‘Tissue of making’ in practice-led research: Practi-care, prepositional thinking and a grammar of creativity

This paper, as essay, elaborates on Barbara Bolt’s notion of the ‘double articulation’ of practice-led research and its relationship to knowledge, and also draws on the work of Ross Gibson and the insider-outsider view of the artist-researcher; the restlessness of narrative acknowledgement. It builds on ideas of practice, where the primary focus of practice-led research is ‘to advance knowledge about practice, or to advance knowledge within practice’ (Candy & Edmonds 2018: 65). Where this leads is to a definition of a prepositional mode of articulating knowledge through practice, where the relations between are key, the abouts, the withins, the ofs; how the different parts of the process or ‘tissue of making’ (to use Bolt’s term) connect with, interrelate, link, belong, resist. It does this by mapping a series of iterative creative works that have been created and/or made over time through the workings of a specific practice. It traces intersecting lines of thought as a way to explore the processual nature of research; the space of, and value in thinking prepositionally; and the syntax or grammar of creativity.