Theorizing Through Repetitive Art Making Processes

• In Event: Constructing Educational Possibilities: Teaching Difference Through Repetition

Abstract

Reflection on the self as artist/researcher/teacher in the practice of inquiry through iteration transfers perception towards embodied ways of knowing, provoking a turn to praxis where entanglements of theory and praxis emerge (Coleman, 2018). In this collaborative teaching/learning process, I asked the collective to integrate theorizing into repetitive art making processes. The act of creation paired with theory becomes living curriculum through the iterative process of responding to and breathing with inquiry. Repetition in creation takes on a role of reflexivity, aligning process with active knowledge production, including "multiple cycles of cycles of planning, acting, evaluating, reflecting, and documenting"; and within each iteration, we create, readjust, invent, and re-create whereby performing reflection-in-action (Bilous et al., 2018, p. 169). Supposing we include experiential learning as a part of the iterative process that occurs naturally within our group interactions. In that case, we embed collaborators' experience within the reflexive process as part of narrative identity construction. This process contrasts cyclical models of experiential learning. In that the reflexivity that occurs through repetition becomes iteration, and the "experience of constructing and reconstructing an autobiography with an interlocutor," which is inherent in engagement and composition, and not something to append following research experiences (Masterson, 2018, p. 4). So, through this process of thinking through repetitive art production, iteratively examining, and regulating ourselves, we advance personal and professional growth, are mindful of our ideas to evaluate, and set intentions to follow through with them (Mitchell, 2017). Through these re/creations, we disrupt notions of what re/search and re/presentation is and should be. Artistic creation and transcription can be perceived in the liminal space between artist and researcher, that the information gathered through inquiry is not an object, but a journey between objects, seeking not to form a path to one from another; it is the movement in-between that is crucial to understanding (Cannon, 2018). Analysis becomes fluid, chameleonic, with the capacity to shift with the experience and perspective of the researcher at that given moment (Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). In the witnessing and creation of arts-based research, we can begin to comprehend and decipher intangible, abstract works of art "through iterative investigative process involving new forms of interpretation and representation" (Gerber & Myers-Coffman, 2018, p. 596).
We develop reflexive interpretive practices through ABR to produce a stage for transparency in inquiry, generate visual interpretations of human experience, elicit empathy, and create profound comprehension of the human experience. An iterative and dialectical praxis of navigating amid art and text as a "dialectic and dynamic movement between deductive and inductive knowledge, participant/observer perspectives, and arts-based and textual data" is a fundamental process in arts-based research (Gerber & Myers-Coffman, 2018, p. 604). Iteration becomes the progression that adopts plurality, and through this, we "investigate, juxtapose and synthesize ambiguities"; the tensions emerging through dialogue and ambiguities emanating from non-verbalized knowledge are explored through engagement in an immersive, reflexive iterative praxis, and as visuals emerge, metaphors and symbolism float to the surface through the creation of an arts-based visual narrative (p. 604).

Author

• Jennifer A. Wicks, Université du Quebec en Outaouais