This publication is a report on the integration of a novelistic element into an artistic practice that oscillates between visual and language-based.
While fiction is of course most apparent in its literary form in the language basis of the practice, the author's aim is to use the latter to articulate the involvement as oneself as subject within the visual practice. Reference to subject has to do with agency, its presence of which causes the author's relationship to their work to be other than that of an operator – while the latter is also a viable strategy for creative doing, making and writing.
Nearest Tips of the umbrella are in effect Project Forward, 1; 2; 3 - 2023 - 2025
Furthest Tips are Project Towards, 4; 5; 6; 7; 8 - 2014 - 2024
Genetic GPS (Runner) as providing a geodemographic other orientation of one's self-orientation
The Stretcher, by analogy, traverses the fiction among the designated calendar years
A fictional character (a heteronym, following the literary use of alter ego by Fernando Pessoa) has often been an aspect of the language-based practice since 2017 up to the present, while the first of the projects that places such an influence began in 2014. Such a character iis not written into the projects seamlessly, in the way that a novelist might situate their characters, but as a declared fragmented strategy within the work, the better to consider oneself as a subject.
This idea of subject distinguishes the approach to the work from that of the author/artist being its operator.
The projects conducted in the aforementioned period of time that include reference to the fictional character orientate in time as if Tips of an averarching umbrella (to use a technical term), the latter motif of which can serve to present the publication's content in summary form.
The umbrella’s hyperlinks summarise language-based involvements relevant to the activity's topic.
Inasmuch as a third-person voice of oneself in one’s own monologue can be divided between self and other, the author's ancestry DNA report in connection with one of their artistic projects (i3S, Porto University Medical Faculty) places their ancestral GPS in the centre of Germany, while the author is a British/Irish citizen with no known family relationship to Germany. This geo-ancestral reading may itself be considered a form of othering. This locus of the axes of the Tips of the umbrella that indicate the author's respective projects and their chronology is also the location-point of the ancestral GPS. The activity will therefore focus as much on ancestry as unconscious subjectivity in the context of the artistic research being driven by a sense of oneself as subject rather than any more operational strategy.