I like the unpath best: Art-practice-writing and the creation of complex, generative and complicating forms and contexts

Abstract

Situating myself as a visual artist with a multi-modal practice, this paper will explore the relationship of writing to making, using the relationship of writing to my own practice to explore questions relating to research processes, the volume of information gathered, and the insertion of other disciplinary perspectives. Here, I will address the element of my practice that is based in landscape, specifically explorations that begin with the idea that places are multi-layered, ever-changing, embodied and always active. In seeing places as experiential fields of investigation, writing can add a more complex dimension as it flows from the landscape itself and research about it, to practice, with writing occasionally becoming the artform itself. This article will consider the connection of writing to practice, and specifically use the relationship of writing within my own arts practice to explore questions relating to research processes and the potential outcomes and outputs of that research.The relationship of art and writing, art to writing and writing to art is complex and ongoing, and it is not my intent in this article to survey its complex and multifaceted history. Rather, this article will consider a specific subject, that of landscape and place 1 , and the interplay between research -writingmaking, how each of these elements can inform the other and what happens in the spaces of research and its aftermath when one brings other disciplinary perspectives, investigations and ways of seeing and encountering into one's work. In particular I will address how writing has shifted from being an integral but inward and private part of an arts practice to an element of work which can be outward Image 1. Tetrao urugallus (male) Found object collected while broodcounting