Dissertation
Blogging art and sustenance : Artful everyday life (making) with water
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Western Sydney University
2017
Metrics
8 Record Views
Abstract
In the local area of Western Port Catchment, Victoria, Australia, I engaged in an arts-based qualitative inquiry over seven years. As a marine ecologist, educator, maker and mother, I looked to artists who created artworks in relation to water to investigate how art-making might contribute to traditional science-based Sustainability Education. Initially I examined: What alternative relationship is negotiated and knowledge attained between an artist and a waterway in the art-making process? Artworks, photographs and transcripts of time spent with seven women – each of whom creatively encounter their local waterways in their everyday lives – were captured on my private research blog. A new query surfaced: How can I sustain waterways if I am not sustaining myself? An alternative methodology of blogging formed (bodyplaceblogging). I used an awareness of my body and its inclusion in the ecology of the world around me (place) through Somerville’s (1999) embodied response to place which asserts a body’s right to know place. With the bodyplaceblogging process, I moved through a post-structural/ (post)qualitative style onto a posthuman platform. I began to think with-water, moving playfully through an initial methodological frame of sustainable education (Sterling, 2001); beauty in everyday life (Rautio, 2009); post modern emergence (Somerville, 1999); and material thinking (Carter, 2004), into an emerging methodology that continued to be reframed as I encountered the words and images of the local artists, my children, the academic and theoretical literature (e.g. Grosz; Barad; Bachelard; Rautio; Deleuze and Guattari), and an emerging critical, embodied, place-aware everyday life. Data analysed in the blog was discovered to be data again in the thesis-writing process, leading to an a-typically formed and formatted thesis: a blogged, knitted blanket of space, place and body-squares. A linear notion of time became disrupted in a space of virtual time preserved in the past (blog posts) and actual time passing in the present (academic/prose) (Grosz, 2005). Here there is an abundance of matter made with, and making, all that I encounter in my mothering, artful, ecological, everyday life with water. Sustainability, as a movement, is traditionally defined as resisting the catastrophe before the end, sustaining what we have in rations – a provocation for lack. New possibilities for sustenance and for what is becoming, and unbecoming, emerge here in the making processes of everyday life.
Details
- Title
- Blogging art and sustenance : Artful everyday life (making) with water
- Creators
- Sarah Maree Crinall - Southern Cross University, Faculty of Education
- Awarding Institution
- Western Sydney University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Western Sydney University
- Identifiers
- 991013174113802368
- Resource Type
- Dissertation