Writing Between the Lines
EXPLORING CREATIVE WRITING AS A RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. CARDIFF UNIVERSITY. SEPTEMBER 2016
Abstract
My presentation will aim to examine the ‘content’ and the allusions of Photograph #283, which is one of a series of 4 images taken at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland during the summer of 1944. It is thought that a Greek Jew, Alex Errera made them on a camera that was smuggled in and out of the camp by the Polish resistance. They are the only known images taken by someone imprisoned there. ‘Elided? Blurred? Smudged? What of my knowing and imagining? I am invoked to look again to look through and beyond the image, to the edges, to squint and burn my stare into the black where I see nothing, yet I see everything. Its punctum pricks me, wounds me and connects to me. As a practice-led researcher I am keen to involve creative writing in ways that go beyond the normal processes of reflecting on practice, seeing it more akin to my drawing as a tool of visual articulation and expression. This exchange between drawing (image) and writing, as an intersection, is a further cairn – a marker – in the process of my thinking and Photograph #283, anchored as it is in a “not-knowing” provides me with the opportunity and space for further contemplation. “Man is an individual apart from all the rest. And it is this very distinction that bestows on him the inheritance of distance, a place from which to reflect – on the world” (Meeting the Universe Halfway. Karen Barad p134) Foucault describes a similar approach to writing history as archaeology, where discursive traces of the past are investigated in order to write a ‘history of the present’. This is important because it articulates how through writing (and drawing) it becomes possible to connect and evoke something that isn’t there anymore. My presentation will demonstrate how this approach to creative / critical writing allows for the spaces ‘between the lines’ to shape part of understanding and that somewhere in these gaps, new ways of being ‘with’ the subject are made possible.