Touch and trace

Abstract

This chapter examines how ethical values can be developed and enactedthrough a creative practice research approach by examining the framework and issues surrounding creative practice research projects that deal with bodily matter derived and separated from human bodies. It addresses questions around what, if any, the responsibilities of ethics and care are for working with bodily matter. Drawing on notions of the abject, I propose that there are considerations researchers need to take into account that relate to the lived origins of human bodily or biological matter and its relationship to the phenomenological body, that is, to the body conceived in phenomenological terms. Working with one of the case studies developed in my PhD research (Handcock, 2014a), The Dust Project, the chapter examines formalised institutional ethical frameworks that affected the development of this project. It illuminates key ethical issues and values that arose through the project, revealing interrelationships between body as matter and body as a lived being that is embodied and experienced. The chapter looks at how ethical know-how and understanding might be discovered within a creative practice research context by examining how ethical values ascribed to the body can impact on ways bodily matter and materials derived from the body are treated and understood through the research process.