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.
Date of Award | 2017 |
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Original language | English |
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- women artists
- blogs
- water in art
- science in art
- environmental education
- Australia
Blogging art and sustenance : artful everyday life (making) with water
Crinall, S. M. (Author). 2017
Western Sydney University thesis: Doctoral thesis