The artistic research project Responsive Space – Sounding into Materiality developed alongside my work on several installations exhibited at the project’s final exhibition Sounding Matter at Galleri F 15 in Moss in winter 2020. Petrichor is a collection of texts that evolved during the process. It contains fragments of ideas, questions, observations and insights that have developed simultaneously and been woven together with the artistic processes. The sum of the research project has been documented and disseminated in an online exposition on Research Catalogue, where this collection of texts is also included. Petrichor is inextricably linked to the rest of the material in this presentation (documentation and description of the work, dissemination materials). The text collection has been formatted for reading online on Research Catalogue.
Petrichor centres around the scope of research through a structure of individual texts, organised as chapters that guide the reader through the main themes of the research. The chapters have been structured to allow the texts to consecutively describe the research process over time.
The collection begins with a hesitant, almost poetic passage in the chapter Mirages. These texts are an active probing of the themes. Next, the chapter A language of one´s own investigates the process of identifying the different languages contained within the research and the relationships between them. The chapter In the Studio invites the reader to join in the practical aspects of the process, while Embracing Synaesthesia – Mode, Materiality and Composition encompasses attitudes and relational work on materiality in cross-disciplinary composition. Time and Truth examines our existence in the world and how we experience it, while the texts in the chapter Circular/Singular describe how these processes follow me into the studio and become part of the artistic process. Assemblage is about the immersive aspect of listening in a broader sense. The texts also question what an individual is. The texts in Conclusion discuss the positioning of the work, disciplinary orientation and how the research positions itself in relation to the wider world.
I look at the practical artistic work and the reflective part as two materials which together constitute an investigation of a topic. The works are not answers to the reflections, and the reflections are neither questions nor answers that derive from the works. They are active investigations in different media that guide each other through a long research process. I like the image of these different elements roped together like a search party scouring a field called “the research project”.
