Pieces of practice | avian spaces

Abstract

This research paper is written in a first-person narrative style. The style mirrors the practice-led research methodology I have used which privileges process over resolution and acknowledges that making can be both generative and interrogative. More traditional research methods rely on distancing the researcher from production and placing them within an external framework. Practice-led researchers “construct experiential starting points from which practice follows. They tend to ‘dive in’, to commence practising to see what emerges. They acknowledge that what emerges is individualistic and idiosyncratic.” In this paper the reader is taken on a journey from the spaces of the future, present and past in search of the ‘unfound’. The ‘unfound’ is also to some extent ‘unknown’, but occasionally reveals itself in the text through accidents of poetic association between objects, art and literary moments. The space of the paper is also an avian one. It doesn’t interrogate the material egg and bird object motifs in my practical work, but occupies the air to which these forms owe their qualities of transience, agility and fragility. It is this element that exemplifies the space of my works production. Instead of dissecting and pinning down this element (which would be antithetical), I have tried to occupy its spirit. A substantial part of the paper is made up of footnotes and references to exterior sites, elements that in this paper are far from peripheral. They are employed here as literary devices that enable a visual and conceptual illustration of the distance between process and analysis. Alberto Manguel wrote that “all writing depends on the generosity of the reader.” This paper requires a ‘generous reader’ willing to follow an experimental journey. 1. Brad Haseman, ‘Tightrope Writing: Creative Writing Programs in the RQF Environment’ http://www.textjournal.com.au/april07/haseman.htm 2. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: Flamingo, 1997), 179.