To Measure the Straight Distance, By Traveling the Winding Way

The aim of this paper is to unpack the nature of visually foregrounded academic research through the process of a practice-based presentation. In doing so, I hope to identify ways in which the field of visual research and its dissemination can move beyond the notions of depiction and representation in order to make space for novel, yet impactful knowledge transfer, with emphasis on two of my most recent artworks; A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars, made in Birmingham UK in 2023 and The Leviathan of Parsonstown, due to be performed in winter 2024 in Galway, Ireland.

Taking psychologist Daniel Schacter assertion that our memories work to reconstruct experience from the photographic record and then recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them (Schacter 1997), my ongoing visual practice challenges this claim through the creation of hierarchical visual system related to the complex processes of human recall and forgetting. Drawing from my long-established series of performance lectures based upon historic collections I tease out narratives that explore the registers and hierarchies of image and memory. Portraying parallels between the neurological recall of the brain, and the indexical recording of the camera, I make a case for a more experimental, and experiential way to present research informed visual practice as archival art-practice.