Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Ways of Writing in Art and Design, Sept 2022

As the COVID-19 pandemic gathered momentum in 2020, it became clear that online teaching spaces risked a distancing from the embodied knowledge so necessary to creative education. Teaching written texts to creative practitioners is a process that calls for alternative spatial and visual literacies, for ontological methods, for honouring experience and reflection – especially in a neo-liberal climate of higher education. In my teaching practice, as well as writing and painting practices, I like so many others have sought spaces for nourishment during this era. Through my teaching and a collaborative research group, one space in which I located this was via hope. This is a time to ask if we can use this moment in history to encourage thinking in an untrammelled manner and to move more freely in the unfamiliar, to transform the classroom; to seek materiality as a method of interpretation, even online; to encourage fearlessness, plurality and relationality; to use craft methods; and to enter a space of care and emotional openness. This contribution will consider creative allyship between staff and students, with the written text as a place of beginning. This is a deliberately open-ended, exploratory, personal and reflective piece of writing, gathered during teaching and research from 2020 to 2022. ‘Ways of Writing’ are explored both through the method of this article as well as its content.

A writing/making divide, within the broader theory/practice myth, is part of the historical narrative in art and design education that both clashes with, and persists in, current practices of writing in art and design. The theory/practice myth separates thinking from doing, head from hand, and writing from making, causing internal frictions in art and design subjects. This article provides a historical and contextual mapping of the writing/making binary in creative practice, drawing on Ivor Goodson’s (1993, 1995, 1997, 2002) work on ‘antecedent subject subcultures’ to discuss the formation and maintenance of subject cultures and – ultimately – their potential to change.

Writing is not, and has never been, our only means of communication or communion. In the university, writing continues to occupy the dominant position in terms of how ideas ‘should be’ communicated – and, more importantly, assessed. This is the case even in the visual arts where it is well understood that written language can feel limiting. This article considers the impact that the value afforded to the traditional academic essay has on working-class students, whose relationship to writing often differs from the norm. Impacts that are often conveniently forgotten – and set to become worse under the current UK government.

This illustrated article offers a record of work done for a third-year undergraduate module called Creative Writing and the Self, as part of the Creative and Professional Writing programme at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in the autumn term of 2021, where students created zines as a record of their student experiences, which corresponded to the years of the pandemic. The article considers the students’ creative process and what is communicated in the zines, pages from which illustrate the article, informed by the methodology of Lynda Barry. The module offered the opportunity for staff and students to use a more open-ended rhetoric than elsewhere on their course(s), and the article considers this alongside the pedagogical implications of a hybrid and multimodal form and approach, of telling stories using text and images, inviting acknowledgement and observation, rather than judgement.

This article considers the experience of writing a daily journal, published daily via a public social media site. The journal began on 31 March 2020 as an attempt to account for the suddenly changed experiences of my personal and professional life (as an artist and lecturer) in the early days of the first UK coronavirus lockdown; it is still ongoing. After producing 700,000 words, this project has come to be understood as having shifted my writing in creative practice to writing as a practice for creating life. An expansive readerly engagement with a variety of creative and critical diarists provides generative perspectives for rethinking life and work. This latter part of the article’s structure considers the ‘Sheffield in virus time’ project in relation to poet Kumiko Hahn’s characterization of the zuihitsu as a fungal form. This Japanese genre (translated as ‘following the will of the pen’) develops casual, loosely connected fragments and ideas, often in haphazard order, a form well-suited to the ongoingness of writing life.

If Matter Poetics, Melange and the Lichenised Posthuman is a universal examination of the interconnected fragments of life, Method/s for Hereafter is a far more personal look into what has transpired in the artist’s life since the original submission of the first essay. Fidkin uses their theory of Matter Poetics as a tool for processing grief, experiencing pleasure, suffering and sickness, and understanding their ever-evolving existence and connection to the more-than-human. Events – both poignant and inconsequential – are scrutinized at a molecular level, attempting to draw parallels between rhizomatic thinking and personal adversity and joy.

This article reflects upon my short visual recording Eyedrops: A Monoculogue (2021). It describes the thinking process of creative avoidance (both making something new, but recycling ideas and materials which already exist, both in the mind and close to hand); pleasure in making (the haptic joy of production); considerations of performance; being audience to one’s own work when exhibited alongside other work responding to the same initial call; re-presenting the work in a workshop context. While it draws upon interdisciplinary theoretical writing to provide phenomenological and ekphrastic considerations of the work, moving between the three-point dynamic which links and divides viewing positions: the image (screen), subject (eye) and the object (puppet), it employs an immediacy of writing, which resists the usual considerations of academic scholarship in a move to free up thinking and to expose the emotional and experiential, questioning what it is to ‘see’.