Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 

About: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice is an academic journal published by Intellect. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Creative writing & Academic writing. It has an ISSN identifier of 1753-5190. Over the lifetime, 193 publications have been published receiving 606 citations. The journal is also known as: JWCP.

A connective model for the practice-led research exegesis: An analysis of content and structure

Abstract: Since the formal recognition of practice-led research in the 1990s, many higher research degree candidates in art, design and media have submitted creative works along with an accompanying written document or ‘exegesis’ for examination. Various models for the exegesis have been proposed in university guidelines and academic texts during the past decade, and students and supervisors have experimented with its contents and structure. With a substantial number of exegeses submitted and archived, it has now become possible to move beyond proposition to empirical analysis. In this article we present the findings of a content analysis of a large, local sample of submitted exegeses. We identify the emergence of a persistent pattern in the types of content included as well as overall structure. Besides an introduction and conclusion, this pattern includes three main parts, which can be summarized as situating concepts (conceptual definitions and theories); precedents of practice (traditions and exemplars in the field); and researcher’s creative practice (the creative process, the artifacts produced and their value as research). We argue that this model combines earlier approaches to the exegesis, which oscillated between academic objectivity, by providing a contextual framework for the practice, and personal reflexivity, by providing commentary on the creative practice. But this model is more than simply a hybrid: it provides a dual orientation, which allows the researcher to both situate their creative practice within a trajectory of research and do justice to its personally invested poetics. By performing the important function of connecting the practice and creative work to a wider emergent field, the model helps to support claims for a research contribution to the field. We call it a connective model of exegesis.

Here, ‘I’ am

Abstract: In this paper I will discuss three communicative acts: an ephemeral artwork InMemory; a narrative ‘The art of being lost’; and a paper ‘Ephemeral Art: Mourning and Loss’. These were presented, respectively, at the Salina Art Centre, Kansas; Emotional Geography Conference, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario; and (Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. These pieces deal with the same subject, but are presented in different modes reflecting the requirements of different sites – a gallery, a conference, and a book. All three aspired to creativity as well as rigour, to articulate intuitive as well as empirical knowledge. I will discuss these works in terms of site specificity and integrated practice, rather than opposite poles of a creative spectrum, which places text at one end and image at the other. I will demonstrate how each mode has informed the other and how each has benefited from the particular requirement imposed by the ‘site’. The site here is not just the physical location but includes the anticipated audience, the environment, and the atmosphere. The works are interactive and are akin to the concept in communication analysis of ‘recipient design’. I hope this case study may be useful in providing an alternative to viewing writing in art and design as inherently problematic. Instead, I offer an analysis of a multifaceted practice in which the ‘I’ is always present, implicitly or explicitly.

The Critical in Design (Part One)

Abstract: The paper concerns the critical in design which is examined under three headings: structurally, as an internal aspect of the processes of designing; economically, in terms of the internal collusion between (weak) design and the strength, persistence and lure of market forces and private interests; historically, in terms of the emergence of a situation—the artificial becoming the horizon and medium of our existence—that now marks our times as one where design takes on new critical dimensions, above all in relation to securing and creating the conditions that can support a humane sustainable global futures. I: The indispensability of the critical ‘Criticality’ trips uncomfortably off the tongue, feels instinctively awkward in use. No surprise then that its use is unfamiliar, and not only in everyday speech. For design, ever unsure how to treat the critical, the connotations are in any case difficult: it is one thing to deploy criticism (in an operational context – to make it useful to designers as in a studio critique), it is even permissible (just) to be a critic (in a professional sense) – there is, after all, if in embryo, a field of design criticism. But what are we to make of the critical when we deploy it as a noun? What does criticality describe? And what would it be to have the critical not just as an occasional moment, but as that which defines the very state of being of a practice? It was perhaps these uncertainties that prompted, in December 2007, a rare silence on the Ph.D.-Design list-serve. Kaja Gretinger, a designer, researcher and writer from the Jan Van Eyck Akadamie sought help in understanding the potential of the ‘critical’ of design. (The epigraph reproduces the essence of her request.) But though pregnant with implication, for practice as much as for theory, her questions evoked little response. They were, as Barthes might have put it, the ‘motor of no development’. Nor did they provoke what many might think long overdue, namely a debate (or at least a discussion, a symposia) around the role of the critical in design.1 177 JWCP 1 (2) pp. 177–189 © Intellect Ltd 2008 1. It should be noted that Kaja Gretinger has recently answered her own questions in a short but telling paper Thinking Through Blind Spots, 2008. (Unpublished at time of writing) Keywords