relations

through juxtaposing museum objects

normally displayed separately. In doing

so, the conjoined objects themselves,

become powerful metaphors. They

encourage awareness of problematic

relationships between owners and

users of the items in their daily

dealings. Moreover, not only are these

relationships made explicit, but the traditional form of museum display, and

consequently the role of the institution itself in perpetuating these relationships, is

highlighted. Wilson’s installations perform as frames and are in turn, framed by

the art museum, as an historical artefact.

Components of Wilson’s installations function as questionable aesthetic objects

and museum artefacts, rather than marketable art commodities. The work is not

market driven, nor does it take up a resistant stance of public re-education, or as

Irit Rogoff would have it “strong education” (2008, para. 32). Rather, what I find

inspirational and relevant about Wilson’s work is its capacity to unsettle existing

relationships between objects and the site through the way the works are

deployed. This makes the seams between existing narratives and performances

visible, setting new and multiple trains of thought and conversations in motion.

What Wilson grapples with in the process of working in the seams, are not simply

artworks in their own right, but also “ways of living and models of action within the

existing real” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.13). This is to say that these installations are

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ostensibly directed toward purposes and practices outside the art market or

indeed outside traditional arts disciplinary frameworks.

While Wilson’s works are critical and powerful, they remain within a

confrontational framework focused on social institutions. Recent Interventions

have exhibited a capacity for play which addresses the community directly. As

such they have the capacity to be effective in generating community focused

interaction. These sort of installations are aimed at initiating that which Rosenthal

refers to as “Rapprochement” (2003, pp. 77–89).

As a general term rapprochement indicates the reestablishment of

harmonious relations (Turner, 1987, p. 912). In light of this Rapprochement as a

characterising approach to installation, performs as intermediary between the

embodied audience and their natural, social and virtual environments. These

installations, like the previously mentioned Interventions, are aimed at changing

the way people think, behave and interact at both local and global levels.

However, rather than critique the work, they operate through the use of example

and jouissance.

This optimistic approach resonates with philosopher Hans-Georg

Gadamer’s theorising around the transformative conjunction of art and play in

Truth and Method (2004). Transformation, as Gadamer envisages it, is relational,

it takes place in-between. He terms this “transformation into structure” or

“transformation into true”. Rather than alteration, or enchantment, which he sees

as a process of waiting for redemption, “transformation into true… produces and

brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn” (2004, p.109).

He goes on to say that: “The world of the work of art, in which play expresses

itself fully in the unity of its course, is in fact a wholly transformed world” (2004,

p.109).

Clearly in harmony with Gadamer’s sentiments is an ongoing project by

Polish-born American artist Adrian Kondratowicz, entitled TRASH:

anycolouryoulike (2008, Fig. 28). This work involves the on-line sale and strategic

distribution of appealing biodegradable garbage bags. The distribution of the

works occurs in partnership with businesses, organisations and home owners.

The bags are piled into colourful ephemeral street sculptures before being

removed. According to the artist they serve as reminders of the importance of

waste management, co-operative community activity, urban ‘beautification’, as

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Figure 28. Adrian Kondratowicz. TRASH: anycoloryoulike, 2008. Street installation, biodegradable plastic bags, rubbish. Harlem, New York.

well as artistic accessibility. Kondratowicz’s installations are indicative of the

emphasis on reframing everyday behaviours and interactions and familiar

environments typical of Rapprochement (Rosenthal, 2003 p. 77–89).

However, the scale of

some of the examples

Rosenthal cites, including land

art and more recent digital,

virtual and multi-sensory

environments, makes them

anything but unobtrusive in their

execution and affect (2003).

Rosenthal suggests that a

defining attribute of installation

as Rapprochement, is that it

approximates architecture in its

function and relationship with

the audience, if not its material

form.

Another marker of this

approach to installation is a

propensity for sensual engagement (Rosenthal, 2003). Physical envelopment and

individual embodiment are important means of activating, co-performing and

completing the work. The use of projected and directed light, envelopment or

activation of senses other than or as well as the visual; ephemeral materials, or

limited duration; and the need for the audience to encounter the works in non-

gallery spaces and sites, are all characteristic.34 The choice of site may result in

such installations being advocated as a ‘new style’ of public art, which is intense,

ephemeral and relational (Holt, 2000).

Central to many of these new public art works, and indeed to a number of

contemporary installations is the use of ‘new media’ comprising technology, multi-

media and the use of projection. 34 Duration: See for example: Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral ice sculptures. (University of Glasgow, 2007) Movement: See for example: Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project 1999, 2000, 2003, (Carlson, 2004)

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Figure 29. Mark Hammer & Andre Kecskes. Rainbow, 2009. Projected light. Lightwalk street installation, Sydney.

Rainbow (2009, Fig. 29)

provides a demonstration of the

characteristic sensuality, interaction

and performativity of Rosenthal’s

concept of Rapprochement.

Rainbow (2009) featured as a

component of Lightwalk (2009), an

installation created for the recent

SmartLight environmental event in

Sydney CBD (Events NSW, 2009).

Lightwalk extended over twenty

seven discrete sites; depending on

the co-performance of the audience

in order for it to be completed.

Participants could access information

directly from their mobile phones as they walked through the light-based

installations. (Events NSW, 2009). Well publicised and part of a larger festival

entitled Vivid Sydney: A festival of music, light and ideas, the Lightwalk

installation fulfilled its brief of performing an act of rapprochement with an

audience of Sydney-siders and visitors (Events NSW, 2009). The dynamics

between art, embodied audience and site are clearly in evidence. The festive

nature of the entire enterprise, coupled with the scale of the event, contrasts

strongly with the controlled and often reverent environments characteristic of

much of the gallery experience.

Rapprochement as enacted through this event, and as Rosenthal (2003)

frames it, occurs outside the gallery, and therefore outside the ambit of the usual

gallery audience. Galleries themselves are in the process of change, attempting

to invite more members of the general public through their doors (Australia

Council, 1997; Australia Council, 2007-2009). While this change in focus

undoubtedly signals a perceived need for galleries to remain viable, the way

artists, artworks and audiences perform in relation to the gallery is also changing.

Speaking from the position of artist Irit Rogoff suggests:

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Perhaps it does not really matter if the museum changes or not, as long

as we do – as long as we occupy the museum in the same way that we

occupy spaces of learning, less programmatically and more as

inhabitations that last for the duration of our presence. Perhaps we are

after an ontological understanding, one that perceives of our being there

as important, regardless of what we may be doing or not doing. And in this

we have ample license to fail in our endeavours, unspecified as they

might be (Rogoff, 2007, para. 22).

This statement is, I suggest, a movement toward rapprochement which

emerges from a shift in perception and practice rather than between the art

works and the spaces in which they are shown. As such it signals a softening of

boundaries and the opening of performative spaces between completion and

non-completion, professionalism and un-professionalism. These are the spaces

from which the concluding iteration of this research emerges.

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Performative texts ‘A performative text redirects attention to the process of doing research, rather than the product or finished report of the research.’

Susan Finley1

Julie Heron. Mutton Done Up as Lamb: work in progress, 2007.

Incontinence panty, artificial flowers, plastic sheep, gold wire, ribbon, pins. Bullarook studio, Bullarook.

1 See Finlay, (2003, p. 287)

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An un/professional performance in two parts (2007 - 2010)

Q. As I understand it your previous work mainly consisted of two dimensional charcoal

drawings. The making of three-dimensional sculptures seems quite a departure.

A. I have worked three dimensionally before, most recently during my MA research. But

the works were small scale; I made a series of boxes using found objects.

So I was interested in exploring the use of space and form further.

I haven’t quite reached a point where I’m ready to try an installation, although I’ve

thought about it.

Until this research I hadn’t used actual textiles for quite some time either; though my

previous two dimensional works

explored and depicted vintage clothes extensively.

I like the idea of working with everyday stuff, whatever is at hand.

It’s a form of making do.

Mostly I use art making as a means to address issues that trouble me.

In retrospect I’ve been addressing my own ageing, the experiences of midlife and

menopause for most of my artistic life, although it wasn’t always overt to me or to an

audience. Hence the connections to the vintage clothes…

I became embarrassed about this obsession, as if this was all I could do.

As a tutor in the Arts Academy I was drawn to new ways of working,

but felt trapped in the old. It became a huge issue for me, and one I thought I could

resolve through trying new ways of working.

Q. Okay, but why sanitary napkins?

A. I can’t really answer that with any great certainty, the story I gave the reporter at my

exhibition in 2005 is that I found them in a cupboard one day, but I no longer have any

idea of whether that story was accurate or simply convenient.

The weird thing is that when I was menstruating I avoided using manufactured pads as

much as possible because I saw them as exploiting women. I view it more complexly

now. When I did use them I just bought what was functional, cost-effective and familiar

to me.

While I noticed the packaging, and occasionally the brands,

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I hadn’t really compared them.

I had no idea about their diversity – the colours, shapes, styles, patterns, etc.

Once I discovered this it became a sort of lure, an artistic obsession to collect and

connect.

I always did my research whenever I went to the supermarket.

Q. I understand the collecting part, but what do you mean by connecting – are you

talking about the way you put the works together?

A. No, not really. At least I wasn’t when I said it.

I was thinking more along the lines of conceptual connections.

Once I started making these connections, there were so many...

But I simply made the works in the first instance. I still wasn’t seeing it as research.

The connections multiplied as I tried to put the artworks I’d made into some sort of

theoretical framework, and then

tried to find new directions for my practical inquiries.

I did a huge amount of reading because I wanted to get past the feeling of being totally

identified with menopause.

Q. How did you go about that?

A. I did what I always do.

Typically I brainstorm, casting out a big net,

looking at lots of things without trying to judge or classify them,

and at some point the reasons for looking at particular images make sense,

or

they fall away.

It’s an approach I advocate to the arts-education students.

I found theoretical confirmation of my approach in Catriona McKenzie’s article Imagining

oneself otherwise. She points out, compellingly I think, the negative effects of limited

knowledge-bases on the individual capacity to imagine.

She writes about how the ability to approach artwork, research and teaching playfully

and imaginatively is directly shaped by this. It’s not only about having the experience or

amassing lots of material, it’s about gaining an idea of it.

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And that is what I think the whole business of doing this research is about.

But I became entangled in other people’s words.

I blew out the research aspect, so it was this unwieldy thing.

In retrospect a lot of what I was appreciating about other people’s research approaches

was what I had been doing all along, I just hadn’t correlated them.

I was also clearly drawing on material I’d read and thought about for years. Feminist and

psychological writing on issues such as menstruation, women’s embodiment, myth...

I also spent time looking at the way these things, along with menopause and ageing are

depicted through art.

Q. I’m still not sure I understand the conceptual connections between the artworks,

sanitary napkins and menopause.

A. Well neither did I, for a while; although the earlier reading clearly played a part.

Put simply, it just felt right, there was a connection between head, hand and heart as

Vaughan Rees suggests. Rees uses the term “goodness of fit” to describe that feeling.

I began with conceptual links to the continuing process of sanitizing and repackaging

women’s bodies and experiences.

Until very recently using or not using sanitary materials marked an apparent division

between menstruating and non-menstruating women. Prior to 2002, menopausal women

were a nearly invisible market for such products if you’ll forgive the bad pun. According to

statistics this began to turn around in 2004, with the promotion of sanitary products

targeting women’s insecurities about their ‘freshness’, and continence. Now the spaces

between menstruation and incontinence have become a lucrative market for hybrid pads.

The development of new markets such as this not only fulfills a need, it also creates and

highlights the artificial and pecuniary nature of the transaction and the fuzziness of the

boundary.

Researchers like Germaine Greer and Emily Martin have gone into this in depth.

Research by Martin, and for that matter, personal experience, suggests that

menstruating women are incontinent, pregnant women stop and start menstruation and

menopausal women don’t stop menstruating straight away – women are well into

menopause before the bleeding stops. Even when it’s stopped, a year has to go by

without bleeding before you are medically considered post-menopausal.

So it’s an incredibly uncertain process and ultimately the unstained napkin, panty liner or

incontinence panty, has the potential to become a kind of symbol or banner. A visual and

conceptual reverse of stained underwear. A reversal of what it means to be fertile.

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Q. I see what you are getting at; it’s a pretty loaded symbol.

A. That’s only part of it. In a book I read years ago, then reread for this research -

Purity and danger; Mary Douglas suggest that on deep psychological and socio-

cultural levels a bloody napkin signifies danger, specifically for men, but goes on

to point out that an ‘unnaturally clean’ napkin is even more dangerous. If

women’s power is in their blood, then their apparent ability to contain it is even

more dangerous and threatening.

Douglas explores a radical feminist position that women are property under

patriarchy, and menstruation is the sign that a fertile women need to be protected

against improper behaviour. She brackets the feminine, fertility, blood, containment

and sanitisation together.

Q. Mmm. While you were talking, I couldn’t help but think about some of the early

feminist artworks, like Judy Chicago’s Red Flag. Her print of a bloodstained tampon

being removed is so provocative. It certainly was unsettling to ideas about the ‘natural

order’ and ‘proper behaviour’.

A. I thought about those early works too, I have an image of Red Flag somewhere in the

early research files. It certainly creates a sense of abjection. It’s confronting and

fascinating at the same time.

Q. Which is how I understand some folk felt about your exhibitions, if the comments book

I’ve read is anything to go on!

A. I agree. I found the comments book fascinating: there’s all these enthusiastic and

empowered responses, next to a piece of graffiti that would be at home in a toilet, next to

comments on the formal properties of the work.

But getting back to what you were suggesting, it wasn’t just people writing in the

comments book. At an exhibition I had at the start of my research, the publicity officer for

the gallery refused to contact the major media outlets to publicise the works, on the

grounds that they were explicit! Now if they’d been blood stained or I’d been wearing

them, as other artists have done – maybe, but because they were made from sanitary

napkins this person found them too challenging.

And what’s more she had only seen the invitation!

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Q. Mmm. It sounds like what you were saying before about management of improper

behaviour.

A. It was not what I expected. If there was going to be some gatekeeping taking

place I would have thought it would happen right at the start. “Sorry too

provocative” or some such, but the curators I worked with were all supportive of

the work. In fact I was taken aback by the seriousness with which they treated the

works.

Q. Really? Why do you say that?

A. It’s hard to express, but I’ve developed a very ambivalent response to the work. I love

and loathe it. I think it’s beautiful and trashy at the same time.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

Q. Can you pinpoint your reasons for this?

A. On one level it seems to tie in with mixed feelings about working artistically and as a

researcher with subject matter that is seen as specifically feminine, feminist and self-

referential.

Negotiating such territory feels like tiptoeing through a minefield. I’m often at a loss to

explain why I began this research, used these materials, or even why I’ve persisted. The

persistence seems to come down to pragmatism and ageing. Ageing; and women’s

ageing in particular, are experiences which are still sanitised in contemporary western

societies, and cultures where youthful appearances are valued over age. Researchers

such as Emily Martin suggest that menstruating women are used as the norm for

womanhood – as against girls or old women. I think it’s telling that while there are a

number of artists addressing their own ageing, many of them concentrate on either the

surface – the presence or absence of lines, wrinkles or their sexuality.

Q. Is that why you chose to move away from your involvement with figurative work?

A. Partly, although as I said at the start I wanted to try something different. Although I

hesitate to describe menopause in terms of loss or absence, the napkins represent an

acknowledgment of the little intimate rituals of use which stopped when I stopped

menstruating.

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I began to take that a step further considering them as mementos, transforming them into

keepsakes like children’s teeth or baby booties. And then…

Q. That’s when you began to get them silver plated!

A. Yes. Those works were never completed.

They became a real focus for questioning what I value.

I see you want more explicit answers.

To explain it in depth is complex,

bear with me if I seem to be digressing.

I find the linear nature of language a real barrier to saying what I want to say.

It’s like I have all these threads but they’re tangled.

But if I straighten them out I lose some of beauty and complexity that comes out of

entanglement...

When I started the research I was keen to address what I perceived then as the

underpinnings of menopause.

To question the popular perception that the right diet, the right medication and the right

sanitary protection can fix what is promoted as a problem in western-centered societies.

The popular biological model

prevalent in western media is clearly not universal although I didn’t realise that when I

started.

I wasn’t alone in this perception of course; the western-centric experience is still

dominant in popular culture and academic discourse.

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For example, early on I encountered Rosemary McLaren’s published research

Menopause art and the body: Contemporary tales from the daughters of Hysteria. It’s a

very interesting and comprehensive piece of research which was a stumbling block for

me as a young researcher.

She conducted in-depth interviews with a number of Australian women artists,

inquiring about the way they’d addressed their ageing through their art.

Perhaps because of this there was an underlying acceptance by McLaren and the

women she interviewed about the normalcy of the western biological model.

Because I was looking for a way around this research I deliberately went looking for

material on other cultures. I found that there are considerable temporal and cultural

variations which shape social perceptions and individual experiences.

It’s not simply about the physical aspects of menopause,

although I certainly can’t deny the embodied experience.

Q. MMM. I remember that piece you wrote about your body changing…

I certainly agree that menopause is not only related to physical or social aspects there’s

the psychological aspect as well. My reading suggests that midlife and menopause

marks a point when the idea of self which has been accumulated over the years is put

into question - in layman’s terms, the mid-life crisis.

As I understand it the process is referred to by humanist psychologies as individuation.

Midlife focuses individual attention on changes that need to be done to advance this

process.

A. That’s why I find the encounter between Demeter and Baubo so interesting;

it’s a mythic metaphor for that moment when things come into focus, where the future

hangs in the balance.

When you become more conscious of ways in which your idea of yourself has been

formed in the past, and you either have to try harder to keep it together

or let go and see what you can put together in a new way.

I’d already been thinking about this, it was the original approach I’d planned to take, but

then I began to question it.

Q. Was that when you encountered post-structuralist ideas about diverse identities?

A. Yes. This offered me a way of accepting the sense of fragmentation which I

experienced throughout the research, without insisting on trying to resolve it. Having said

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this; I still found myself looking for some way to do just that. It’s a movement against a

lifetime of cultural conditioning.

Q. You mentioned the Baubo/Demeter story before. How does that fit in?

A. It refers to the whole menopausal moment idea I talked about before. Baubo’s

performance of anasyrma sets the moment in motion, and then it’s up to Demeter.

What I imagine happens in that moment is that the space between the two women

expands to allow a whole lot of emotions, ideas, possibilities to come into play.

So while I’m not looking to tell the mythic story, it’s become a metaphor for an extended

moment which encompasses the duration of this research.

It can also be used as an analogy for what happens when an audience encounters an

artwork. This extended moment of research has been an excruciating and exhausting

experience that has caused me to question much of what I previously took for granted

about my practice and purpose.

Q. Not menopause?

A. The two are intertwined.

Referring back to Catriona McKenzie’s ideas, the difficulty seemed to be as much a

result of my limited concepts of research,

as it was in my limited concepts of menopause - or post/menopause as it was by then.

The collapsing of research, arts practice and post/menopause only became viable for me

following my decision to engage in reflexive research.

Q. Why did you decide to do that?

A. Because I couldn’t go on framing menopause through auto-biography. It felt too

personal to talk about my embodiment, to trivial and dishonest to talk about menopause

in light of all the other things going on in the world, and I couldn’t universalize the

experience, because I didn’t want to perpetuate the prevailing western-centric story. So I

decided, eventually, after a lot of rewriting, and I might add after the fact, to look behind

the exhibiting of the artwork, to think about the artistic processes, the way I performed as

artist/researcher and some of the implications and crossovers which resulted from my

teaching.

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Q. Okay. You were going to tell me about the links between sanitary napkins and

menopause…

A. I’m trying to find a way to go forward which doesn’t make my misgivings worse.

Along with the value of works made from such challenging materials, is the value of the

menopause process in shaking up my own and other peoples ideas – especially those

that relate to desirability, sexuality and beauty.

And I really like the idea of working with something that is considered value-less in our

society, changing it so that it has value-of a sort.

It’s a kind of uncertain value –like when you insist wrinkles have beauty, and you’d like to

believe that all the time, but sometimes there’s a doubt lurking inside…

Some time ago I came across a quote from an 18th century French poet Mallarmé,

which sums up my misgivings pretty well:

“The fields are gone and the streets are empty, let me tell you about our furniture”

Then there are times when I’m confronted by some physical change and this fear and

loathing leaps out for an instant, along with a sense of inevitability.

And that’s a very private moment.

When I first realized that I no longer had the same personal smell and taste it was awful,

I felt dirty and estranged and I linked it to all those sexist ideas about how women smell,

as well as all my own experiences of the smells of older women.

I was acutely conscious of the sexism when I wanted to make works about this

experience, about associating womanhood with genitalia, and genitalia with flowers, and

the abject.

Q. I noticed that someone wrote in the comments book about the fish being obvious.

A. I did abandon most of the fish works for this reason, but I exhibited Specimen flower:

Core value a second time, perhaps because it wasn’t an orchid.

I didn’t want the works to be seen as essentialist – it’s the kind of thing that really sticks,

and it is only recently that the importance of play and performance in early feminist works

has been highlighted.

I see some connections between my works and the playfulness of Hannah Wilke.

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She and later feminists began to play with performance, particularly comical performance

and parody to challenge ideas of the feminine.

I really like it when people laugh when they see the work. Women especially see the

humour in it.

Q. Is laughter a typical re-action?

A. I hope so!

But it’s also okay if people have other reactions too. It’s taken me a while to come to

terms with this. At one point I became quite worried about audience response, but its

clear that the works can set all sorts of responses in motion.

It’s funny menopause seemed such a big deal a while ago, but in the stress of living it’s

become far less important. There are times when it feels like it’s all a performance,

something I have to finish to help my career prospects.

I’m at a point in my life when the choices of a lifetime are coming home to roost. My

partner and I are working frantically to provide some future security for our older age. So

in one sense while the idea of ‘mutton done up as lamb’, pales before the parable of ‘the

ants and the cricket’, I feel the need to muster every resource at my disposal. I suspect

that I’m performing menopause in lots of instances, and that as a society we are

spectacularising it.

Q. I’ve certainly seen a lot more mention of it in recent years. There was that musical

they made a while back.

A. Menopause the Musical! I went to another smaller production; a one woman show as

part of my research, and at one point I turned around and looked at the audience, and

was appalled that I was, and might be seen to be, part of the group I saw.

Q. Tell me a bit about the practical side of how you make works…From what I’ve seen

patterns are really important. I’m thinking of the big circular piece, and the black piece

that looks like a bustle.

A. That’s certainly true! There are patterns within patterns within patterns.

One of the things that amazed me when I started collecting different samples were the

variations in pattern that each brand used. When I started putting works together it was a

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period of just total curiosity about what patterns I could make, and exploring the contrast

of sculptured or 3D patterns and 2D ones.

The other thing that’s emerging are patterns of knowledge that go on ‘behind the

scenes’. Not just the making and selecting of the works but also the knowledge you draw

on consciously and unconsciously.

These are the hidden processes and performances of art making, and therefore arts

research - all the bits that go consciously or often unconsciously into the work, the bits

that are overlooked. It feels like that is where the real research is – rather than re-jigging

social or psychological ideas of menopause itself.

Q. I was going to ask about that!

A. I can make a list.

Q. I notice you find lists compelling!

A. They fascinate me! They introduce new order into the

chaos and complexity of ideas, allow me play with patterns and

sequence to group and regroup ideas and test new lines of inquiry.

So:

Practical artistic knowledge:

properties of textiles including texture, grip, sheen, grain, slipperiness, malleability

techniques and issues related to handling and joining specific textiles by particular

methods including pinning, sewing, gluing, stapling

types and styles of pins

availability and range of haberdashery supplies.

Awareness of composition, scale, texture, movement

the interplay between object and space, solidity and shadow.

the display of these properties.

Observational vigilance; informed by and coupled with techniques of artistic bricolage

and assemblage

suppliers, op-shops, recyclers, take-away food suppliers, toy shops, florists, chain stores,

supermarkets, hardware for same.

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Embodied knowledge:

What it feels like to bleed and no longer bleed,

to be looked at with desire and ignored, and to care and not care at the same time.

What different sanitary napkins feel like when they are worn, changed.

What an individual body smells like, secretes, feels like to touch and look at and how this

changes, or not.

Historical and social knowledge which feed the works:

Popular culture, advertising, academic discourse,

diverse cultural understandings and approaches.

art histories, artists and artworks; including still lives, feminist works and contemporary

approaches such as installation,

material and conceptual knowledge of and valuing of objects such as gemstones and

metal, liminal material such as hair, living things such as flowers and herbs and their

uses, lore and symbolism. For example: the Victorian language of flowers.

Awareness of flowers and goods which act as memento mori in 17th century Dutch still

life paintings; and in the hair, jewellery and colour codes of Victorian mourning customs.

Q. That’s quite a list! Can you expand on the last bit?

A. The memento mori? The mourning customs? I’m intrigued by things which are

outwardly spectacular, but also private.

They link into matters of value and the passing of beauty and the death of things, the

transitory nature of life.

The ephemeral, but also paradoxically, things that remain.

And that of course ties back into disposability and the use of ephemeral materials, but

also their deliberate presentation and enrichment.

While I do link it artistically to the use of the found object from the early twentieth century

on, I think in this instance it’s the replication and patterning I’m interested in.

Q. You mentioned paradox and it seems to me that there’s a lot of paradox in your work.

A. Absolutely. There’s all that business of everything being on show, while at the same

time there’s so much else which underpins it. And there’s the process of making

something out of disposable mass produced materials then enriching it with semi-

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precious stones, silver plating, hours of embroidery, as well as fake flowers and plastic

insects.

Which is then exhibited as artwork, and perhaps other people will value it and perhaps

they’ll think its trash – ‘a silk purse made out of a sows ear’ as my grandmother used to

say.

Obviously there are times when I have trouble deciding which, but I keep on making

them anyway.

Q. It reminds me of the idea of value adding…

A. Mmm, I hadn’t quite thought of that.

I suppose I associate the term with production – which of course is what it is, but I’ve

been looking at it from a consumer point of view. Isn’t that interesting…

There’s a book by Daniel Miller where he talks about consumption as work.

He suggests that once we have ownership of a thing – a piece of mass produced

consumer goods we invest in it, work on it, make it our own; put it in context with our

other possessions. And this is what I’m doing in a sense. But it’s also what happens to

our understanding of the self when we’re shaken by events like menopause.

We have to look at our investments – beauty, sexuality and so forth and reevaluate them

again.

Q. So we’re back to value again?

A. Yes.

I’m really questioning what I value at present.

But I find it impossible to just turn away from these works, I feel like I have to use them in

some way or its simply more waste.

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References

1. McKenzie (2005).

2. Rees, (2005).

3. McLaren, (2005).

4. See for example: Avis et al, (2001); Komesaroff, Rothfield & Daly, (1997);

Martin, (1992).

5. See for example: Niemela & Lento, (1993).

6. Greer, (1991); Martin, (1992).

7. Packaged Facts (2006).

8. Douglas, (2002).

9. Chicago, (1971).

10. See for example: Julius (2002); Nelson & Shiff (2004); Meskimmon (1996)

for development of the concepts of abjection and related ideas including

the grotesque, the monstrous and the carnivalesque in art.

11. Mallarme, Poesies cited in Maleuvre (1999).

12. Feldman Fine Arts (1995).

13. See for example: Isaak, (1996).

14. I referenced these ‘fables of post/menopause’ through a series of

embellished incontinence panties made in 2006. These works have not

been shown to date.

15. Menopause the Musical.

16. Miller, (1992)

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Notes in preparation for art as installation 22/12/2009, 04/01/2010 I write this in the coolness of my newly reclaimed study in

the days immediately before Xmas. The gentle voice of Geoffrey Yunipingu coming

through the headphones doesn’t quite soothe my awareness of unswept floors,

pending emails or the urgency of the present deadline. I’ve hesitated for days over

this part of the text, unsure how to craft this chapter.

22/02/2010 I agonise over paragraphing, indents, spacings, referencing, voice.

There are so many threads, so much to gather in.

Eventually I decide that this discussion must not only involve looking back on

and analysing previous work, but will also involve a range of surrounding visual and

written material. This sifting process will, I hope, foreshadow possible ways to

canvas and reconstruct materials for the forthcoming exhibition. I am performing

here as curator, and it has become clear that what I am working with is an archive of

the past five years. 22/12/2009, 04/01/1010, 05/01/2010, 06/01/2010, 08/01/2010, 10/01/2010, 11/01/2010, 13/01/2010,

22/02/2010 What remains unclear at this point and can only be decided in practice, is

where the seams between the modernist aesthetic, characteristic of my art making,

and the ethnographic and educational purposes will emerge, and how I will address

them. I conclude that both must be evident in this exhibition, in order to generate a

space between, through which the research is able to perform.

I do want to go beyond the surface which appears to characterise Rosenthal’s

previously mentioned concepts of Enchantment and Impersonation despite their

opposing emphases. By this I mean, despite strong initial affinities with such

approaches I am not intending to create an overall atmosphere of mystery,

enchantment or abjection, whatever ambience individual works may retain. Nor will I

pretend to comprehensively catalogue the past five years; the exhibition will rest on

verisimilitude, not presumptions of universal truth-telling. While I do intend to explore

various processes surrounding and unpinning the earlier exhibitions which are the

mainstay of this inquiry, in order to express awareness of the constructed nature of

this research outcome, I will also consciously make aesthetic choices.

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Figure 30. Julie Heron. Considering placement of artificial flowers used in previous works, within the space marked out for glass cabinets. (Planning for installation: Performing in the spaces between, Post Office Gallery), 2010. Digital photograph.

I forgo the possibility of using the gallery as an actual performance space to

restage aspects of my practice. What will be presented are re/representations of my

intertwined practices as artist/researcher/teacher-educator and writer. I take this

approach to allow the chaos, complexity and revelations of the last five years, the

ordering of the research structure and process to be evident. The planned use of

studio accoutrements; tools, mundane materials and furniture will anchor the

installation in space, countering my desire to isolate and reify individual works as

encapsulated moments of truth.

What I am planning is consciously artificial, but I hope to limit the drive toward

flawlessness and congruity evident in the previous exhibitions. Recalling the

installation of the 2006 exhibition Revelation and Disguise, I remember the careful

placement, the enshrinement of each textile sculpture within the surrounding space,

the tactful weeding out of the gaudy incontinence panties by the curator: “perhaps

save them for another time?” My deference to the skills of the professional,

acquiescence to the modernist vision of beauty; was a measure of uncertainty

regarding the direction the research was headed as well as my lack of authority.

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Figure 31. Julie Heron. Testing placement of studio table using newspaper. (Planning for installation: Performing in the spaces between, Post Office Gallery), 2010. Digital photograph.

This time the onus is on me. I will

use what is on hand, from the

mass of often poorly archived

records of the last five years. I think

of the artworks, raw materials,

accoutrements of everyday

practice, exhibition and research

documentation relating to and

generated throughout the research

inquiry, scattered across office,

studio, study and storage spaces

and shudder at the task. The words

I write now will document the

thinking processes of the

un/professional performer, perhaps

more articulately than many of the

journals written by my

inexperienced and confused hand.

Where necessary, memories of

events will have to suffice to shape

the forthcoming installation. My

intention to chart the vagaries of the research, to set in motion preconceived

relationships between artistic practice, research and education, to generate

openings for future practice; relies far less on a pre-ordered system than it does on

an intuitive and imaginative approach.

I turn away from my capacity to act as archivist, and back to the constant

desire to unsettle my own and audience expectations, noting that I am no longer

relying on affective audience responses to achieve this, as I did in the earlier,

foundational exhibition. Yet I hold too, to the possibility that affective responses may

still occur, although the matters and the audiences I address in this installation are

no longer predicated on assumed commonalities of gender or age.

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Threaded through the research and present to a greater or lesser degree

throughout has been an awareness of myself as an embodied being. It is impossible

to avoid the way I have alternately embraced and moved away from the issue of

gender in the process of this research. The initial works themselves were both a

celebration and a questioning of the social construction of the feminine. Gender and

age had not been an issue in my previous work, nor I might add were considerations

of whether this was feminist research or not. The need I perceived to position my

work, to write more openly about my research, and the pressure I encountered to

share and discuss my research in various academic contexts often seemed counter-

intuitive and counterproductive. To have my work viewed by audiences which

included senior male academics from other disciplines, no matter how interested or

well-meaning; and later on curious arts education students considerably younger

than I, was something I was psychologically unprepared for, and reacted poorly to. In

the early stages of my work I recall flashes of shame; bodily sensations of self-

exposure, which were equally as unexpected and confronting as any menopausal

flash I experienced. Thinking about this I recall the courageousness and honesty of

artists such as Hannah Wilke (Feldman Fine Arts, 1995), and the auto/ethnographic

research of Carol Ronai (1992), both of whom took routes I was unable ultimately to

follow. The desire for financial security attached to my ageing also clashed with the

provocative, embodied performances I initially envisaged. Instead I have chosen an

option that in some ways feels more exposed, but leaves me feeling less vulnerable.

The exhibition I am planning will take place within the broader ambit of a

gallery space which operates within a university art school, referencing and

intersecting with research and educational functions. This is both in/convenience and

choice. While I am tempted to opt for exhibiting in the corridors of my workplace,

eventually I accept the opportunity to exhibit in a space which is a juncture between

gallery, academy, diary/documentary and museum. Combinations of artwork,

artefact, text and documentation will point toward the constructed nature of this

practice, this exhibition and this research. In doing so, I hope to continue to unsettle

my own and other peoples concepts of practice, exhibiting and research, and self as

artist, researcher, teacher and writer.

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Figure 32. Julie Heron. Exploring text size and position using overhead projector. (Planning for installation: Performing in the spaces between, Post Office Gallery), 2010. Digital photograph.

Skimming the computer mouse through an earlier draft of this exegesis, I

re/encounter Irit Rogoff’s (2008) remarks about her work addressing urgency rather

than emergency, access not accessibility, and finding myself nodding in agreement.

Like Rogoff I feel no desire to make a point about the institution, just as I have

moved beyond the need to make a point about the institutionalising and marketing of

menopause. The exhibition will however, reference a culture of use which is in

keeping with Rogoff’s idea of ‘weak education’ (2008, para. 26). In order to achieve

complexity the works will be a métissage of text and art, diary and documentary,

made and unmade.

This entry has taken an hour to

write and I notice how readily I slip into

the form of academic writing. I wonder

how much of this formal prose I can

and should include in the exhibition?

There will need to be some, the voice

of the researcher too must be evident,

I’m not trying to set up a division

between public and private.

I wonder too how I can do this

without overloading the space with

text (Fig 32). If I incorporate sound will

it be too much like the omniscient

voice? I want to avoid this.

There are other people’s

voices, other co-productions, I’d also

like to acknowledge, but wonder if this

will be ethical. As artist I can do things

that as artist/researcher I find myself

hesitant to do. I look again at the comments book from an earlier exhibition for the

first time in a while, pore over the 102 handwritten entries in the comments book I

employed at the exhibition Revelation and Disguise.

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The faint prickle of the plush velvet cover rasps my fingertips as I note cross

conversations and expressions of outrage and delight and plan to use as part of the

forthcoming show. I have reread these entries a number of times, but writing this

discussion I see afresh how ready I was to stereotype both my work and my

audience.

Reminded of how I struggle with such assumptions in my teaching, I pause

over an entry, challenged and delighted by what I read:

Seeing this exhibition with my seventeen month old daughter in the pusher. I can only hope she has the freedom and strength to express her femininity as you have done here. CT and ET The generosity of the writers’ words rubs against my own begrudging and

narrow attitude of that time.

02/01/2010, 04/01/2010, 06/01/2010, 6/03/2010 This comments book, and one other with

only a single entry, is only a part of a surprising amount of matter I find to draw on. I

have an accumulation of material relating to two solo exhibitions; various joint

exhibitions and three academic presentations, including confirmation of candidature,

in which I participated.

As well as existing works, there are journal entries, photographs, Powerpoint

presentations containing digital montages, poetry and prose, exhibition ephemera

and raw materials and tax receipts. The latter, surprisingly, offers rich insights into

expenditure and embodiment. They give depth to my emotive awareness of my

consumption, rather than referencing the practices I engage in as producer, showing

priorities, changing engagements in art making, study and teaching. They also show

patterns of geo-physical movement as I garner and gather materials and ideas,

crisscrossing the city centre in my quest for the perfect find. The years mark my

changing preference for buying new goods, rather than relying on chance finds in

op-shops. The op-shops do clearly continue to supplement material bought in

supermarkets, hardware chains, speciality sewing centres, camping stores,

haberdasheries and bookshops. The books which nourished my creative spirit

remain a major expenditure throughout.

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Figure 33. Unpublished journal entry: flower, 2006.

22/12/2009, 23/12/2009, 29/12/2009, 01/01/2010, 02/01/2010, 03/01/2010, 04/01/2010, 22/02/21010

Looking back through a dozen or so journals for sketches and notes, I see with some

bemusement that I have considered taking the plunge into installation art at various

points along the way. The books yield page after page of discarded and forgotten

ideas and evocative titles (Fig. 33). As I note how they act as markers of thought,

documenting shifts and connections, I reflect on how few of these journal works have

been realised.

Were the ideas flawed from the outset?

Under the pressure of art as research, did the

journaling take the place of experimental and

creative doing?

Did manifesting ideas on a page satisfy the need

on some level at least, to create, without actually

engaging in material practice?

Did I revert to a state in which I was afraid of

making mistakes, of running out of time, so I

materialised nothing, while imagining so much?

What does distinguish the ‘made’ from the

‘unmade’?

Does committing an idea to a journal signal its

lack of vitality and plausibility, rather than the other way around?

Each of these questions seem on some level at least, to be truthful, yet none

of them can lay claim to being the truth. I clearly remember trying to pre-empt the

direction of the works instead of trusting in the process. This was in part at least,

brought about from my need to bring my arts and education practice closer. I

considered making works in the School of Education; going so far as to apply for

permission from the university management.

05/01/2010 There are only minimal journal entries which relate to the design and

making of the works which dominate the previous research exhibitions (although

there are some tentative exhibition layouts). A search through image files also

reveals few process images for those first months of the inquiry. These works were

103

completed during moments of deep immersion, through practical hands on inquiry.

The magic, as Bolt (2007) suggests, is in handling.

Pondering darkly the implications of this for the twelve week course which

provides the bulk of arts education offered to the primary pre-service teachers I work

with, I resolve to try yet again to find ways to boost the practical component, while

honouring the need to encourage a broader vision of what the arts can be.

I wonder briefly why I thought it more effective to write rather than

photograph, as I line up photographs of the large circular work No/w/here on the

computer. No/w/here is a key component of this research (Figs. 4-17). Making and

exhibiting this work through several iterations has involved numerous decisions

relating to size, height, lighting and siting in relation to other works, even the choice

and placement of pins.

11/01/2010, 13/01/2010, 5/03/2010 Thinking about the gallery in which the work will

be installed I have a sense that I’ve come full circle, the first photographs of the

sanitary works were taken here in early 2005 (Fig. 6). In the coming week I will use

the same space as a de-facto studio for a few days; trialling layouts, (Fig. 30-32, 34,

35, 38, 39) looking at the lighting and most likely re/making work as well. In the

absence of a functioning studio space I will have to make do, just as I do in the

standardised classrooms in which I practice my arts teaching. After all, remaking

No/w/here took place in the clean, well lit and spacious environs of the science lab,

and in the corridors of the School of Education (Fig. 15).

The works have been stored away in rooms which are only nominally studio

spaces, since my partner and I moved to our new home three years ago. I have no

idea what I will find when I unwrap them again. While the ephemerality of the art is at

odds with the extended duration of part-time research, I trust that their swaddling has

kept them safe over this time.

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Figure 34. Julie Heron. Laying out stored items on the gallery floor. (Planning for installation: Performing in the spaces between, Post Office Gallery), 2010. Digital photograph.

30/12/2009, 05/01/2010, 06/01/2010, 11/02/2010 I look forward to working in a studio

situation again. The last time I ‘engaged’ in hands on research art work was in the

period immediately prior to my confirmation when I remade No/w/here in order to

document the process. Engagement is a redundant word to describe this task,

undertaken pragmatically. Looking at the photographs of my interminable pinning I

see this lack of engagement, and the sense of performing for the camera in my face.

At that point I had shifted toward

conceptualising my work as

performance, and the video

footage was an experiment in

documentation of the making

process, as much as art.

Reviewing the audio-visual

material I became intrigued by the

awkward rhythms of pinning. The

footage is raw, but to polish it

would be to go against its

experimental and performative

spirit.

Strangely, the journals

inform me that I have dallied with

the idea of performance from the

start of this inquiry; the mythic

vignette which heads this exegesis

further confirms this. My first piece

of writing for this inquiry addressed

performative interaction with the retelling of the myth which now frames the

research. Once again, as in the matter of installation, it seems that I had to have the

experience before I could gain a sense of it. Both, it seems, are necessary.

105

Figure 35. Julie Heron. Studio, Arts Academy during the development of Unfinished Project, 2006. Digital photograph.

11/01/2010, 13/01/2010,

5/03/2010 The airless heat of

the present summers’ day

reminds me of hours

kneeling on the boards of

the light airy studio space at

the arts faculty as I

prepared for the 2006

exhibition at the nearby Art

Gallery of Ballarat (Figs.

10a, 10b; 32).

Is it worth mentioning

the tiny pieces of grey ash

from nearby bushfires which

fell almost imperceptibly

onto the near completed

work? To recall how my

hands and face turned bright red in the stuffiness of studio with its windows now

securely fastened? How my hands and arms ached as I re-cleaned the studio and

replaced the pads festooned with tiny sooty marks, listening all the while to local

radio and wondering what was happening on the fire lines where my partner was

stationed?

These are aspects of research practice which leave no trace in the finished

works; their continued absence contributes to the mystique of the work and of

practice which produces it. My thoughts jump to the undergraduates with whom I

work. Their understanding of the work that artists do is often limited. It is so difficult

to cultivate their appreciation of the need to encourage creative persistence in their

future classrooms. I recall a moment which affirmed my intention to turn back on and

highlight my research practice as well as the outcome in some form:

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Journal entry Work/Play dichotomy 1/06/07

It was a bitter day outside so I allowed yesterday’s group to look at an excerpt of an Andy Goldsworthy video (Two Autumns), instead.1 Ironically, in the video Goldsworthy was up before dawn building a stone cairn and collecting stones from an icy stream. When I asked the students to comment afterwards; I was struck by a reply that Goldsworthy was ‘just playing’ while the farmers all around were working. This contrasted strongly with what I observed as I watched the film, but also with what I experience as artist, and now as artist researcher.

Yet the perception of art as ‘just playing’ is so close to the surface. At times

during the present inquiry I have battled against the feeling that my own work was

lightweight compared to ‘real research’.

11/01/2010, 13/01/2010, 5/03/2010 My occupation of the arts faculty studio was

truncated when the pressures of teaching kept me away for months at a time. It had

taken the place of another studio, the one in which I made the original works. My first

studio in Bullarook, is gone, its pink Canite walls crushed beneath a bulldozer. I

doubt if my research would have developed in the way it did, if not for the yielding

walls of that studio. Looking closely at the photographs of work in progress I see how

the walls are peppered with the traces of pins. It exists now only in my memory and

as an amorphous background to any photographs I use in the forthcoming exhibition.

29/12/2009, 05/03/2010 Leaning against the shower recess, under the hot stream of

a mid-afternoon shower I think again about walls. Not only the lost walls of studios

past, nor indeed the masonry walls of the gallery, which pose a challenge to my

need to pin; but also my sense of being walled in by words. Words for ageing, words

as academic markers, words of artistic hyperbole... There was a point in this

research where I felt the enormous weight of language, the need to weigh my

language word by word. Words felt shifty then, now they shift more readily from

language to creative material, as I refine patterns of text conceptually. I recall that

previous attempts to incorporate text into artwork always felt artificial and forced.

Making and incorporating text into artwork now seems a logical and surprisingly

exciting manifestation of this research, developed I suspect, as I struggled to craft

the writing in new ways.

1 See Arts Council of Great Britain (1992)

107

I hunt through the messy study for my copy of Graeme Sullivan’s book2

remembering, and looking for, his discussion on “thinking in a language” (2005, p.

126). There seems little question that I am drawn, as he suggests, to text, metaphor,

linguistic processes and an awareness of the viewer or audience. There is always in

my work a strong interrelationship between individual experience and socio-cultural

frameworks. Yet it is the parameters of this framework against which I have

continued to press. Gender, age, education and economic status are in tension with

the positions of artist, researcher and teacher-educator. A repudiation of my own

confining, self-definitions has shaped this research, forcing it away from the well-

traced path from which it started.

23/12/2009, 29/12/2009, 01/01/2010, 05/03/2010 As I flip through the journals yet again, I

note list after list. These lists, fragments of the written word, have emerged both in

this text and my planning for the exhibition, as a means of working creatively when I

could not work in my usual ways. My desire to categorise and play with words is a

strong force in my life and one which has emerged in various ways throughout this

inquiry. I realise with some surprise, how much this desire to categorise is present in

my planning for this installation. Grappling with these ideas my freshly poured coffee

cools as I imagine the installation gaining strength from a movement away from the

composite approach characteristic of the initial textile sculptures. I want to emphasis

the component parts, to show their intrigue and my obsessions, the costs and the

benefits together, like the baby and the shit.3

6/03/2010 Returning to this entry some weeks later moves me to search further

for photographs of incomplete works, looking for and finding images of engraved

plastic magnifying glasses, silver plated sanitary napkins, incontinence panties

embellished with ribbons, plastic insects, fish and wax (Figs. 36, 38, 39).

2 I think again briefly of my intention to include tax receipts in this exhibition in some form. Sullivan’s book is one of many I have bought since starting this research, tellingly I now spend more on written material than on art materials. 3 See quote by Lara Merlin; front matter p. xx.

108

I intend to incorporate a number of the incomplete works in the installation;

have earmarked glass cabinets to do so. Pausing before a photograph of a work in

progress, arrayed on a rough cardboard form (Fig. 36), I think back to the material

difficulties which attended their making: I wrestle the shirred panty over the rough cardboard frame I’ve made. This frame holds the garment under some tension, but allows me to get my hand underneath the fabric. I also have to be able to pull the work on and off the form, checking the tension, so pinning it securely to a frame is out of the question, and there is too much pull in the elastic to simply pin it to the wall. Working with the fish I have bought is easier than the embroidery, and far simpler to work with than the waxed garment. By the end of the afternoon my hands ache with the effort of small careful movements. These small iridescent fish, by far the most beautiful of all the samples I have brought from the fishing shop, draw the eye away from the wicked barb, which remains as I work, sheathed in protective plastic. I’ve spoiled too many pads with blood as I’ve pinned works together, a careless slip on a larger work like this could see days of work wasted.

2006/2010 reconstructed journal entry

Figure 36. Julie Heron. Work in progress, showing cardboard form, incontinence panty, thread, plastic bait fish with hooks, 2006. Digital photograph.

109

Figures 37a & 37b. Julie Heron. Trialling elliptical shapes as a potential means of hanging incontinence panties on masonry walls. (Planning for installation: Performing in the spaces between, Post Office Gallery), 2010. Digital photograph.

09/03/2010 I’ve finally downloaded the pictures I took at the Post Office Gallery

as I planned aspects of the installation in January. Finding ways to exhibit works

such as the incontinence panties proved challenging. During the trial period, I tested

a range of options including the making of elliptical shapes which could be hung on

the narrow masonry walls between the arched windows (Figs 37 a, 37b). Eventually

I tested polystyrene shapes, painted the same colour as the gallery walls. The costs

of working with this material are prohibitive, and while I find the elliptical shape

appropriate, I may yet end up with shapes similar to the cardboard form I started

with.

Turning to the other photographs I consider ways in which the etched

magnifying glasses and silver plated napkins might also be displayed; wondering

how often other artists pre-make expensive components they never put to use. The

sheer cost of what I was doing was a factor in my decision to stop making the silver

plated sanitary liners.

110

Digging deeper, I remember my frustration over the finish of the plated works.

The artisan employed to do the work found it difficult to get the silver plating to the

thickness I desired (Fig. 38). I wanted the embossed patterns to be evident, but if the

plate was too thin it did not properly cover the fabric. I recall how difficult it was

experiencing loss of artistic control, and my sense that this was not a creative co-

performance, but one where two purposes, two practices, were at odds. This was

not the case with the magnifying glasses, perhaps because the work was done

before my eyes (Fig. 39). These components never attained the status of a

completed work, but now I reconsider hanging them from the ceiling perhaps with

light projected through them to allow the text to flit across the walls. I resolve to test

this.

I feel I am gradually coming to grips with the underlying dynamic I need to

address; the tension between im/material components, the space they occupy, the

fragmented and interwoven relationships I hope to invoke. The space which springs

to mind is the end room of the gallery, which I am considering curtaining off so it can

only be viewed from the street. I think about filling this shop front space with an

iteration of No/w/here above a pool of flowers. I like the metaphoric fit of including a

new component which magnifies, disrupts and complicates the purity of the original

works, but there is no way I can test the material parameters of this right now. I defer

the decision until later.

05/01/2010 Turning again to the journals I distinguish between sketches which

are conceptual attempts to expand the sanitary works further, those which attempt to

contextualise the sanitary works as a phase, and others which were developed after

the exhibitions in an attempt to reposition the research as a whole. The sanitary

works include floral themes which speak to my awareness of and sporadic

identification with, normalised femininity; those which address ideas of fashion and

the fashioning of the feminine and those with medical themes. One page yields a

rapid sketch of an idea for sanitary cloaks to be worn as an artistic performance

directed toward the education students. This conceptual attempt to amalgamate my

research, art and teaching emerged literally from a dream, and vanished from

consciousness as readily becoming lost to the demands of my busy teaching life.

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Figure 39. Julie Heron. Plastic magnifying glass engraved with the word bristle, 2006. Digital photograph.

Figure 38. Julie Heron. Unshown works, silver-plated sanitary napkins, 2006. Digital photograph.

30/12/2009 As the stack of reviewed journals accumulates on the patterned rug

beside my swivel chair, the sheer volume of written material is made evident. This is

not typical of my previous working approach, and I wonder what self imposed

strictures, what concepts of ‘real’ research compelled me to fill up page after page of

text. The content is variable, some pages sparsely filled, others dense with writing.

At one point I am confronted with an outcry of fear and loathing scored deeply

across a page. I recall sitting on the floor of my former studio sobbing as another day

has disappeared with nothing to show. These are things that academic research and

the gallery habitually tidy away. I think again of the close up shots of my hands taken

as I remade No/w/here, and the suggestiveness of the bitten nails. Perhaps I think,

picking at those same nails, I can incorporate these images of body fragments, not

only for what they are doing, but also what they say about the embodied researcher

and the processes of research. Auto-ethnography is often perceived as narcissism,

but I am now convinced that it is not the emotional outpouring that’s important, it is

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Figure 40. Julie Heron. Rear view, Unfinished Project in situ, Revelation & Disguise exhibition, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery: Ballarat, 2006, Sanitary pads, pins, artificial flowers, wire basket, coir matting, terracotta stand, pearl. Dimensions variable.

the exposure of the underpinning. The evocative language is a tool which sets ideas

in motion. I have repeatedly battled my fear of seeming self aggrandising, as well as

my desire to tidy away the seams of this research.

This train of thought takes me to another place:

An interesting thing happened today. I had just about finished setting up the works in the gallery when the deputy director came down to look at the work. She asked me about Unfinished Project, pointing to the section I had deliberately left incomplete. Did I want to turn the work she asked, or place it in a corner so the back wasn’t visible? I explained that my placement was deliberate, offered the name of the work, stating that I wanted to make a point about incompleteness. She accepted this. But I am left with a strange mixed feeling of gratification and embarrassment.

2006/2010 reconstructed journal entry

02/01/2010 Looking at the

photograph of this work (Fig. 40) I

appreciate yet again why the question

was asked. It is the only piece which did

not appear to conform to a consistent

standard. The work was conceived as a

visual metaphor for un/certainty; of hope

and loss in tandem, yet it also

represents a small step along the way to

defining my concept of an

un/professional performance.

04/01/2010, 06/01/2010 Reviewing a

slideshow presentation made for an

academic audience I note the

juxtaposition of text and images (Fig.

37). The slideshows themselves,

document an emotional distancing as I

respond again to my original work; the emergence of a curatorial eye, cataloguing,

rearranging, juxtaposing, re/iterating. At the time of their making the slides were

small opportunities to work creatively in a non-gallery context; they drew on my

visual arts training as readily as any artwork. They also, I realise, re/iterate original

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Figure 41. Julie Heron. Slide from UB Conference powerpoint presentation, Performing … in the spaces between, 2007. Screen capture.

works, addressing new audiences through their aesthetic as well as intellectual

properties. And, as aesthetic objects they also have a role to play in producing

relations between people and the world, as Bourriaud suggests.

04/01/2010, 06/01/2010 I re/discover another document which lays out ideas which

threaded through or were pinned to the early works; noting complexities I had

forgotten (Fig. 42). This table demonstrates both the underlying wealth of ideas but

also the way in which these threads have been reworked into various structures with

a view to imposing an overarching narrative. Chewing on the remnants of a fingernail

I am reminded yet again of how easy it is to smooth away counter-narratives, and

why I want to persist in making them visible in this exhibition. The question now

becomes, in what form shall I include them in the installation?

I add this to the list.

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Figure 42. List of relevant concepts Revelation and disguise Fabrications Constructions, that which is made – to a pattern? Inventions Performances Truths Flawlessness Menopause a social construction Feminine a social construction

Manners Politeness Hiding that which might offend Discrete Secretive False Disguise Deliberate deception – tromp l’oeil

Protections Ordering Making safe that which is fragile Delicate Swaddling Smothering Dictates Whose interests are protected?

Secret Kept private Not to be made known or exposed to view Hidden

Revelations Baubo Looking The Gaze A baroque sensibility Putting on display Anasyrma Making public Indiscrete Making a spectacle (of ones self) Visual and spectacular emphasis – typical of Dutch still lives. (use of magnifying sheets) Countered by tactile and olfactory Menopause as abjection? Acceptance

Sanitary Sanitise Make “nice” Cover up, gloss over what is shameful

Napkins Mopping up mess Making fresh Clean Dry

Sanitary Protection Napkins Incontinence pads

Secrete Put object etc into place of concealment Produce by secretion from gland or organ

Disgust Shame Inappropriateness Judgement (mutton done up as lamb) Loss/desire for what is lost Unbecoming

F - words Flush Fluster Flutter Flatter Flash Fan Fabricate Fritter Frenzy Fear/less

Secretion - Act of concealing - Process by which substances are separated from gland or organ through excretion etc. Substance produced by such a process eg blood, urine, saliva etc

Becoming Process of becoming Changing not changed Changing and changed? Liminal space Space between Third space Anasyrma creates opening - always/already?

Unsanitary Dryness Continence Temperate, chaste Having normal control over ones excretions etc Without moisture parched, dried up Meager, plain, uninteresting, dull, unprofitable

Excretion Separated and expelled waste matter Incontinence Unable to control excretions voluntary

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Materiality Materialising Bringing into view Matter – stuff Matter – be of importance Be present when expected –embodying. This is about the body, not about psychological changes so much

Preserving Maintaining “Keeping up appearances” Status quo Renewing Fetishising

Transfiguring Process Changing of matter (esp embodied matter) De-materialising Fading from view Invisibility Disembodiment Unmaking,Deconstructing De - familiarising Making uncanny – fading, silvering, magnifying, shadowing

Decaying Deteriorating Declining Withering Decreasing in price/lose quality Becoming rotten Memento Mori Role of insects in this

Material: the stuff from which things are made, having an emphasis on that which is made, the physical world commodity

Accretions: things that accumulate – over a lifetime Personal lore. Herbs, gems, embroidery, knowledge of medieval, 17th c Dutch, Victorian mourning customs, fashion, textiles. (Pearls)

Personal lore of the body Everything I thought I knew since adulthood, about my body, is changing. Trickle in the night blood scent copper taste (Venus)

Fabrications: Constructions, that which is made – to a pattern? Inventions of the truth Performativity Artiface Device, contrivance. Embellishments, adding of value? (of the truth) Cunning, skill, practiced

Fashionings: the way things are made Fashion - the mode, to make Re-fashionings: the way things are re-made Manipulations

Reconfiguring Making into a new mode of arrangement (Artificial flowers Remaking sanitary napkins, incontinence pads etc)

Disfiguring away from the norm Monstrous Grotesque Dissolving Flaws

Patterns: Excellent or ideal example Regular configurations, orderings, listings Design –embellishments Decorate with pattern

Fastenings: Things that hold things together Create order

Demi-fastenings Pins, thread etc Precariousness Temporariness

Loosenings Baubo Freeing Spreading, Slack Relaxed from discipline Indiscrete Indefinite Vague, Shadowy Chaotic?

Embroidery: Embellished pattern Embellish -beautify, adorn, heighten (Bella –beautiful) Inessential ornament - Bibelot

Enriching: Make rich Add to contents of collection Make richer in quality Luxury Gains, but what cost? Adding of value

Encrusting: Things that grow (on the surface) Patina (esteemed as ornament, gloss produced by age on woodwork) Adding of value? Pearls - Venus goddess of love, beauty, fertility

Crusty Crustlike, hard Having a coating or deposit on the surface Bristly, stiff short hair. Show temper, prepare for fight

Commodity that which is valued sufficiently to be part of trade Value/values

What is a commodity? How do we commodify something? How do we decide what is valuable?

Naming/Branding Carefree, Libra, U, Poise, Freedom, Pureste, Kotex, Modess, Stayfree, de joir

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Flowerings Flowers (Cut) Cosage Arrangement Bouquet Sheaf Posy Spray Wreath Swag

Roots Underground Hidden

Specimens Things of value Accumulating Putting on display Display –corsage Arrangement Still life paintings (Dutch)

Collections Things that have been collected Things of value to collector Accumulating Ordering, cataloguing Listing Putting on display

Preservation/ Decay Dried flowers Desiccated flowers Withered flowers Role of insects in this? “See the flowers” (old term to menstruate)

Bloom (in bloom) Especially of plant grown or admired chiefly for flowers Blooms are cultivated, cut, deflowered. Grown for purpose Ordered Flourish as in grow such as anger, jealousy, sadness, blossoming in ones chest/heart

Rhizome Prostrate or subterranean rootlike stem emitting both roots and shoots Rhizomes emerge in unexpected places Weed

Flush glow delicate powdery deposit on grapes, plums etc freshness Fullness

Display Floral show Implies ordering

Florescense (in bloom)

- prime - perfection

Bear flowers, be in flower, come into flower, be in flower, full beauty, culminate, flourish

Blossom: Flower, especially as promising fruit Mass of flowers on fruit tree etc, early stage of growth, promise

Flower of womanhood Femininity Yoni

Anthology (anthos) flower (logia) knowledge (fr. Lego gather)

Take the bloom off –make stale Clean out Send down toilet/drain Hot flush Gone to seed (but can’t bear new life)

Ineffective, unkempt

Seediness Scratchy, Dry

Artificial flowers mimesis Language of flowers (Victorian) Dutch Memento Mori

Which ones? loss, grief, joy, fate, mourning, hope, curiosity, new beginnings, honesty, trust, anger, waste, resignation, freedom, transitory nature of existence, forever, decay

Herbal lore - as applied to menopause

chamomile, ginseng, red clover, passionflower, valerian, arthritis herb, wild yam

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Concluding remarks and future directions

I began this exegesis with a retelling of the mythic encounter between

Baubo and Demeter; an encounter which provides a metaphor through which to

approach the present research inquiry as a whole. This mythic encounter focuses

on the interaction which occurs when the elderly nurse Baubo raises her skirts in

the performative gesture of anasyrma. This unexpected gesture gains the

attention of the goddess Demeter who is locked in mourning over the loss of her

youth/ful daughter. The encounter, acting as a metaphor for menopause and

midlife, emerged as a powerful visualisation of my own failure to move beyond an

obsession with ageing. Like Demeter, I remained locked in mourning, expressing

this in various ways through my arts practice, but unable to reach a resolution

psychologically or artistically. Taken by the story of the momentary interaction

between these mythic entities, I identified Baubo’s performative gesture as one

which expands time through focussing Demeter’s attention on the detail of what

is literally before her. The vignette resonated with my desire to unsettle a

practice which had become stagnant; through turning back to that practice.

In the mythic story, a fundamental shift was signalled through the outburst

of laughter with which the goddess greeted Baubo’s spontaneous gesture.

Demeter’s laughter signals the beginning of a movement away from stasis to

purposeful re/engagement, through acknowledgement of the absurdity, and

uncertainty of life. Over the last few weeks, laughter has come more easily to me

than it has for some time, and writing these words I can say with conviction that

this inquiry has allowed me to review my existing arts practice, to identify ossified

approaches and perceptions. I have also been able to reform, re-articulate and

reposition the existing work.

Turning back reflexively to the textile based works generated in the initial

stages of the present research provided a focus which echoes Baubo’s

anasyrma. This intuitive movement to look more intently into practice, disrupted

the further playing out of work already started, while re/activating and highlighting

the underpinnings of my creative practice. As a consequence I have become

aware of taken for granted material and embodied underpinnings, along with the

functional importance of an emotional connection as a starting point for my

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practice. The process of questioning previously held assumptions regarding the

interplay of audience, works of art and my own performances, highlighted gaps,

connections and co-performances which were by no means clear at the start of

this research. It has enabled me to consider the value of what I do as artist, as

researcher, writer and teacher-educator.

Engaging in this inquiry has unexpectedly fostered awareness and re-

engagement with my body, not as an object of arts research as so often in the

past, but as an active and living component of everyday practice. Where

previously I studied my form extensively, representing character, performances,

body parts and embodied experiences, undertaking this research has drawn my

attention to the way I use my body as artist/researcher/writer and teacher-

educator. Prolonged periods of pinning, writing, lecturing and peering into a

computer screen have drawn attention to the way practices, as much as my

biology, shape embodiment. This renewed physical awareness feeds a

re/appreciation of the materiality of my arts practice.

As artist I have been able to explore a range of new techniques and

approaches; have shown my work publicly on four occasions. All but one of these

exhibitions has been a solo endeavour, and these were and are milestones in an

artistic practice which was only just emerging professionally when I commenced

this inquiry. I have made a substantial body of sculptural works; have written and

engaged in creative performances before a range of audiences at galleries,

conferences, presentations and informal gatherings. In my final exhibition I

represented the research work as installation.

The installation emerged hesitantly, through reflection and material

iteration. As such, it is the outcome of a rhizomatic research process, rather than

a planned destination. It featured a métissage of complete, incomplete and un-

materialised works. It also included texts, materials and furnishings which talked

back to my practices as artist/researcher/writer and teacher-educator.

References to museology combined with autobiographic and auto/ethnographic

material reflected on my practice from positions of both intimacy and distance.

Much of this exhibition was archival in nature; a venture not simply into

representation, but re/representation. As such it moved between production and

consumption.

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Prior to the present inquiry, I envisaged my role purely as producer, artistic

consumption being of little consequence. Undertaking this research has changed

this premise. This represents a change in perception which was not anticipated

at the start of the inquiry, when still working from within a humanist framework.

Identifying with a humanist framework, I had initially conceptualised my research

as a rite of passage, a form of a transition from pre-menopausal to

postmenopausal and from novice to professional artist/researcher. However

taking up a post-structuralist framework I have been able to let go of the need to

identify or indeed to not identify myself as post/menopausal woman, and as

professional artist/researcher. Rather I have come to regard identity as

performed and performative.

As an outcome of this shift in position, the deliberately ambiguous epithet

‘the un/professional performer’ has emerged as a self-referential term, a

reference point not defined by gender, race, age or other familiar parameters.

Nor is it shaped by expectations within a discipline, but rather denotes a more

fluid performative position, through which I may question, converse and perform

acts of métissage in the spaces between these socially and academically defined

parameters. As a framing concept, the un/professional performer has emerged

from extended periods of writing where I sought to re/represent my practice, and

the artistic outcomes of the initial phase of the research, through creative,

performative text.

Performative text is but one way I found to test the boundaries between

artworks and text. This testing is also evident in the materialisation of this

exegesis and in the use of text within the installation. Therefore, although I have

long employed writing as a tool for communication, this inquiry has allowed me to

explore ways to work with text as artistic and research material. In doing so I

have been able to highlight and work with documentation of processes which are

often confined to appendices and backup folios.

While I initially regarded the writing and artwork as separate and other,

the demands of research and a new teaching appointment impacting on my

capacity to make art in the more usual form, have moved the two closer.

Therefore while writing reflexively in the discussion section and the preface of

this exegesis serves to identify shifts in thinking which result from the overall

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inquiry process, it also reconnects imaginative aspects of my arts practice.

Despite this my easy identification with the position of artist is gone, and this

writing marks an opening into a changing practice as much as the closure of a

research inquiry.

When I began reflecting on my arts practice, I was not aware of the

degree to which the research process itself would shape what I was doing.

Although this exegesis has taken me to places I could not have foreseen in the

beginning, it has also taken far longer to write than anticipated. A full-time

teaching load, coupled with part time study and the shifting, iterative nature of

this inquiry has attenuated and shaped the research process. Immersed in

rhizomatic thought, I have found the need to re-evaluate the importance of

parameters, sequences, and framing devices in order to communicate more

effectively, and to bring this inquiry to its end. The sense of a larger academic

research community looking over my shoulder has at times seemed palpable.

Aware of this, I have struggled with an intermittent compulsion to predict and

control outcomes, and pre-empt processes. In light of this experience, I consider

that the impact of arts/research on artistic practice is clearly open to question.

While this matter is evident in the literature related to arts research, it remains an

area for useful future research inquiry.

Further, although the performance of creative writing in a research context

is increasingly commonplace in higher degree research, it is still rigorously

resisted in some quarters. Although I have, at times, been acutely conscious of

fulfilling my desire to work against the grain, of allowing the seams to show; over

time I have also accepted the need for some structure and frameworks for the

reader and some measure of caution for my self. As teacher/researcher I have

also come to see that what seems ordinary and everyday to some may be

outrageous and unscholarly to others. In pursuing auto/ethnographic research

further these are matters with which I will continue to deal.

The degree to which the changes I have discussed so far are the result of

the research process as a whole; and how much they rely on challenges and

opportunities within the daily educational round, is impossible to tell. While this

consideration hampered my research development at one point, its significance

to my thinking is now minimal. A more salient question for the future will rather be

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the extent to which my art practice feeds my future research. While I will

undoubtedly continue to grapple with deeply personal issues through art in some

form, this is unlikely to be framed as arts/research. The function of my arts

practice as a pleasure and release is too readily subverted by the rigours and

requirements of research.

However I do now feel able to work authentically and honestly in a more

detached matter, thus opening up the potential for collaborative arts and arts

education practices and research. Concepts of co-performance which have

developed in the course of this inquiry, along with intermittent collaborative

educational opportunities, have brought the future likelihood of joint research into

view. My stated aim to find research communities to which I could contribute

formed the beginnings of a movement toward deeper collaboration with others in

the future. While commonplace in research practice, I have now come to regard

my attendance and participation at conferences during this inquiry as a small

step towards what has become, in the course of this research, a clear desire,

rather than simply an institutional expectation.

Acknowledging that it is impossible to gauge the extent to which the

presentation of this inquiry in a public arena touches others, I have eschewed

attempts to do so beyond my usual arts practice of maintaining a comments

book. Despite this, on a number of occasions I have encountered anecdotal

evidence that my work has allowed audiences to find new perspectives and

possibilities. Encountering Rogoff’s concept of weak education has allowed me to

reconceptualise such outcomes as educational, with a small e.

The latter is one of a number of ways in which my arts and education

practices have shaped each other. The perception of my teaching practice as a

dynamic ongoing project which forgoes the apparent certainties of knowing, for a

position of not/knowing, has been a direct result of this inquiry. At this point in

time therefore, my educational and arts practices like my writing have been

drawn considerably closer and now have much to say to each other. I smile,

recalling the certainty I had at one point that they were so very different and

almost mutually exclusive. This shift in position is a feasible measure of how

much my position has altered. The tolerance of uncertainty which imbued my arts

practice before I became stuck on an inability to by-pass menopause, has

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returned, and found a place in my educational practice. I have re-learned the

ability to trust the process.

What has not clear at this point are ways in which auto/ethnographic

practices as artist/educator and writer will meet in future research. What seems

likely at this point in time is that such research will attend to my classroom

practices. The awareness gained in the present research provides the necessary

grounding for this.

Loosening ties of identification with the position of artist has also enabled

me to see the value in working in an interdisciplinary fashion with fresh eyes.

While my arts practice has always incorporated interdisciplinary threads in the

making of work, I now have a stronger sense of how it is possible and why it is

important to engage in overt acts of interdisciplinary practice at this point in time

and in these circumstances. There is a clear shift in position from one where

disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary differences and the everyday privacies of

studio practice occluded new ways of working, to one where diversity and

seeking ways of rapprochement are also validated. The concept of

rapprochement enables me to reaffirm the position that my actions can bring

about change, albeit in small ways. Through an appreciation of rapprochement, I

have found research directions which will continue to challenge and develop my

understanding and connection with arts and educational practice, while

remaining relevant to broader social issues of the twenty-first century. These are

outcomes not only matter to me, but matter, I conclude, for others who are also

grappling with what it means to work as artist/researcher, and indeed

artist/researcher/teacher in the shifting environments of the twenty-first century.

The inquiry processes manifested both within the pages of this exegesis and via

exhibition are familiar to many, but are not always apparent in the polished

exchanges which occur within gallery and conference halls. Revealing creative

practice as imbued with ongoing, complex, iterative, embodied and everyday

interaction contributes to a broader picture of ways individuals negotiate, make

meaning and relate to the demands of changing situations and experiences.

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Appendix One Performing in the Spaces Between

Post Office Gallery, Ballarat.

Jun 23 - July 3, 2010

Figure 43. View from footpath, reiteration of N/o/w/here (2005/2010) in situ. The exhibition space consists of two areas; the main gallery and a small room with a large window facing the street. This smaller room, at the opposite end to the gallery entrance is accessed and framed by an internal doorway (Figs. 83 - 85). I chose to reconfigure and place No/w/here (2005 -2010) in the smaller room for several reasons, including its visual impact internally and externally. The work was clearly visible to passing motorists and people moving across the nearby pedestrian crossing. This placement also created an opportunity to hang the work from the ceiling for the first time necessitating experimentation with new materials and techniques. I extended it in new ways through the addition of a floor circle, as discussed on page 35 in the essay Re/iterating No/w/here. This arrangement also provided the backdrop for a shower of hot pink, magnifying glasses etched with suggestive adjectives, which were suspended at various heights between the glass and the work. The conjunction of these materials in relation to the existing work enabled a new dynamic to be set in train.

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Figure 44. View from exterior window looking toward main gallery space. Figure 45. View from interior looking into small exhibition space, window on left.

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Figure 46. View from the gallery entrance. Upon entering the gallery items of furniture were clearly visible within the main gallery. A studio table, two exhibition cases, a desk and chair were deliberately configured to encourage movement between, across and through the installation. The furniture acted as a counterpoint to the textile sculptures ranged along the walls. Individual pieces of furniture drew attention on the varied practices of artist, researcher/writer and educator providing concentrated sites for experiencing materials, samples, texts, ephemera, incomplete and experimental works.

Figure 47. Exhibition title and additional text. The curators’ desk was situated on the right of the gallery entrance. I chose to place the exhibition title accompanied by additional text here to provide a conceptual key. Un-shown, but to the right of this text on the wall adjacent to the entrance, was a printed abstract. These writings foreshadowed the importance of text as an integral feature of the installation. The exhibition title and supplementary text in charcoal gray text introduced the subject positions of artist, researcher, teacher and writer. These key words were intersected by the additional word menopause written in a dark rust red, an aesthetic choice which linked the exhibition to the exegesis.

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Figure 48.

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Figure 50. Sample book with silver plated napkins behind. This arrangement was intended to encourage co-performance through touch. The gloves were a means of generating permission to handle materials and objects. The hand written swing tags created cross references to other works and materials in the installation, but also allowed me to embody and voice the position of writer as well as artist.

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;

Figures 51a & b. Details of wooden boxes on table. The wooden boxes contained a wunderkammer of items used or gathered for the purposes of embellishing a series of artworks entitled Recent Understandings, which occupied bays along the street side of the gallery (Figs. 52 – 55, 78 – 83). Each box was overlaid by a section of the lists shown in Fig 38. The box on the left includes hair, silk ribbon and gold thread; that on the right, contains fruit and flowers.

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Figures 52a & b. Details of wooden boxes on table. The box on the left contains a range of pins and fastenings, while that on the right includes materials such as plastic insects and fish, pearls and fossils.

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Figure 53. Creative prose and embellished incontinence panty entitled Mutton Done Up as Lamb (2006/2010) from previously un-shown series Recent Understandings, in situ. This was one of five works (Figs. 52 – 55, 78 – 83) arrayed along the wall adjacent to and between the windows. The use of Styrofoam body shapes enabled the works to be displayed and hung on walls which were too dense for pinning. In doing so the beauty of the shadows gave the works a greater dimension. Figure 54. Hanging arrangement, Mutton Done Up as Lamb (2006/2010). Incontinence panty, ribbon, brass pins and wire, artificial flowers, plastic toy, swing tag label, Styrofoam support.

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Figures 55a & b. The Parable of the Ant and the Cricket (2006/2010) from Recent Understandings series in situ. Incontinence panty, artificial flowers, plastic insects, paint, swing tag label, Styrofoam support.

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Figures 56a & b. Glass cabinet containing works from the reconfigured series Wealth of Meaning (2006/2010). Two glass cabinets were positioned in the central section of the gallery, one on the left or window side of the gallery some distance beyond the table, and the other shown here, to the right and rather closer. This broke up the space, while enabling the grouping of works which might otherwise have been difficult to display.

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Figure 57. Glass cabinet containing works from the reconfigured series Wealth of Meaning (2006/2010). This cabinet contained gray, black and white flock covered jewellery busts, displaying jewellery made from sanitary napkins. These works embellished with similar materials to the incontinence panties were arranged in order to encourage viewing from all sides of the cabinet. The bottom of the cabinet was strewn with artificial flowers complementing those hanging above the table. Figure 58a & b. Detail of individual works in situ.

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Figure 59a, b & c. Detail of individual works from Wealth of Meaning series (2006/2010). The brooches were originally shown in the Revelation and Disguise exhibition at Ballarat Gallery in 2006. At that time they were not yet mounted on individual busts. I chose the busts to give the works additional elegance, presence, unity and drama. However the use of busts, like the shapes used to support the incontinence panties also alluded to the presence and absence of the gendered body.

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Figure 60a & b. Detail of individual works from Wealth of Meaning series (2006/2010).

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Figures 61a & b. View of the rear wall showing glass cabinet, wall text and large works. Looking back toward cabinet containing Wealth of Meaning (2006/2010) series, the curators’ desk can be seen in background. Text retrieved from the exegesis writing is faintly visible on the left hand wall. The text, deliberately whiter than the walls appeared and receded as the co-performer moved around this part of the installation. This is especially evident in figure 67 as light plays across text which is overlaid by two of three large works shown which date back to 2005. These works Loyal (impossibility of flight) (left) and Secrecy (conspicuous consumption) (right) were both made from black sanitary napkins. In the lower right hand corner of the photograph the back of a chair which is part of a group of furniture and artefacts referencing the work of researcher, is visible.

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Figures 62a & b. View from the centre of the gallery. The research desk occupied the centre of the room beyond the glass cabinets. It was anchored to the space by a carpet retrieved from my study. The carpet and desk were strewn with selected books, papers, drafts of the exegesis and personal items. Occupying a prominent place on the desk was the comments book from the Revelation and Disguise exhibition (2006). Strategically placed gloves encouraged handling. To the right of the desk the third of the large wall mounted works made in 2005, Poise (desire for flight) is visible. On the floor beneath is a reconfiguration of Carefree, also made in 2005. The open doorway to the smaller gallery is visible behind the desk, framing the hanging work, No/w/here (2005/2010). Standing in this position, the repetitive murmur of the audio visual work occupying the plinth in the background could be heard, but not clearly discerned. One of the works from the Recent Understandings series; Poppy Show (2006/2010) is visible adjacent to the window.

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Figure 63. Poise (desire for flight) (2005/2010) in situ. Figure 64. Carefree (2005/2010) in situ.

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Figures 65a & b. Glass cabinet featuring unrealised, un-shown and incomplete work. Co-performers standing in the position shown in figure 68 were required to choose between continuing toward the desk, moving along the rear wall to look at the large works, or engage with the material in the cabinet to their left, shown here. This cabinet, situated in a bay between two windows contained a selection of unrealised, un-shown and incomplete works.

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Figures 66a & b. Detail of contents of glass cabinet. The base of the cabinet was occupied by make up cases containing lavender bags, table napkins and napkin rings, surrounded by strewn artificial flowers. These were materials amassed in the first few months of the research, which were never developed further. The shelves above contained deconstructed and silver plated sanitary materials, samples of joining methods, and a floral work which was never shown. All items were accompanied by swing tags which revealed information on their construction and purpose.

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Figures 67a & b. Detail of top shelf featuring samples.

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Figure 68. View of researchers desk and glass cabinet from rear of main gallery. Two works from the Recent Understandings series (2006/2010), Butterfly and Last Rose of Summer are visible on either side of the cabinet. The close up views of both works (figures 65 & 66) clearly show the shadows which have been an important feature of all wall mounted works. The size, boldness and repetition of these works enabled them to be effectively mounted along this wall despite the interruptions posed by the windows and the cabinet. Figure 69. Butterfly (2006/2010), in situ. Incontinence panty, artificial insects, beads, swing tag label, Styrofoam support.

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Figure 70. Last Rose of Summer (2006/2010), in situ. Figure 71. Last Rose of Summer (2006/2010), detail of construction. Incontinence panty, gold thread, brass insects, handmade velvet flower, wax, beads, swing tag label, Styrofoam support.

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Figures 72a & b. Poppy Show (2006/2010) in situ. The photograph on the right shows placement in relation to the video Pinning (2009/2010) mounted on the plinth. Selected pages from the exegesis are visible to the right of the plinth mounted on door frame between the large and small galleries.

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Figure 73. View of Pinning (2009/2010) with No/w/here (2005/2010) visible in the smaller gallery beyond. Pinning allowed glimpses of the embodied artist and gave voice to the physical experiences behind the making of the work. Figure 74. Selected pages from the exegesis referred to development, previous configuration and exhibition of No/w/here (2005/2010) between 2005 - 2009.

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Figures 75a & b. Internal view and detail of 2010 installation configuration of No/w/here (2005/2010) featuring floor circle and suspended components including magnifying glasses. No/w/here (2005/2010) was mounted on an angle in order to allow it to be viewed externally and internally.

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Figure 76. Close up of No/w/here (2005/2010) showing construction of suspended components. Figure 77. Close up of engraved magnifying glass in situ.126

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Glossary Anasyrma Act of raising skirts to reveal the genitals, used as a cheeky defiant gesture. In the mythic encounter between Baubo and Demeter, Baubo uses this gesture as a means of re/engaging the goddess in living. Art as installation Term used by Peter Osborne (2001), to distinguish a conceptual basis for installation from one based on formal properties (art installation). A/r/tography A research approach initiated by staff and students at British Columbia University, which involves working in the spaces between A/rt, R/esearch, Teaching and writing (graphy) A/r/tography thrives on a metissage or interplay of art and text. Research emerging from this approach is strongly ethnographic and auto-ethnographic, with an ongoing commitment to communities of practice. The work of a/r/tographers is informed by the philosophical writings of Jean Luc Nancy (2000), post/structuralist theories of rhizomatics discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the teaching approaches of William Pinar. For detailed information see the a/r/tography website. A/r/tographer Someone who adopts a research approach which references the interwoven positions of artist/researcher/teacher and writer. Culture of use A philosophical approach which emphasises function rather than identity, discussed by Nicholas Bourriaud (2002). Can be compared to theorizing by Michael Foucault (1991) on author function, and Barbara Barrett (2007) on artist function. The artist enters a “culture of use” when s/he scrambles boundaries between production and consumption rather than seeking to bridge them Metissage A mixture, or loose scrambling of boundaries. As opposed to the practice of bricolage which seeks to bridge boundaries, making a new structure. Performative That which unsettles existing understandings; sets things in motion. Rhizomatic From Deleuze and Guattari. The authors compare a rhizomatic plant with the hierarchical structure of a tree, drawing analogies between these vegetative structures and that of knowledge systems. They point to the following rhizomatic principles in their analogy: connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity and asignifying rupture (the capacity of a rhizome to create offshoots from any point despite damage or partial removal) Rhizomatic inquiries they suggest map new territories rather than re-tracing old ones. Text/ile An interweaving of text and artwork to explore and unsettle existing knowledge. The use of text as material which can be manipulated not only semantically but also visually, through repetition, juxtaposition and loose conjunction. Un/professional performer A term I use to denote the intentional adoption of a position of uncertainty in relation to my practices as artist/researcher/teacher-educator and writing. The notion of ‘uncertainty’ corresponds to what Irit Rogoff refers to as ‘weak education’.

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