My fingernail is nearly grown out. I don't remember how I did it in the first place, it probably involved a hammer or something I was using as a hammer. The dead pool of blood started out near the perfect half moon of whiteness that I am told, on good authority, has the consistency of mashed potato. I have watched it grow out over the last four months. It is a good marker of time as it cuts through weeks and months, deadlines and disparate projects. There is something inevitable and progressive about its slow growth, this is how PhD time should flow.
I seem to have accidentally taken a month off from PhD work. I was getting deeply stressed and frustrated with the writing I was doing. I would not say it was making me ill because in my, family things of the mind never make you ill. Even though we have lived with the impact of mental illness destroying lives, our bi-polar genes cascading through generations, we all find it difficult to say that there may be a problem. My problems always seem to surface when I get stuck into writing and produce texts that do not match up to what I have in my mind's eye. Making art felt like this for a long time, especially after I had just finished art school. I did not feel like I had access to the tools, materials and time to make anything good enough. I would gradually build my workshop, buy a lathe, a welder, a circular saw, and I amassed a collection of bits and bots, bellows and false legs, things I found on the beach, hand worn pieces of wood, my Dad's tools, my Grandad's tools, and a leather bag of lead shot that my Great Grandad had used to make 12 bore shotgun cartridges. I gradually gave up on the impossibility of what I wanted to make in my mind's eye and started to make what was possible. The possible then replaced the aspirational and I began to make things that I became happy with. To be happy with is not to be satisfied, when you are satisfied you tend to stop. In contrast, as you start to get happy with things you feel inspired to do more. I have channeled my desire to make things into making things that are part of making something happen. The piece I carry from my practice is the importance of doing something rather than nothing, the strange yet potent truism "Stuff comes from Stuff".
I have been writing academic papers since 2010. I do this with competence and flare. As a writer I attempt to play with forms, to write in a way that is unexpected. I am a poet and a storyteller with a belief that there is always something missing and always something more. I play with written forms in a way that I play with materials and objects. Never fully locating myself in something that can be recognised, yet consistently paying attention to the nuanced details of words and things that bring us closer to something. My break from writing my PhD has made me feel better in myself but has not as yet, brought any resolution to start to write again.
I decided today that what I needed to do was bulk out my writing. I used the analogy of a meal where you only had 2 or 3 tasty things like some anchovies, olives and fillet steak and you had to bulk it out with rice or mashed potato. I think I know what my tasty things are - they are concepts rather than garnish.
1. The opacity of artistic practice, the secret plan that nobody, not even the artist is fully aware of. The plan is linked closely to feeling. The feeling that something is the right thing to do and the internal and opaque logic of the sense of it. All art comes from this place. Sometimes it is located in a single person yet more often it is dispersed.
2. Research-creation as a way to introduce and hold this opacity within a research project as distinct from the creation or event of art in the world.
3. The collective and irreducible singularity of the event as an ontological position. It feels that although different to some extent there is a need for any way of being that sets itself against dominant modes of thought to have and hold a structure of concepts that can resist.
4. My take on the singularity is to propose, use and define the term 'raveling' as a concept that will do work within my study. This is the fillet steak of the meal, it needs to be cooked with care and shared out in careful portions. This will be my contribution to the field - a concept that I think will help artists think and work differently.
This is what Deleuze and Guatari set out to do or at the very least propose. A minor philosophy that would chip away at the foundations of thought until the edifice is undermined to the extent that the only way forward was to build something new. We sit in the forlorn ruins of a near defunct capitalism where we feel everything is to be lost and nothing can be found. Everything within the structure of the academic way of knowing about the world seems unable to move away from a building block approach to knowledge.
