DIY6: Practice-Based Research 2009

The beginning of the residency at Meltdowns coincided with my participation in the Live Art Development Agency’s (LADA) DIY6: Practice-Based Research for Emerging Artists. The project was led by performance artist, Helena Hunter, with five other participants, with wide-ranging practices and backgrounds, Catherine Wharfe, Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Lauren Williams, Poppy Jackson and Yael Schmidt

During two long weekends, over two weeks, we explored and investigated what practice-based research is and could be, through workshops, discussions, and activities. The timing for this was perfect, as it became a vital underpinning and support for the time in the studio, and I was able to explore materially and physically in the studio, ideas, concepts, and investigations that came out of the more theoretical activities.

During this time, I developed the beginning of a new project, (A) Play of Three Magic Particles: Light, Dust, and Photographic Grain. An exploration of duration, and documentation of time through the transformation and observation of particles.

This included the creation of a set of research questions;

•How can I disrupt and re-consider time through the play of the three particles of light, dust, and photographic grain?

•Through image making, live and still, how can I manifest the notion of the impossible, of holding and suspending time?

•How do I prevent this downward journey and keep it up in the air?

•Through image making, live and still, how can I prevent the magical particles, dust grain, light – metaphors for time – from entering the past, a place from which they cannot return?

•How can I disrupt photography’s predilection for speaking about the past?

•How can I create, suspend, hold time through drawing and photography?

•How can I create stillness in a durational activity?

•What is a document? Explore this in photography, drawing and action

•How can I suspend time when I am using gravity to form the work?

•How can I make the audience reconsider their experience of time and space?

•How can I offer the audience a sense of wonder?