NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

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.

Throughout this serendipitous and iterative process, I have meandered through academic fields as varied as social design, the digital humanities, the Singapore poetry anthology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, with my latest iteration situating my practice somewhere between translation and adaptation studies. I have attempted to contextualise this process of soliciting original knowledge but from an often uncooperative witness with seven stanzas of rhyming verse. This practice research experiment should be contextualised within the community of practice of creative practice research theorists including R Lyle Skains, Linda Candy, Ernest Edmonds, Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt, Graeme Sullivan and others.

Read the poem


Joshua Ip the author of five volumes of poetry from Math Paper Press. He has co-edited eleven poetry anthologies. His debut collection won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014. He also won the Golden Point Award for English Prose in 2013 for the short story ‘The Man Who Turned Into a Photocopier’, was runner-up for English Poetry in 2011, and received an Honorable Mention for Chinese Poetry in 2015. He was the recipient of the Young Artist Award for Singapore in 2017. He was a WrICE fellow in 2018. He is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University.

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 +
Practice.

BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined

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

BY Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BY JENNY HICKINBOTHAM – Life didn’t GET IN to my PhD research, my life IS my PhD research.
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.
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.
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).
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.