Research Catalogue

Pamela’s project fascinates me by its compilation of the two narratives, ‘factual biography’ and ‘prosaic biography’. The former gives me insight of why, what, when and how something happened in her live. The latter informs me about how Pamela has experienced and interpreted certain events. Thereby, I also appreciate hearing her voice in the audio recordings, because this form of communication connects my interest of Pamela’s artefacts with her narratives. I interpret her sculptural artworks as an experimental visualisation of drastic life events, namely the daunting shock of a devastating fire that burnt out her home and the consequential loss of her possessions. Whilst reading through Pamela’s exposition, I value the above-mentioned narratives in combination with the sculptural artefacts as an interesting and personal contribution to Artistic Research that could be contextualised in a qualitative research paradigm. I would suggest it to be a constructive contribution to discussions held in evocative and interpretative discourses such as Creative Analytical Practices (CAP) in Autoethnography. In saying that, my understanding of such discussions would then not be part of her published project but rather a separate research with this in focus, ideally a collaborative research between Pamela contributing her outcomes from Artistic Research and a scholar sharing his knowledge from currents discussions in Autoethnography.

My personal orientation in Artistic Research situates in defining the meaning of this discipline and contributing to its own and unique academic discourses. Thereby, I position myself in discussions that distance themselves from methodologies, which combine artistic practice with disciplines that are not directly related to the latter. However, I am quite open to invite and to be invited in discussions across disciplines, because it is my experience and understanding that interdisciplinary in research offers great potentials.

 

Interdisciplinary research implies for me the exchange of cutting edge knowledge and, in our field, artistic forms of expression. It is my experience that experts in respective disciplines always know more and better about the current state in their own research. Therefore, I interpret Pamela’s writings outside of her own field of expertise and, more importantly in this particular project, her personal experience, as peripheral statements. I conclude there might be a danger of these intellectual excursions where it might raise an issue of citing and contextualising knowledge, which has been revised today, because contemporary research has emerged over the time. To this complexity comes another one. For instance, her summary about C. G. Jung’s particular theories evoke in me a more compulsory exercise to meet expectation of traditional academic conventions rather than adding to the value of the contribution in Artistic Research. However, Pamela expresses her personal interest in this particular knowledge and states that it resonates with her practices. Given this information, I would then have anticipated learning more about how reading and interpreting Jung’s text influenced, or inspired, her practice. She does elaborate a little, but then quickly jumps away from the paper sculptures to another group of artwork she has produced. She then mentions the paper sculptures later, but never does really elaborate how Jung’s text has, or might have, informed the artistic process of her particular sculptures made out of photographic paper, which are, in my understanding, the central artefacts in her exposition. Generally, – in my understanding – the “how?” and “why?” questions in her exposition remain answered sometimes only vaguely.

 

I might suggest that if Pamela would have kept the focus on the above-mentioned two narratives ‘factual biography’ and ‘prosaic biography’ plus if she would have drawn out links from there to her photographic paper sculptures, possibly outlined and scaffolded the potentials of a collaboration with a scholar in Autoethnography, I believe her exposition would have had an even stronger impact. But again, I am arguing from my position in the discourse and interpret Pamela’s project from my personal standpoint rather than postulating a generalising comment.