Abstract
This practice-led PhD operates across modes of installation, drawing, video, publication, and sculpture, utilising quotidian materials with excessive enthusiasm. The research explores the potential of three conditions: wiggle room, anti-smooth, and comic objects. In this research wiggle room calls attention to the untended by working through an ethics of support, responsibility, and collaborative modes of making. Wiggle room is an agitating movement that is a purposeful attempt to create more space, for bodies, neglected ideas, or ways of being, within codes and structures that already exist. The concept of anti-smooth sits as a counterpoint to the filing away or sanding down of difference. It takes into account the acceleration and deceleration of images, the possibilities for lumpy resemblance, and the rearrangement of sense and syntax. These temporary conditions are explored through assorted imaging and imagining, in particular the filtering of the digital domain, semi-sketched details, amateur craft processes, and the disordering of anticipated rhythms. Prop-like comic objects operate within this research project as absurdist visual jokes, where prolonged uncertainty and variable resolution ‘prop’ open entrances into alternate politics. The practice emerges from an entangled research field, sources are pulled from TV, memes, medieval manuscripts, anecdotes, and shopping experiences. Threaded through a helical methodology, this project explores the political inflection of specific movements that are able to re-orientate our relationships to the familiar. This processual helix encompasses different sites of research as it moves around and through them, turning and returning to the overlooked. By making present the strange or seemingly impossible, this research invites sensitivity towards small, familiar (but nonetheless important) things. The agitations of the practice facilitate a continual drawing and re-drawing of the bounds of the known and unknown; where the untended borders of objective reason open via the co-operative flexing of the absurd and the familiar.
