The challenged of being a creative, practice researchers, who working with artistic practice as, the predominant medium, is that, often people seem to overlook the subject matter of the research, when cThe challenge of being a creative, practice researcher who works with artistic practice as the predominant medium is that people often overlook the research’s subject matter when confronted by the artwork. I’ve been working on my subject area for going on ten years now, and in the last two weeks I’ve had three conversations with colleagues in my corridors, where I’ve been explaining the distinction between my subject matter and methodology; their response has been.

“Oh! That’s an interesting way of thinking about the city.”

So, we are clear, my work is about the material ecologies of post-mining cities, how those inter-agencies affect and are affected by the human-altered climate crisis in the Anthropocene. I am interested in urban terrains, cities’ materiality and deep time, as more-than-human ecologies.

Thanks for reading In-Situ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Artistic practice is a methodology, as are mapping, making, design, construction detailing, and teaching praxis. I do not view them as separate things but rather, interscalar ways of addressing the same topic of inquiry.

Divergent thinkers often require multiple fields and scales to think through the topics that they wish to research. They will likely be both highly technical and creative in their exploration of their research subjects.

For my research approach, I have cunningly modelled the rough terrain map of some of Johannesburg’s geology, and the detail of how a windowsill goes together materially, in my head. This lives alongside thinking about the juxtapositions of a plastic-clogged river, butted against a carefully crafted home stead, swept clean, with growing things in the courtyard. And how the watershed of the Witwatersrand connects to the oceans, a continent always, and how that somehow tangles with the city that is planted atop all of this. This tangled three-dimensional thing lives in my head. So, no, I can spell potato! We need more than one field of study to hold these ideas and more than one methodology to think about such things. Since I’m not good at math, quantum physics wasn’t an option.