C.6 Ethics and Responsibility in Research-Creation Practices, Part 1
Thu Oct 27 / 13:30 – 15:00 / rm 244, University College
chairs /
- Andrew Testa, Memorial University
- Cameron Forbes, Memorial University
Due to lack of clear definitions of ethics in research-creation practices, many funding and educational institutions rely on Tri-Council policies developed from a social science and humanities perspective, leaving gaps and foggy edges in protocols for visual arts practitioners. Within this atmosphere, we are posing questions for discussion: What are the important ethical guide posts in our field? How do we define responsible practices within a studio based and/or public context? In a more than human world? Are ethics individual to particular situations, or are there collective protocols that might be put in place? We invite artists, curators, and educators to reflect on ethics and responsibility in the visual arts. This panel strives to bring together Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, case studies (whether looking at one’s own practice or others), and educational best practices/approaches (from both educator and student perspectives).
keywords: ethics, responsibility, research-creation, visual arts
C.6.1 Feltness: radical relatedness, reciprocity, and care in research-creation
Stephanie Springgay, McMaster University
This paper/presentation takes up questions of ethics in research-creation through the concept of feltness. Feltness has various entry points including: the textile process of hand felting; affect theory and feelings; the material and embodied experience of being in the world; queer-feminist theories of touching encounters; and feminist materialist conceptualizations of more-than-human entanglements. Feltness or intimacy conjures radical relatedness, reciprocity, and care.
Intimacy is conventionally described as closeness, affinity, attachment, and familiarity. As feltness – relationality and reciprocity - intimacy, becomes a mode of invention and creation that proliferates indeterminately and affectively. This is an ethics of care that is uncomfortable and perplexing and does not place human mastery at the centre. In articulating research-creation as a practice of intimacy, I am holding space to be touched by the thinking-making-doing of research-creation, as well as the bodies (human and non-human) that co-compose the research encounter.
As a practice of intimacy research-creation recognizes that everything is in relation, indeterminate, and constantly forming. However, it is crucial that we ask complex questions about what it means to be in relation; to be intimate: How are relations composed and sustained over time? How are all bodies in relation being accounted for, attuned to, and offered something for their contribution/labour of being in relation? Opening space for the production of intimacy demands that we are response-able to the formation of relations. Intimacy stems from an awareness of the efforts it takes to cultivate relatedness in difference. Research-creation for me, has become a question of how to work ethically and in intimate relation with diverse publics.
In thinking ethics of research-creation as feltness, I attune to a number of research-creation events that were collaboratively co-produced between researchers, artists, students and teachers over a decade as part of The Pedagogical Impulse. The research-creation projects take up questions and matters regarding socially-engaged art, research-creation, and radical pedagogy in post-secondary institutions, as well as elementary and secondary schools in North America. The various exemplifications explore the how of research-creation as an ethics and politics committed to queer-feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial intimate practices.
keywords: research-creation, feltness, intimacy, radical relationality, ethics of care
Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. She directs WalkingLab—an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a SSHRC partnership grant Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen—a 6-week performance project that explore food soveriegnty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies.
C.6.2 To be tied together
Sheri Osden Nault, University of Western Ontario
On the question of ethics as a queer Métis arts practitioner, community member, and educator; most critically, none of these things is separate from the other. My identity and positionality, and my commitment to social justice, are through-lines in my life and creative practice.
Beginning with a brief overview of my own positionality and research-creation, I propose to situate as a necessary (though not uncomplicated) ethical guidepost that each of us is in ongoing entangled relationship with the beings around us and, as such, must strive to be in caring community with these human and non-human beings.
To exemplify my point, I will discuss the pervasive cynical attitude that humans are inherently destructive and harmful to one another and the environment. This supposition relies on the harmful colonial fantasy of an ‘untouched wilderness’ which erases the historic presence of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (and elsewhere) as well as our important symbiotic role in our environments. There is not and has never been a place of ‘pure,’ ‘untouched,’ and therefore implicitly ‘unharmed’ Nature. Humans are also nature. The planet is a complex and adaptive system which can process a certain amount of impact. We have already affected the planet and will continue to. So, we must imagine ways forward that acknowledge this.
This framework offers an alternative to the hopelessness and sense of overwhelm that stems from knowing we must live and work within often harmful systems and institutions, and that each of us will inevitably cause harm. It is possible and worthwhile to strive to be in responsible relationship, while also accepting that we will make mistakes. Further, the impacts of our actions are not final and it is our ongoing responsibility, as individuals within entangled interspecies community, to strive to act with care and rigour.
keywords: ethics, ecology, research-creation, art, indigeneity
Sheri Osden Nault is an artist, community worker, and educator. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, actively participate in research residencies, and engage with local and global art communities. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more, integrating cultural and experimental creative processes. They are a member of the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Their art considers embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous Futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing and sharing knowledges, the wisdom of lived experience, and learning from more than human kin. Their research is grounded in their experiences as Michif, nêhiyaw, and Two-Spirit, and engages with decolonizing methodologies, queer theory, ecological theory, disability justice, speculative fiction, and intersectional and Indigenous feminisms.
C.6.3 Leave it Better Than You Found it: Collaboration as an Avenue for Community Care
- Kellyann Henderson & Erienne Rennick, Memorial University of Newfoundland Grenfell Campus
How can we as artists and educators invite all walks of life to our works, and what does it look like to approach that question with a collaborator. Through exploring the limitations on opportunities in our own lives as creators, through the lens of poverty and neurodivergence we reflect on the lived experience of being “difficult”, “hard to digest” and “distractions”. This allows us a freedom in collaboration that we honor by centering inclusivity for all - in a way that welcomes the inherent differences among us (to be in love with the inherent differences among us).
By applying autoethnographic research to our creative partnership as it unfolds in real time requires being open and honest in both the moments of friction as well as the bliss of a successful workday. As we create this work (an interactive playhouse combining adult play tables, and reflections of a friendship) we open the discussion around the ethics of intertwining two creative practices in a way that celebrates the individual goals and motivations of two distinct artists, while reflecting on the responsibilities we have to others.
How can collaborative art making build a community by honoring the net of others it takes to make any interactive artwork possible. This is an effort to shift the art participant through the principals outlined of Pedagogy of the Oppressed as cocreators opposed to empty vessels, as much as a reflection on the deep friendships that foster a successful co-operation.
keywords: ethics, research-creation, visual arts, community building, collaboration
Kellyann Henderson and Erienne Rennick are students in the Master of Fine Arts program at Grenfell Campus in traditional Mi’kmaw territory known to settlers as Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Kellyann completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Florida State University and investigates her roots in southern fringe society as a critique of the caste structure and an inspiration for community building. Erienne Rennick holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Waterloo and creates collaborative experiences in accessibility with a focus on neurodivergence. As current collaborators, they work to create visually stimulating and playful open doors to access in art.
Take what you need but give what you can.
