This practice-based research project centres on the Cornish landscape. Its interpretation is encouraged through participatory arts-based strategies that connect experimental filmmaking to social research, favouring visual and material approaches. The project takes on three phases in its methodology: the first phase involves fieldwork by participants which is then interpreted
by a second group of participants. From here, visual artefacts such as photographs and drawings are collated and reinterpreted by the researcher into a non-fiction film, alongside 16mm film footage depicting the landscape. Those images act as material objects of engagement, where a connection between creator and landscape is evidenced through the materiality of the images themselves and the film grain.
Navigating the arts and social sciences, my research aims to be socially engaged, examining the tools that inform or help produce knowledge and the visual methods that can be employed to record this information. It joins up with disciplines that examine people and place, such as cultural geography, visual ethnography and art. Throughout the project, I advocate for democratic and emergent knowledge that can be more easily found between bounded disciplines, slow artistic processes and multi-sensory approaches. Following the recent “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences, material methods can locate the visual research objects as knowledge generators, transferring the status of the participant from “subject” to “co- creator”. Here, visual methods and their objects can produce “material and multi-sensory ways of knowing” (Woodward 2020: 71), to be made visible by the final film as visualised generative knowledge and a research document in motion.
