Touching Text: Feeling My Way Through Research-Creation

Abstract

This article explores how artistic research practice, as a thinking through art, generates different understandings of the world. Having come to higher education through my visual arts practice, I trace threads of thinking-making practices that, while seeded in the studio, continue to generate new connections and concepts that in/form my PhD inquiry into different ways of learning in South African Higher Education contexts. Guided by Manning’s conceptualization of research-creation as an ecology of practices operative within the interstices of making and thinking, I show how artmaking as an intuitive process nudges my thinking through-and-around concerns obliquely, attuned toward different registers and levels of intensities, cutting across normative accounts of what it means to know. Referring to two bodies of my work, sum of the parts (2010) and Evidence of Things Unseen (2014), the article shows how materiality and making conjugate new languages that give expression to the ineffable obscured in the name of Science and Fine Art. Exploring the diffractive entanglements of thinking-making practices in the “between” of writing and drawing, the article shows how writing-with, drawing-with, doodling-with, and scrawling-with activate and agitate the spaces between words and images and do inquiry differently.