JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2019

Our Guest Editorial interview this issue is with Associate Professor Jim Drobnick, who reached out and suggested a possible collaboration. ‘Ficto-criticism’ is an assignment in the course he teaches in the Masters in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, and involves a creative act of writing that subverts traditional ideas of art criticism. Look out for this exciting collaboration in the next issue, where JAWS will host a special section for ficto-critical work!

In Unmade, Untitled, my practice as research project, the sense of un/belonging – a feeling of dislocation paired with the notion of impossible homecomings – is transferred in affective and embodied ways to audience participants. This article outlines the methods that Unmade uses to create memory spaces to comment on the complexities of migratory belongings in an age of global migration. This is done by introducing disruptive material metaphors into ritualistic food-making, and requesting the performance of surrogate speakers from participants who re-voice an autobiographical narrative.

The following work looks into how table top games inherently create a space that operates in a tandem reality. Within this space human interaction and connection are played out through a shared narrative experience, practicing the expression of self. Through both a theoretical and practical research approach, the work in this article will set out as an exploration and an assessment of the importance of that space.

This article presents the artist’s book as an aberrant object. Using the work of Czech-born Australian artist Petr Herel (1943–present) as a case study, it draws upon interdisciplinary theories from art history, anthropology and socio-cultural studies to examine the interpretation, collection and display of the aberrant artist’s book. The attribution of aberrance to the artist’s book is not a pejorative, but a positive term that casts new light on why the artist’s book sits so uncomfortably in art historical discourse and institutional practices as a ‘high load’ object. Rather than limiting analysis, examining aberrance generates room for subjective analysis that embraces the experiential qualities of tactility and temporality that jar with conventional art histories.

This is an attempt to elucidate non-Cartesian re-presentation (NCR) as a creative methodology allowing for the revealing of nonhuman agencies. Cartesian representation has presented a world of nonhumans ready for consumption, even exploitation. NCR works to reveal what-is and a sense of relational being through the arts encounter, negating a sense of human exceptionalism through movement, reciprocity and slippage. In this proposition I draw from the writing of Barbara Bolt to re-engage with the male philosophies of the past, to re-signify the lines of thinking, to imagine the potentialities of re-presentation outside of the predominate fictive imaginary.

Can we survive 24 hours without touch screen technology? Have you observed how we travel in the Underground? It is unbelievable how these devices have radically changed social dynamics in a decade. If our first primitive approach to aesthetics was through tactility, how is screen caressing affecting us? In an individualistic and image consumerist society, touch screens empower illusion and the spectacle. This exploratory research done, between 2016 and 2018, attempts to understand how touch screen might, paradoxically, detach us from our tactile and haptic instincts. This article concludes with prospective inquiries seeking to find an equilibrium in approaching new technologies without losing our humanity.

This article aims to build a brief reflection on expanded cinema beyond the traditional circuit (EU–USA) by presenting the trajectory of the Brazilian duo Mirella Brandi x MuepEtmo. It also presents light and sound as an autonomous artistic language with the potential to create/change environments and evoke new perceptions for the viewer. This article was achieved through bibliographical research, presenting a theoretical reflection on expanded cinema using four unpublished interviews with the artists between 2016 and 2017. The interviews focused on their use of only light and sound, and on how they see their relationship with the audience, inducing the spectators to create their own subjective narrative.

This article examines how preclosure theory and the data gathered from preclosural analysis might be used to support creative writing. Preclosure theory attempts to reveal how and why readers chunk short stories into ‘meaningful units above the sentence level’ (Lohafer 2003: 58) through identification and analysis, both structural and linguistic, of those sentences in a narrative where a reader feels the story could end. This article begins with a description of the development of a preclosural writing frame for the creation of short fiction, explaining how the writing frame itself is developed in response to data generated by the preclosural analysis of fifteen British short stories written between 1885 and 1920. Here I propose that this methodology offers the author-practitioner a new way of controlling the staging of closure within a short story by replacing a previously intuitive process with a more conscious approach. In the article’s second half, I describe my writing process prior to my engaging with preclosure theory. This account of my intuitive and unconscious manipulation of closural staging in prior works provides context for an evaluation of the impact of this methodology upon both my writing process and the text produced. In closing, I argue that the preclosural writing process outlined here has had a positive effect upon my own practice and, furthermore, has the potential to extend the author-practitioner’s understanding of and ability to innovatively employ the staging of closure when crafting a short story.