Feminist creative practice research: methods, motives and meaning
3 December 2022 at 2:00:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Courtney Pedersen, Queensland University of Technology
Dr Rachael Haynes, Queensland University of Technology
Session Speakers
Dr Naomi Blacklock, Queensland University of Technology
Zoe Freney, Adelaide Central School of Art & Australian National University
Dr Karike Ashworth, Queensland University of Technology
Creative practice-led and feminist research methods demonstrate many shared ethical and practical goals, including developing unique or distinctive outcomes, the pursuit of affective resonance, and valuing diverse perspectives in research. Feminist research asks crucial questions about what constitutes knowledge, how it is obtained, and for what purposes. There are evident synergies between this feminist questioning and the goal of creative practice research to prompt, reveal and communicate new ways of knowing that cannot be adequately discovered or demonstrated via traditional academic methods. This may explain why these two approaches have been increasingly melded over the past twenty years. The history of creative research is also a history of women’s and/or feminist contributions to methodological debates. This panel provides an opportunity to assess the mutual impact of these methods.
Intersectionality: Empowerment, Healing, and Identity Using Intersectional Feminist Methodology in Contemporary Creative Practice
Dr Naomi Blacklock, Queensland University of Technology
Creative practice using Intersectional Feminism as a methodology can serve as a way to decolonialise feminist methods and empower creative practitioners. Using practitioner reflection, engaging in critical self-reflexivity, I consider how to use sound, performance, and ritual methods to create a visual lexicon for understanding overlapping identities and experiences. Kimberley Crenshaw continues to define Intersectional Feminism “as a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other” (Steinmetz, 2020). This approach to feminist creative practice research takes a subjective view, bringing the artist’s personal, emotional history and narrative to light. In my creative practice, I explore my culturally diverse background, in the context of tensions between gender, race and sexuality. Using sound, performance and ritual as cultural and feminist process and political tools, I produce feedback loops of my own voice and artefacts traditionally used in ritual practices. Making noise as aural contamination and noise pollution, and as a way to acknowledge and consolidate my own existence in the face of colonisation and patriarchal culture, I occupy space to be seen and heard, as the feminist ‘other’. Through creative practice, I aim to expand upon these intersectional frameworks and use them as a space for cathartic healing that empowers me personally and creatively.
Some matricentric feminist problems of creativity and care during lockdown: making the new normal through anecdote, mess and interruption
Zoe Freney, Adelaide Central School of Art & Australian National University
This paper presents findings from my PhD project, Making the New, Normal: re-presenting mothers’ subjectivities and their creative potential. The practice-based research project investigates how the creation and dissemination of artworks representing some experiences of contemporary mothers may help recuperate representations of mothers in contemporary western visual culture, challenging their denigration and exploitation. This project became particularly urgent during COVID-19 and its concomitant social impacts, as work, care and research were all compressed within the same temporal and spatial situation of the locked-down home. The research project is thus framed as a creative response to a matricentric feminist problem, that is, the intensification of neoliberal structures of motherhood under global pandemic conditions. Working with theories of the matrixial and subjectivity in the feminine, the artworks produced in the project situate motherhood and the domestic sphere as ethical and generative sites of innovation and potential. The paper explores art’s possibilities for affect and impact in disrupting the dominant discourses around motherhood today and how these outcomes may be measured.
Being brave: Mixed data collection methods in feminist research
Dr Karike Ashworth, Queensland University of Technology
Data collection methods for feminist creative practice-led researchers can be diverse but they are also fundamental to the process of determining or revealing research questions. This paper is a practitioner reflection on the melding of methodological approaches I have undertaken in my practice, including researching and applying an intersectional feminist media studies methodology to a traditional academic research paper on a topic closely related to my usual area of creative practice research. While certainly difficult, this approach led to a generous, global, collaborative exchange with multiple intersectional feminist researchers across research paradigms and was significant in assisting me to understand the research problem more fully and, in particular, its intersectional relevance. Further examples from practice are also provided to show how research problems/enquiry questions are initiated and/or revealed across different parts of a practice: in the making (obviously), but also in the performance feedback loop, exhibition display, collaboration, artwork damage, dialogue, giving speeches, teaching etc. The paper argues that these are all important data collection methods for a feminist practice-led researcher.
Biographies
Dr Naomi Blacklock, Queensland University of Technology
Naomi Blacklock is an artist based in Brisbane, Australia whose practice maps the nexus of embodied performance, culture heritage, and gender identity. Working across a range of media, from experimental sound installation, performance and sculpture, her work creatively examines the mythologies, archetypes and harmful histories of gender and cultural identity. Her ritualised sound objects and performances are intended to amplify the body and the voice through performative bodily precision and aural screaming. In 2019 Naomi was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy. Her work has been presented at Hobart’s Art Festival, Dark Mofo, and in numerous galleries and Artist-Run-Initiatives, both locally and interstate.
Zoe Freney, Adelaide Central School of Art & Australian National University
Zoe Freney is a practicing artist and research academic. She lectures at Adelaide Central School of Art where she is (Acting) Coordinator BVA and BVA (Honours). Zoe is currently a candidate in the PhD program at the Australian National University, where her project explores depictions of mothers and mothering from a matricentric feminist standpoint. Zoe's artwork has been featured in numerous exhibitions and prizes. She has shown work internationally in Scotland and North America. Zoe has also been widely published in a range of art journals and online writing platforms including Artlink and fine print.
Dr Karike Ashworth, Queensland University of Technology
Dr Karike Ashworth is an Australian feminist contemporary visual artist and sessional academic at the Queensland University of Technology. She completed her doctoral studies in Visual Arts in 2019. The focus of her research are the expectations that govern the lives of women.
Dr Rachael Haynes, Queensland University of Technology
Dr Rachael Haynes is a Senior Lecturer in Visuals Arts in the School of Creative Practice at QUT. Rachael's research investigates feminist ethics, archives, care and activism through pedagogical, curatorial, participatory and installation strategies. Recent creative works and projects have been exhibited at the Wallach Art Gallery, New York (2021), IMA, Brisbane (2020) and the Museum of Brisbane (2019-20). Rachael's writing on feminism and art has been published in journals including Feminist Review, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Journal of Australian Studies, Educational Philosophy and Theory and was also included in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism (2019).
Dr Courtney Pedersen, Queensland University of Technology
Dr Courtney Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology, with a special interest in feminist creative practice research and creative pedagogies. She is currently affiliated with the Centre for Child and Family Studies and the More-Than-Human Futures research group at QUT.