Writing Material Change: A Creative and Critical Approach to Object Writing

Abstract

This thesis is an interdisciplinary, practice-led inquiry into writing practices that are consciously shaped by material culture. New materialist and posthumanist thought destabilises the idea of a universal human subject, questioning where the self begins and other entities end. It also recognises the potential of non-human entities as co-constitutive of creative practices, and acknowledges that materials and materiality are not static, but rather form part of a continual process, an event or an unfolding. This understanding of the inherent porosity between the human and material worlds has implications for creative writing practices, particularly life writing practices. Drawing on approaches to writing with objects from literature, art writing and material culture studies, this project explores and engages with the idea of writing as both a representational mode and coconstitutive process. Situating writing as an embodied practice that is in active conversation with the material world, it considers how an attentiveness to objects and their traces can attend to an understanding of materiality that is located between historic dichotomies of nature and culture, or their contemporary counterparts of non-human and human. The creative component, ‘Making an Artefact’, takes the form of a collection of nine essays that fall within the mode of life writing. Each essay is not only attentive to the material change of objects but the capacity of human subjectivity to perceive and participate in the process of change. The creative work considers the potential of writing with objects through contemporary theoretical frameworks, moving beyond common literary tropes that align objects with memory, art writing tropes of the artist as sole creator of a work, and the biological analogy. Materiality is conceived of as something inherently unstable, which allows the creative work to be understood as part of an object’s continual unfolding in a mutable world.