The photograph St Peter’s Seminary and the video Bevin Court and the Sivill House are simultaneously autonomous, completed artworks and experiments contributing to an ongoing artistic research methodology. Both works were created through movement intervention by the human body within architectural contexts. The generation of such works does not rely solely, or even mostly, on an intuitive response to site. Instead, a text-based research process concerning the building that includes the cultural circumstance at the time of construction, the motivations of its architect(s), the choice of materials, and so forth, precedes the intervention in an effort to fortify the creative process with a knowledge base that functions alongside more instinctive decision-making.

These interventions address buildings categorised as brutalist architecture, an architectural epoch of the recent past; yet, these still-standing structures also exist as objects in our contemporary culture that continue to be addressed by historians and critics in a text-based form. However, if we consider that building and architecture are primarily about engagement with the physical body, investigation conducted through direct physical engagement will yield different findings than cognitive postulation. This logic is behind my approach to architectural research through movement intervention. Just as the body, in this way, is employed as a research tool, I also employ it as the artistic medium of my creative practice. According to a report by the Australian Examination of Doctoral Degrees in Creative Arts, ‘the conduct of research in, or through, creative practice is associated with the acknowledgement of uncertainty and contingency, the denial of grand narratives, a tolerance for complexity and confusion, and both willingness and capacity to be led by the data rather than by a predetermined point of view.’[1] This rings true of my mode of research because the intervention process begins with a predetermined approach and a willingness for the process, once in motion, to influence the intervention and its outcomes. Such a method intentionally creates space for the creative process to locate unforeseen ideas and resources of equal or greater relevance than those originally identified.

This exposition includes an exploration of how various artists have used movement intervention to generate artworks and through a theoretical approach considers how these pieces function as artworks and convey meaning. Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Anahita Razmi’s Rooftop Piece Tehran, and Lucy Gunning’s Climbing Around my Room are used to illustrate this discussion, alongside my own works. The theoretical framework for this discussion is provided by phenomenological analysis, using Edmund Husserl’s notion of pairing and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s elaboration on the role of movement quality within the process of pairing, and by the application of aesthetic negativity as defined by Theodor Adorno and rearticulated by Christoph Menke. After establishing an understanding of artistic practice and output, the contexts of the creation of artworks St Peter’s Seminary and Bevin Court and the Sivill House are discussed in detail. The subsections ‘Site specifics’ and ‘Architectural intention’ share the text-based aspect of the research process; subsequently, ‘Movement intervention’ addresses the phenomenological experiencing of site and relays important details of the intervention process itself. The section ‘Context of reception’ discusses the artworks’ exhibition at the Laban Centre in London and the ways in which exhibiting these artworks in a new architectural circumstance extended the artistic research process beyond the context of creation and into its presentation. The two movement intervention case studies that come together in the exhibition context allow us to consider this creative practice as a research methodology within the contexts of creation and reception.

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