Methodology, Making and Mothering
Still Not Done: Methodology, Making and Mothering York University, April 2022
The research-creation project which this text examines was initially conceived as an oil painting. The painting would be supported by frameworks previously associated with my existing body of work through textual research and academic writing — autotheory, the everyday, and the notion of in-betweenness — to consider the boundaries between life and art and what Griselda Pollock describes as the “conditions of creation.” These theoretical frameworks allow me to understand and advocate for my work from a social perspective. Still, they don’t necessarily offer insight into the specific form and function of my subjective studio practice. What are the material conditions of my mothering, practice, and research, and how do they affect one another? How does the specific configuration of my practices of mothering and painting impact, impede, or enhance my research-creation projects? I recount the implementation of various methodologies borrowed from writing and pedagogy to interrupt established paradigms and determine new ways of working and thinking about the messiness of conflicting practices. The answers to my questions may not be as definitive as I’d hoped. I suspect the reason they are so difficult to pin down is because the social and material conditions are, in fact, entangled and always in the process of becoming.
I am, in a sense, no longer just raising children; I have begun raising myself.