Uncovering an Occupational Folklore of Ceramics: Small Stories Found in the Spaces Between Word, Gesture and Clay
(2025)
author(s): Natasha Mayo, Kim Norton, Sam Lucas
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
The term ‘Occupational Folklore’ refers to the social expressions of people, linked to the work that they do. This exposition explores the possibility of there being a common language of clay, a vernacular that can be used to story-tell, and how stories arise from the studio, from the intersection of making, thinking/talking and clay.
Comprising three discrete projects, we move from a study of the materiality of voice to establishing a vocabulary of clay to a narrative collection of embodied experiences. Their combined knowledge leads to a fourth project, in the form of conversations held whilst making around a studio table. Passages from the exchange are filmed and analysed from the perspective of ‘small stories’, an oral history methodology that gives focus to the speculative, iterative and nuanced decisions often overlooked in a conventional account of a conversation. When applied to the making process, it begins to uncover a deeper understanding of the processual and implicit decisions that take place through the interaction of making, thinking and material properties. The passages allow us to witness the very emergence of storytelling taking place, the moment at which life experiences intersect with formations in clay.
The aim of collecting all four projects together is not simply to document examples but, as with all modes of folklore, to use story to identify and share more resilient and connected ways of being in the world. Within these intersections lie the porous and mutable properties of clay practice, that are rapidly redefining the wider field of ceramics in terms of its social contribution. Contained within these social expressions of clay lies its ability to connect with and contribute to wider community and environmental issues. The term occupational folklore is used in recognition of the historic continuity of behaviours, actions and beliefs that arise from these interactions, if only we shift our focus from individual attainments to the collective knowledge and transferable learning these small stories contain.
It’s Natural (and Other Frictions)
(2025)
author(s): Cecilia Carvalhal Braga de Andrade
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition explores how performance-based artistic research can expose the constructedness of gender identity by placing the body in tension with resistant materials and wearable prosthetics. Working with spray foam insulation as both sculptural surface and choreographic partner, I investigated how its artificiality, rigidity, and eventual fracture could function as metaphors for the instability of normative embodiment. What began as a struggle to inhabit a rigid foam body evolved into experiments with prosthetic extensions, where the material was reimagined as a collaborator that displaced gestures, layered images, and generated hybrid presences. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, drag performance practices, Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés, and Rebecca Horn’s prosthetic sculptures, the research stages a dialogue between body, material, and viewer. Documentation through video and photography further expanded the work, creating layered choreographies where prosthetics multiplied into digital traces. In this process, the foam bodies became what Lauren Elkin calls “art monsters”: excessive, disruptive forms that refuse coherence, insisting instead on incompleteness, transformation, and the possibility of imagining bodies otherwise.
RNDR M3 4S (1) 0F UR AVATAR GRLS*
(2023)
author(s): AMUSED
published in: Research Catalogue
This thesis is aimed at investigating virtual embodiment and how it can affect a performer's experience of; and relationship to the physical body. With this auto ethnographic case study I hope to shed some light on the ways virtual reality technology enables critical experiences and what effects these experiences could have, through my own personal journey. The study was conducted in the setting of my home using a Pico 4 VR head mounted display and HTC vive full body tracking. The project used for the case study was an audiovisual pole dance performance that was performed on the platform Neos VR and streamed to Studio 44 in Stockholm. The research is rooted in the artistic field but draws knowledge from psychological and social research on VR as a cognitive and embodied technology. The research methods used to gather and analyse the research material were visual research, phenomenology and deep listening. The data collection consisted of visual and text based data. On the visual data I applied thematic analysis, coding and categorising of the text based data and analysing hyper reflections with a phenomenological approach. I found that the experience of virtual embodiment did change my relationship to my own body in a positive way by feeling more grounded and accepting. I was less anxious about performing and felt more confident in myself. Because of the entanglement of the study it was not possible to solely contribute the outcomes of the effect to virtual avatar embodiment in itself. It did however demonstrate how these VR technologies could be used to enable norm critical experiences by the use of norm critical design applied to avatars challenging beauty ideals and societal norms of performativity. My virtual embodiment and its effects on me can give a unique insight that would benefit developers and users active in these platforms as well as for personal introspection and self development. The study serves as a good base to build future research on and I intend to further elaborate on the extensive research data that was gathered.
Concepts of Embodiment in Interdisciplinary Work Within a Musical Context
(2019)
author(s): Sarah Albu
published in: KC Research Portal
Integrated musical experiences have long existed, previous to and outside of the traditional concert music setting. Interdisciplinary approaches to performance creation are becoming more accepted and more common in academic music contexts. This research asks the question "How does the concept of embodiment serve the creation of interdisciplinary work within a musical context?", examined through the lens of definitions of embodiment, spinning, technology, community, and inter/multidisciplinary vs. intermediality and expanded through case studies of two of the author's recent performance works.
Untitled: Women's Work
(2016)
author(s): Adesola Akinleye
published in: Research Catalogue
Untitled: Women’s Work is both scholarly art and artistic research using narrative inquiry, dance and film as research methods. The research looks at the embodied experience of a group of women in the work place. Methodology for this research was to use an embodied approach across the whole research process from dancing with participants as part of the date collection process, to using choreographic tasks to analyze the data and finally using dance and film to disseminate the ‘findings’.
The research looked at the lived experience of women living and working in the Flint and Detroit areas, USA. It is an attempt to take the body and bodily experiences ‘seriously’ when we research. The research took the position that embodiment is a methodology and method for understanding the narratives of the women’s work and what makes a ‘good’ job. I saw dance and visual images as a language for communication of the ideas the research uncovered.
Data collection asked women participants what they considered makes a good job along with collecting their memories of their own working experiences (this was done through dancing together and verbal interviews). Analysis drew out two themes: relationships (developed and negotiated in the situation of work and Self), and rhythms (of Self and work institution). Initial findings presented here suggest the continual establishment, disruption, negotiation and maintenance of rhythms and relationships in the work place has an impact on what makes a ‘good’ job.
The research is part of my on-going study of how an embodied approach to the lived experience (based of Pragmatist and Phenomenological principles that place bodily experience as central to meaning making) can be embedded into the whole research process. This challenges ‘traditional’ research methods, that it could be argued, place the body as an add-on to text-based theory even when the research subject it self is about people's experiences.
Territoriality and choreography in site-situated performance
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): K.G. Guttman
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The PhD project of K.G. Guttman 'Territoriality and Choreography in Site-Situated Performance' is conducted through artistic practice and theoretical inquiry. The project performatively activates a series of residential sites in Canada and the Netherlands. Site-situated performance refers to an artistic process that begins and ends on-site, working within the specific conditions of a location. The key terms territoriality and choreography here represent concepts and practices that express and navigate space-time(s). The project animates qualities of territoriality through a choreographed encounter between host-dancer, guest-audience and site-performance. Written and explored from the perspective of a Canadian settler scholar and artist, the project attunes to the material and discursive agency of the guest, host and site within colonial and settler colonial conditions. The project develops a critical and creative mode of engagement with the social, material and political characteristics of a site and with the world-building potential of performance.