‘Speaking With’ the school run

This text uses auto-theoretical, diaristic and narrative writing methods to think through how correspondence operates in my writing, performative painting and moving image practice through a method I refer to as ‘speaking with’.¹ I understand ‘speaking with’ to be a feminist method of practice, of coming close to works, ideas, other artists and writers and their texts, to converse with them through practice. Practices and research that utilizes ‘speaking with’ methods acknowledge and articulate proximity and subjectivity between conversational interlocutors in drawing on, and thinking with, the works of others. By engaging with creative materials, texts, archival gaps and bodies, subjectivities are held in dialogue, from which work arises. As a method of conversation in fine art practice, research and writing, and in thinking through the potential of the term ‘correspondence’, I am opening this term out to account for different forms of engaging with an interlocutor in practice. This includes forms of art writing, autofiction and auto theory, as well as non-textual, material-driven creative and research practice, articulating these conversational encounters as fine art practice including moving image, performance, painting, sculpture, installation and more. In this text I enact ‘speaking with’ in correspondence with Amy Sillman’s concept of ‘awkwardness’, the work of Lynda Benglis, haptic memory of touch and feminist thinking around the horizontal. This work presents a thinking through an expanded painting, sculptural, moving image and performance practice and the role of the floor as an important dialogic space in my work.