Traces of Departure and Arrival

This paper traces the consequences of dislocation for studio arts-practice. I recently found myself in Perth, far from my home of 20 years and with directional vertigo, looking east to my old life and west to the Indian Ocean. In order to make sense of this move I used the studio to resolve/recollect/ trace my sense of movement, change, loss and vertigo. The multiple departures and arrivals on this journey are articulated as catalysts to studio production. We rarely speak about the spaces between such departures and arrivals and the effects those spaces have on the lived body. The space between in this instance was a road trip from the East to the West Coast of Australia. Traces of those departures and arrivals – (that always being between destinations) while evading the dichotomy of here or there and metaphors of inside and outside informed the studio processes entered into. The studio can be understood in this context as an instrument of phenomenological subjectivity in the world because our embodiment is premised on the mutually constituted agency of the self/other, or self in/of the world. The resultant bodies of work are described not as objects but as artefacts of arts-practice-led-research; as locaters of embodied knowledge; as traces of the performance of making. Through studio practice, an active material conversation occurs between ideas, the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of the studio, bodies and images.