Output details

Invisible Things: Documentation from a Devising Process • PaR (book)

Invisible Things is a book about devising. Made in parallel with Fevered Sleep’s project An Infinite Line: Brighton, it is a critical-creative book about process rather than a document of a specific performance-installation. The book features a combination of text, photographs, drawings, extracts from artist’s notebooks, critical commentary and dialogue.

300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content

This PaR outcome is published in the form of a book. It explores the collaborative and devising processes that led to the creation of Fevered Sleep’s project An Infinite Line: Brighton, a site-specific performance, installation and publication commissioned by Brighton Festival.

Whilst I was principal investigator and lead artist/writer on Invisible Things, it was conceived and created in collaboration with book designers Valle Walkley and dramaturg Synne Behrndt. It is submitted not as a documentation of a practice as research project, but as a practice as research project: the practice being that of conceptualising, collating, writing, and designing a book.

The research inquiry of this PaR project focuses on a set of related questions:

1.How do artist practitioners working in contemporary performance approach processes of devising? What strategies for devising, developing and structuring material can be found in such processes? What sorts of dramaturgical frameworks and concepts are deployed?

2.How can a devising process be articulated not as an object of analysis and study by one external to it, but as a period of lived experience and collaboration which is multi-dimensional, multi-directional and multidisciplinary?

3.How can this be articulated through the form of a printed book?

Invisible Things is structured as a series of themed chapters enclosed in pages documenting the research, development and devising processes that accrued around these themes. Both of these are intercut by case studies of specific elements of the research, devising and producing of An Infinite Line: Brighton. Differentiated by the use of different page sizes, the distinction between creative practice and reflective, thematic research is blurred through the presence of graphic representations of the smaller pages within the larger practice-focused spreads: “fake” pages which become a playful and disruptive presence in the body of the book.