I’ve been working towards the presentation I’ll be giving tomorrow at ‘One thing Leads to Another’. It’s a bit confessional, about the way I’ve gotten in my own way whilst thinking about how to make practice based research work.

Things are a bit better now, and I’m centring more on the context in which I can do more reflexive practice. What this means, basically, is keeping the ‘flavours’ of my academic practice handy. Questions like ‘How do I use Roles?’ ‘What does the narrative aspect enable?’ ‘In what ways am I operating between media?’ The sort of things that I ask other artists in fact. My writing about my work will continue to be about the other sort of reflection I do too, namely the stuff about subjects. When I’m writing about things normally, I’m writing about how I’m sorting through the subject matter and my execution of it. By incorporating or labelling the research aspects (roles/narrative) etc, I can knit it far more into my academic practice.

Funny that up to now I hadn’t realised that that could be extensive enough, or go on for long enough, to be a useful part of my research. In fact, this is where it has to happen!

It also seems likely that if I take an interest in my practice in this way, my ‘practice-interest’ might come to resemble my ‘research-interest’ more. I’m not going to go for it deliberately, but half my struggle has been that they don’t resemble one another at all. Just because I make artists’ books, doesn’t mean that my practice interest includes the same interest that informs my research… or such has been the case.

Assembling a toolkit of ‘research flavours’ to bring to my reflective practice will mean that my reflections become more usable as research. That’s what I hope my presentation will convey.

The title of my presentation, ‘Tactical Practice’ reflects an idea  I had, that we use practice in different ways at different times. Sometimes it has a strategic goal or outcome, and sometimes it is a case of feeling one’s way through- ‘tactical practice’. I think that one applies different outlooks at different times.

If one thinks of these as two different ‘logics’ of practice,then it’s possible to imagine still other ones, not just this simple dialectic. It’s more of a dynamic response to materials, motivations and the research environment. One chooses not only a methodology, but also a logic that informs it (a ‘metamethodology’?)