NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

Practice.

BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined through the process of undertaking PhD creative writing practice research.

Situated in a context of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and other “life” changes, the reflection explores how throughout the course of the PhD, my perspective on what counts as “the practice” has shifted. I have over time come to see the research practice and the creative practice, and ultimately the PhD, not as individual and distinct practices within my life, but as related and continuous expressions of the practice which is life.

Read the essay

Emily Wotherspoon is a PhD candidate at RMIT Melbourne, researching the creative practice of writing film and television adaptations, looking at the portrayal of potentially queer women across time.

More from this issue

Palimpsest Series

BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration

Read More +
A Gathering.

BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric

Read More +
Insanity Helps

BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It

Read More +
Literally In

BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a

Read More +

More from this issue

Editorial
BY Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty
Read more +
practice research
BY JOSHUA IP – The interrogation of practice is a common task faced by practice-based researchers. As a PhD candidate the Practice Research Symposium programme in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT, focusing on the discipline of Creative Writing, I have attempted to interrogate my wide-ranging practice as poet, editor and literary organiser for the past six years.
Read more +
How life gets in: poem and essay
BY ANNE M. CARSON – Disrupting, interrupting and sometimes derailing study in both welcome and unwelcome ways; life gets into PhD projects in a plethora of ways, so much so that there often seems to be no hard boundary between them. This essay uses the example of synchronicity as one way that ‘life gets in’.
Read more +
Palimpsest Series
BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration from the concept of a palimpsest and the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
Read more +
A Beginner’s Mind: From Ball-Hating HDR to Basketball Coach
BY JENNY HEDLEY – In this reflective essay, a time-poor single mother and PhD candidate accidentally takes on the role of basketball coach as she seeks to achieve balance between scholastics and life.
Read more +
Between – Cabbage Tree Creek, April-July 2023
BY MICHAEL DONEMAN – Between is a reflection on loss and renewal. It interweaves personal, cultural, and environmental stories near the country where I live, by a waterway at the edge of the Boondall Wetlands called Cabbage Tree Creek.
Read more +
Write, stitch, unpick
BY CLAIRE WELLESLEY-SMITH – The use of textile as a creative recording method alongside my PhD (2023, The Open University) extended a practice I began in 2013. Stitch Journal is a long length of linen cloth, pieces added in sections.
Read more +
‘Where a language is opening’
BY SUSIE CAMPBELL – Before an unexpected brush with serious illness, the journey of my PhD research project seemed clear. I set out to engage with the avant-garde Modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein in order to draw on her experimental approach to language for my own processual model of poetic practice.
Read more +
A Gathering.
BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric essay, is written with the conventions of the lyric essay, utilising white space, non-linearity, image, archive, fragment, association and braiding.
Read more +
Insanity Helps
BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It is styled as an interview with the self and is punctuated by interactions between the interviewers which descend into hostile conversations.
Read more +
My Life IS my PhD Research
BY JENNY HICKINBOTHAM – Life didn’t GET IN to my PhD research, my life IS my PhD research.
Read more +
Literally In
BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a writer, doctoral researcher, and a psychiatric survivor.
Read more +
Writing Life: reflections on parenting, poetry and practice-based research
BY ISABELLA G. MEAD – This creative response to ‘How Life Gets In’ details my experience maintaining a creative practice while also being a PhD candidate and a parent to young children.
Read more +
How voluntary assisted dying turbo-charged my doctorate
BY LAINIE ANDERSON – Life didn’t get in the way of my PhD. Death did. Or more specifically, it was South Australia’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill (2020).
Read more +
Degrees of Separation
BY DANTE DeBONO – ‘Degrees of separation’ is a reflective consideration of the ways in which creators navigate the complexity of their internal writing processes as unique configurations of their lived experiences.
Read more +

In the spirit of reconciliation, the DDCA acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

Copyright 2024 – DDCA