Art Practice Commons^™

Behind The Cover, Julie Orr

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Julie Orr's artwork - Daze Ablaze - for the cover of this issue of The STEAM Journal.

Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening And Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, And The Work Of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening and Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, and the Work of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward

Sunrise Haiku Project: Learning To Trust, Diana Lynn Tigerlily

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Born and raised in Illinois, I moved to the ocean during a major life transition, leaving behind the familiar: family, forest, and soil. This essay incorporates reflection, photographs, and haiku to represent sixteen months of journeying to the ocean sunrise everyday. The daily practice yielded unexpected insights, moments of deep healing, and growth. The biggest lesson for me was that no matter how thick the clouds and how strong my doubt, the sun will still rise. By witnessing the phenomenon of the sun rising everyday, I have been able to rise up through layers of self-doubt and grief, and begin …

A Daycare Artist Residency In Minusio: Aesthetic Eunuciations In Borderspaces, R. Michael Michael Fisher

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This is a compilation of happenings from an artist residency at an urban core daycare and kindergarten site from July-December, 2021. The artist provides some notes on how to approach a residency, create site-specific art and work with the children, their teachers, care staff and the community surrounding the site. A newly coined concept of minusio, emerged over time and served as an invisible basis for art-care, in a sense the mirror(ing) of the gift of nurturing but also the lack of care—and offering a route to what human’s really desire, when they are not so busy and distracted …

Rooms That Awaken Us: A Poetic Inquiry Of Multiple Selves, Rawda Harb

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Using poetry as a research method, the author wrote for self-expression, self-discovery and self-healing during the pandemic. As she wrote, she realized that she is a different person in different settings with differ- ent people. Without intending to ever share this work, she then examines her multiple selves’ learning-teach- ing dance with life using literature by Aoki, Leggo, Dewey, Tajfel and others. She even discusses the notion of multiple selves in life with her young children and is fascinated by their artistic response.

Becoming An Artist: Embodying Emergent Art Making Practices, Kate L. Wurtzel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Absract: Written in layers, this creative essay invites the reader to consider the relationship between one’s own becoming and emergent practices in the teaching and making of art. Weaving between a discussion on the theoretical concept of becoming and emergence, along with a personal narrative presented with images, the author tries to demonstrate what emergence might feel like in the body while creating alongside-and-with her own child. From points of disruption to points of harmonizing with material and material bodies, this essay examines emergence through the lens of an embodied relationality and offers up potential ways to experience such practices.

Studio As Collage: Familiar And Strange, Alison Shields

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In this visual essay, I present an artistic inquiry I created as I examine the studio as a space to dwell, a space to daydream and a prompt for the imagination. I draw from previous research about artist studios and a visual archive created of objects within the studio as I re-imagine the studio as a collage; it is a place filled with odd juxtapositions of images, artworks, ideas and space that may produce new connections and imaginings. Through presenting the studio as both subject and process, I encourage readers to embrace the strangeness within familiar places.

Dreaming My Ancestors: A Poetic Inquiry Into Longing And Legacy, Maya T. E. Borhani

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This poetic inquiry traces certain aspects of my identity as the daughter of an Iranian immigrant growing up in the United States. I use autobiographic life writing (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, Leggo, 2009) to lay out (some of) the bones of a larger personal and family story, followed by a suite of poems addressing some of the mysteries, wonderments, gifts and reckonings that I am left with—and which are inherent to—my misplaced, scattered family history and lineage. Although my father shared little about his life in Iran before coming to the U.S., with the help of other relatives I have gleaned a …

Skyward, Darlene St.Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Skyward illustrates the embodiment of creation-centred research (St. Georges, 2018; 2019; 2022b/c; 2023; St. Georges & Bickel, 2022), which relies on creative-experiential-engagement and interaction. Creation-centred research is uniquely rooted in métissage (Hasebe-Ludt et al, 2009), poetic inquiry (Fidyk & St. Georges, 2022; inpress) and storying (Archibald, 2009; 2019), and leans into arts-based practices (Leavy 2015; 2018; Sinner et al., 2018). The term “creation-centred” reflects the ontological and cyclical nature of artistic practices and supports its creative intention and integrity. Situated in an aesthetic and creation-centred paradigm, it resists privileged discourse while generating and weaving threads of our stories through the …

Silent Interruptions: Democratizing Academic Discourse Through Wordless Narrative Research, Jeff Horwat

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Emerging in the early twentieth century, wordless novels portrayed stories of working-class laborers, immigrants, and other marginalized groups overlooked and silenced by industrialization. Wordless novels visually operationalize their silence by presenting their narratives without words to call attention to hidden struggles of different social groups exploited under capitalism, colonialism, and other forms of systemic violence. This paper explores how the generative power of visual silence forces a pause in hegemonic discourses to create space for reflection and social change. Drawing from the collectivist ethos of wordless novels, wordless narrative research is introduced as a method of creative inquiry to study, …

In The Imaginal Realm Before She Could Read: A Healing A/R/Tographic Inquiry, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This healing a/r/tographic inquiry ritually cycles through ancestral time to the present inspired by a recently found small grey book above the author’s dad’s desk—10 years after his death. This article shines light and memory onto spirit infused matrixial borderspace(s) through the co-mingling of text and image; returning to a site where text first met image in the early years of the author’s life. She is both the young dreaming artist-child and the responsible artist/researcher/teacher seeking embodied relational imaginal knowledge through the light of both image and word.

Data’S Entanglements: Artmaking As Corresponding Companion During Diffractive Analysis, Kelly Clark/Keefe

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This essay invites readers into two creative correspondences that emerged during the author’s involvement in a participatory arts-based research project called Life Lines. The Life Lines project aimed at engaging a small group of young adults alongside researchers in their use of multimodal arts practices to inquire into what makes young adult identity work work the way that it does. In Life Lines the phenomenon of identity and the approaches to inquiry used to explore it were conceptualized through a material feminist framework that proposes the co-constituting nature of meaning and matter (i.e., bodies, atmospheres, and objects of …

The Way Of The Crane, Alexandra Fidyk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Using pastiche, a dreamscape and reflection upon it, offers entry to a centring practice. In holding both, a new image emerges. The dreamscape—an unexpected scene of cranes in joyous dance—unfolds as actual dream and offers a metaphor for understanding the dreamer’s life. By extension, the dream returns practice as a syn- aesthetic engagement, which she calls expressive arts pedagogy. In this condensed yet nuanced rumination, personal and professional, poetic and haptic, participating and witnessing blur. This practice, the way of the Crane, is timely because it introduces, by embodying its own phenomona, a relational pedogogy for our troubled times—a pedagogy …

Interlude Art And Poetry, Darlene St.Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Interlude cover page introducing Articles and Essays of this issue.

Introduction: Creative Encounters And Interruptions, Darlene St.Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial Introduction to the issue 7 volume 1.

Front Matter 2022, Darlene St.Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Front Matter of Artizein: Arts & Teaching Journal Volume 7 issue 1

Full Issue Artizein 2022, Darlene St.Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full issue of Artizein: Arts & Teaching Journal 2022 Volume 7 issue 1

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …

Hands. Words. Mirrors. A Letter To My Mother., Iliana Emilia García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My capstone project is a memoir of my mother in a letter format, where I tell my mother the story she forgot, who she was, where we were, and where we’re headed. After my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2013, my focus on telling my family history shifted from research of the family to recovery. The loss of my mother's insight and recollections prompted a shift in the narrative. She, one of the main characters in my story, became my most important audience. In a photo album approach, I aim to rebuild what seems lost. I am keeping the …

From Extractivism To Adjacency. A Research Manifesto, Margarita Palacios, Anette Baldauf

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

This essay concerns with the ways in which extractivism continues to be reproduced in academic frameworks despite innumerous initiatives of decolonization. Engaging with artistic research and embracing a materialist approach that emphasizes embeddedness and embodiment, as well as acknowledging the affective-aesthetic flows that accompany research, the authors locate the heart of the problem at the disjuncture between critical epistemology and research practices. This disavowed space of knowledge production, they argue, is where the logics of extractivism and its racialized epistemic dualism are reproduced. The authors put forward the notion of adjacency, as in their view, dwelling on the power of …

Unlocking Creativity In The Visual Arts: Using Mindfulness And Open Awareness Meditation To Access Creative Insight, Erin Gocinski

Mindfulness Studies Theses

An artist's creativity is a vital resource, so it is important to nourish this internal phenomenon and develop helpful techniques when they experience a creative block. Researchers have discovered that mindfulness and meditation positively affect artists' ability to access creative insight. The research reviewed in this rationale paper demonstrates beneficial experiences for artists who are trying to foster creativity or move beyond a creative block. After reviewing research, there were common threads linking the reasons for artists’ creative blocks and the positive impacts of mindfulness and meditation. The creative project is a handbook designed for artists and provides information, meditative …

Mindful Artmaking In Elementary Classrooms: A Path To Emotional Regulation, Christine Gober

Mindfulness Studies Theses

Abstract

In an era dominated by technological advancements and mounting external pressures, the emotional and mental well-being of the younger generation is a growing concern. This research paper explores the intricate relationship between mindfulness, art-making, and emotional regulation within the context of elementary classrooms. The modern world, filled with a plethora of stimuli, has escalated stress levels among individuals, especially children, leading to a surge in mental health issues. Mindfulness, deeply rooted in ancient traditions, teaches individuals to stay present, fostering a non-judgmental awareness of their thoughts and emotions. Art-making, on the other hand, serves as a medium for emotional …

A Place Under The Sun, Maya B. Baran

Theses and Dissertations

Maya Baran’s work reflects on how light, nostalgia, and photography allow her to look at the past and ask questions about the human experience, intimacy, temporality, societal and personal journeys. looking back through time at things that become present when photographed, Baran looks at the scientific, metaphysical, and human.

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

Blanket Statements, Issue 161, Seminar 2023

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 161, Seminar 2023

Whispers, Amanda Cole

Allusions

No abstract provided.

Static Trigger, Rebecca Henry

Allusions

No abstract provided.

Rescue Politics: Richard Mosse’S Thermal Imaging And The Containment Of Migration, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article focuses on a body of work by Mosse that includes the multichannel video installation Incoming, shown as a 52:12 minute three-channel video installation with 7.3 surround sound, and the photographic series Heat Maps (2015–2017) (Fig. 1). While Incoming concentrates on migration routes, Heat Maps portrays the architecture of refugee camps.4 I consider how the artist’s use of thermal imaging and his immersive mode of documentary complicates tropes used to represent migration. I reflect on the way Mosse’s artwork intersects with a long-standing interest by practitioners and theorists of film and photography in the idea of the camera as …

A Birdhouse For Dragons, Hogan Sloop

Allusions

No abstract provided.