A bricoleuse is a pragmatic woman who practices bricolage. Bricolage involves adapting what is at hand in imaginative and intuitive ways to solve problems. Bricolage may be both a theoretical approach and praxis, particularly suited to creative research. The bricoleuse swerves, strays, wanders and tinkers to create complex new forms of knowing through stories and artefacts in local contexts. These are created from fragments of different viewpoints, voices, and materials by an experienced bricoleuse attempting to make meaning from entangled relationships with the messy, complex world around them.
This paper reflects on the exhibition meeting place (2018) as a discourse of bricolage. meeting place (2018) was a solo exhibition of fibre and ceramics from a process-oriented practice intending to create relationships between geographical and human elements of a non-urban place. The critical potential of bricolage, in this context, is to piece together the meaning of fragments of sensate awareness, relationships and memory to relate stories. Critically situating bricoles (bits and pieces) together may articulate and enrich the discourse in the indeterminate and dynamic process of experiencing and creating place. A bricoleuse’s approach to field-based/practice-led research contributes a relational, conceptual, and methodological approach to creative arts, and to interdisciplinary research frameworks.