Research Interests

My doctoral research is motivated by a concern for how art practices which draw on concepts of participation,¹ dialogue,² and relationality³ can respond to the recent, renewed emphasis on materialism across a range of disciplines, and the urgency of adapting an arguably anthropocentric art practice⁴ to post-humanist theory⁵ under post-anthropocenic conditions.⁶

My thesis, as it has emerged, is that this mode of participatory, dialogic or relational art practice, is disposed towards others⁷ in such a way that it can readily generate more-than-human social formations based on mutually transformative relationships between people and things.

The working title of my doctoral thesis is: Who Else Takes Part? Admitting the more-than-human into participatory art.

This research is undertaken through practice, and has resulted in the production of six new artworks which cumulatively demonstrate the development of the thesis, the various concepts/themes that contribute to its emergence, and my own learning development through this process.

These artworks are all developed and produced through a process of gathering groups of participants, initially through a snowball-like method of sequential meetings, before assembling all participants at a live, discursive event; these are often recorded and later exhibited as transcribed audio-recordings or video-screenings, for example.

At the outset of this project, my understanding of who took part was largely constrained to my peers within the field of participatory, contemporary art. Over the course of the project the range of participants was extended to include the charred remains of a fibreglass sculpture, a large sample of steam coal, Dartmoor’s tin deposits, a boulder of Lewisian Gneiss, and a scrap of Neolithic Linen. Further to these ‘nonhuman’ things, the those people who took part in the artworks and the development of the thesis was extended to include those who were either symbolically or—most significantly for this research—materially related to those things.

1My initial points of reference were largely critical of the term: (Bishop 2011; Miessen 2011; Bourriaud 2002) although (Freire 2005)indicated participation as integral to working around the problematics of objectification in practices with an emancipatory ethos; more recently, through conversation with social science and humanties researchers at the university, I have turned to (Barad 2007)for an understanding of participation as intrinsic to all encounter.

2 I initially drew on (Bohm 2004; Kester 2004; Kester 2005) from (Buber 2002; Buber 1958; Bakhtin 1981; Clark and Holquist 1984).

3 Such as Bourriaud (2002); Latour (1993); Harman (2009).

4 ‘Relational aesthetics is now criticised for being too anthropocentric – I am OK with that. But I stand for it, too: the main political agenda for art consists in rehumanising those spheres from which the human has withdrawn – from the economy to ecology.’(Bourriaud and Charlesworth 2014)

5 Much of the new materialist literature and many of the researchers encountered during this project are situated within an ongoing post-humanist project, ‘in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself…’ ((Wolfe 2009)

6 I was initially introduced to the Anthropocene though (Morton 2012)and the of consequence of this concept for art practice in general; I understand the history of this concept through (Steffen et al. 2011)The concept is itself placed under pressure by those who would see the term as humanist, for example: (Malm, n.d.)this criticism is countered, and the usefulness of conflating of the geo and the anthropos discussed in (Van Dooren 2014, n1)

7 From Martin Buber’s ‘hospitably disposed to everything that may come.’(Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London: Routledge, 2002), 4.)