Otherlands
(2020)
author(s): Jacqueline Taylor
published in: Research Catalogue
‘Otherlands’ is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project traversing visual art, linguistics, psychoanalysis and philosophy. It interrogates Julia Kristeva’s concepts of abjection and the semiotic as pre-linguistic markers and their potential to articulate ‘otherness’ in visual art. Whilst Kristeva’s thinking is revolutionary in conceptualising dimensions of experience ‘beyond’ language and representation as vital to the signifying process, its application in aesthetic practice is limited. Those art practices that have engaged with abjection and the semiotic rely on representational strategies and thus undermine their very definition.
Otherlands demonstrates that it is only where representational structures are disrupted towards the place where meaning collapses that abjection can function as ‘abjection’ in art practice, in turn articulating modalities of ‘othering’ as part of an alternative signifying process. Understood via a new theory of ‘intermateriality’ developed by the researcher, Otherlands offers for the first time vital new ways of understanding meaning-making in art practice that shifts from representational and visual economies of signification to the material, performative, affective and intersubjective dimensions of art.
Informed by an eight-year corpus of practice-led research, Otherlands was developed collaboratively through 12 months of rigorously testing ideas. This included textual analysis, an on-site curatorial residency (University of Memphis), field visits to examine ‘othering’ in selected cultural sites, interviews with key practitioners and scholars, and feedback gathered at the Otherlands exhibition and live event at the Kristeva Circle annual conference, Memphis (prestigious interdisciplinary platform for world-leading Kristeva scholars). The work was blind peer-reviewed by the Kristeva Circle directors and Art Museum University of Memphis curatorial committee.
The research includes a two-person exhibition with award-winning artist Georgia MacGuire, curatorial essay by Kristeva expert Professor Estelle Barrett and major live performative event. The research is simultaneously all these outputs, understood via the interrelations between its different parts as an ‘other’ form of signification.
Praxis Para-dox
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Jacqueline Taylor
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Whilst there are growing bodies of research surrounding ‘artistic research’ and ‘researcher development’ discourses, they are acknowledged to be in conflict with one another as well as being significantly under-theorised in relation to pedagogy. ‘Praxis Para-dox’ interrogates the extent to which ‘artistic research’, ‘researcher development’ and ‘doctoral pedagogy’ discourses can be brought together to develop new praxical, conceptual and pedagogical frameworks for doctoral study in the arts.
The research encompasses three components that iteratively build upon one another. Understood as a multidimensional topology, ‘Research-Practice-Pedagogy’ firstly offers a new conceptual model whereby artistic practice, research and training are intertwined with pedagogy for the first time. Secondly, ‘Discourses of Dissonance’ builds on this model in relation to Rolfe’s concept of ‘para-dox.’ It demonstrates that artistic research performs a generative ‘para-dox’ whereby associated pedagogies must continually disrupt various doxa to generate epistemic shifts vital to eliciting ‘doctoralness.’ Finally, ‘What the Praxis?’ evidences numerous qualities of ‘artistic research-ness’ necessary to establish ‘para-dox’ and reconceive ‘pedagogy’ as onto-epistemological agential spaces at the nexus of practice and praxis.
‘Praxis Para-dox’ brings together two substantial bodies of research: research on ‘artistic research’ conducted over a ten-year period (including case studies, interviews, research diaries, practice-led research) and pedagogic research undertaken at a UK institution over a five-year period (including interviews, action research, the testing of ideas, focus groups and participatory workshops). The synthesizing of these bodies of research was informed by in-depth literature reviews in multiple fields to contextualise and theorise the work.
The research is disseminated in two book chapters (‘Research-Practice-Pedagogy: Establishing new topologies of doctoral research in the arts’ and ‘Discourses of Dissonance: Enabling sites of praxis and practice amongst Arts and Design doctoral study’, both double blind peer reviewed and published alongside key scholars) plus an international keynote performance (‘What the Praxis?’, University of Gloucester).
