The Blue House/ On Flower Time: A Slow Methodology for Experimental Life Writing

The Blue House/On Flower Time: A Slow Methodology for Experimental Life Writing is a practice-based and practice-led research project that explores boyhood and flower time – producing a memoir and dissertation on the art of life writing. The Blue House is a memoir written in fragments that narrates boyhood and adulthood, exploring themes of love, violence, and belonging. The fragments move around in time in an intuitive and purposeful way, reflecting the slow methodology. In this project, working from an art studio, painting and drawing, I tune my body for writing slowly by hand, and develop a set of methods to bring my attention to life in the present and to write memory and life associatively. Along the way, I practice and discover relaxation, Tongan ways of knowing and what it means for me to love. These ways have key intuitions: the slowness of flowers, love, and memory. I find myself spiralling backwards to make this project, to understand myself and the world, asking: Not what do I want, but what can I give? As an artist and writer, I learn to be like a flower; more open to sunlight and shadows—to the world, spiralling. In finding the texture of words, memory, and the world bland, this path leads to joy. I discover an authentic writing voice, fragmentary form, and multi-modal creative practice/process. This project generates dialogue between teaching and learning, suggesting that a certain way of being both an artist and writer today is to dissolve ‘I’. To un-transform ideas of expertise in a singular field and therefore affirm multi-modal practicing.