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.
It is covered in rhythmic, improvised, hand stitches. This solitary activity in a working life based in socially engaged arts projects is a material-based method that carves out a different sort of thinking space. It acts as a counter to the busyness of community spaces, the constant reflexivity required as practitioner- researcher, offering a stillness and quieter contemplation. During my PhD I used it as another way of managing often messy real-world multi-site research and also as a mirror of it.
Needle-weaving with leftover threads, Stitch Journal detail (2013-23)
Doing edits I make small needle-woven shapes using scraps of leftover thread. I have begun to see them as interruptions, small but significant. Completing fieldwork and writing up through a pandemic has interrupted my life and my every day in a legion of ways, my thinking practices seem altered, scattered. I always seem to be picking things up and putting them down again. I am reminded of a quote I have used in teaching over many years by Lucy Lippard, writing about quilts as art, that women’s time ‘comes in small squares’.1
Stitch Journal, reverse detail (2013-23)
My notes – language, ‘scaffolding’, intense focus on my document, the writing, editing, rewriting, doing and undoing of texts, thoughts, moments. The textile as document again. Highlights added to the text for correction/ clarification. Coloured page marker stickers doing the seemingly endless editing, refining. How was this like the precision of my needle puncturing the cloth? When looking at it again from the back it became clear. Mess, improvisation, becoming, undone.2
10 years of daily stitching, Stitch Journal (2013-23)
Notes
Lippard, L.R. (1983) ‘Up, Down, And Across: A New Frame for New Quilts.’ In The Artist and The Quilt ed. Robinson, C. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 33-43 ↩︎
Clare Wellesley-Smith is an artist, researcher and writer based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. Her projects are situated within arts, heritage and community wellbeing. The ability of textile to transform and connect over time informs her studio, community and research practices. Her doctoral research project Crafting Resilience: Cultural heritage and community engagement in post-industrial textile communities (2022) with The Open University was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is currently an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies also at The Open University.
Main Image: Expanded view Stitch Journal (2013-23)
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.
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 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 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.
