Helen Chadwick’s ‘Composite Images’

This article traces the considerations of British artist Helen Chadwick (1953–1996) regarding ‘composite images’ and the potential liberation they opened up in the gap between image and form, surface and spectator. These will be discussed as the author follows two apparently contrasting trajectories of her thought; while her considerations of the image, and her own image-making, tend increasingly towards ‘pure surface’, her ambitions for spectatorial positioning and agency increase. In parallel, while the epistemological underpinnings of her thinking become increasingly complex and dynamic, the role of (self)portraiture in her work moves away from the portrayal of her own, and later the recognisably human, body. These trajectories can be mapped (roughly) onto particular projects, beginning with Ego Geometria Sum (1982–1984), developing through Of Mutability (1984–1986) where she first used the photocopier to produce ‘automatic images’ and into her light-based installations, such as Blood Hyphen (1988)

Lifeworld Inc. : and what to do about it

Can we detect changes in the way that the world turns up as they turn up? This paper makes such an attempt. The first part of the paper argues that a wide-ranging change is occurring in the ontological preconditions of Euro-American cultures, based in reworking what and how an event is produced. Driven by the security – entertainment complex, the aim is to mass produce phenomenological encounter: Lifeworld Inc as I call it. Swimming in a sea of data, such an aim requires the construction of just enough authenticity over and over again. In the second part of the paper, I go on to argue that this new world requires a different kind of social science, one that is experimental in its orientation—just as Lifeworld Inc is—but with a mission to provoke awareness in untoward ways in order to produce new means of association. Only thus, or so I argue, can social science add to the world we are now beginning to live in

Qualitative inquiry: where are the ruins?

The article interrogates the notion of “the ruins” and its cognates (rupture, loss, failure, etc.) as productively destructive figures for postfoundational methodology and wonders how much damage has actually been done. Hoping for ruins, have scholars merely produced a picturesque gloss on the same old Enlightenment edifice? The author finds some promise in Deleuze’s notion of the stutter, using this to look at what happens when the body surfaces in language. The author suggests that attention to the bodily entanglements of language, which qualitative method generally prefers to forget, can be put to work to perform a particular form of productive ruin commended by Deleuze—namely, the ruin of representation

Representing creativeness : practice-based approaches to research in creative arts

The investigation of creativeness in the creative arts requires some theoretical originality to enable the development of an effective research method capable of subtly reporting upon original artistic activity. The research endeavour requires something of the tactfulness of the work it seeks to understand. Considered introspection, in the form of practice-based research, into creative arts practice offers the opportunity to try to understand the way an artist engages in an original way with their physical, cultural and psychic raw materials