Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia
Abstract
The installation Thank You (two words), will be an outcome of my research into the creative process through practice-led research. It will aim to communicate to the viewer something of the search and experimentation I have carried out in the studio through a material engagement with a small personal archive of writing by Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007). Through an engagement with particular materials-paper, ink, and dust the installation will also aim to participate in a conversation of broad relevance in the visual arts, and one in which many artists, writers and thinkers have been interested since the eighteenth century: a conversation about thinking, making and seeing begun by Romantic writers and thinkers. Many recent commentators, including visual artists, have responded to the archive as a melancholy place of loss; however my research has been predicated on the notion that the archive and the past to which it gives access might make possible conversations with the thinkers, writers and artists of the past and facilitate contemporary creative work. As such, my research also participates in a conversation about the archive. This exegesis backgrounds my planned installation through a discussion which briefly describes the Jolley archive and the key ideas-the Romantic fragment, the archive, dust-that have accompanied my creative work in the studio. I demonstrate the ways in which Paul Carters\u27 concept of material thinking has been instrumental in the development of my project, through a discussion of my adoption of aspects of Elizabeth Jolley\u27s creative process and in the development of my planned installation. I also outline the way I have come to see the migration of dust as a metaphor for interactions between people and objects in the spaces of the archive and the gallery and for the conversations in which I aim to participate through the installation, Thank You (two words)
