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CHAPTER FIVE

Part Three

Second practicing research expressions

An early example of second practice exploring is a three week period in March 2023, when I am too weak to talk or write. It happens very suddenly. I need to rest the language part of my brain. At the time... I don't know how long the resting will take. After a week I really want to continue creating and working and researching... but it is too overwhelming and damaging to read or do voice recordings or write notes.

I centre the practitioner.
In this particular bodymind moment with these particular bodymind needs.
I harvest and bring into the middle the second practices that support my current needs.

I move with Solitude.

Things to think with.

And Lurking. 

I take photos from my phone of my point of view. My bodymind throughout this time of illness and bedboundness and enforced quiet (Figure 1). I take the photos as something to come back to and to write about or make Mouth Notes of when I can talk again. But something feels missing. They don't capture the complicated feelings of these moments. I have more to express in this moment right now. I want to see as a researcher and wonder as a researcher and explore and express as a researcher right now and I have no access to verbal language.

Figure 1: A collage of five photographs taken from the researcher’s point of view. Photo 1: A dark bedroom during the day with blue curtains closed. Almost half of the photograph is taken up by a floral doona cover. Photo 2: A lower body on a daybed in a living room. The researcher is wearing dark blue pants with a repetitive light-blue circle pattern, a chunky green-and-yellow crochet jumper, and compression socks. An orange-and-red brick wall, fireplace, and large Monstera pot plant are visible in the space. Photo 3: A lower body in a living room at night wearing a beige nightgown, with a large part of their right leg exposed. Photo 4: A lower body lying on a daybed in a living room. The researcher is wearing a burnt-orange shirt dress and compression socks. The windows are open, and the plants in the front garden are visible. Photo 5: A lower body is on a daybed wearing black compression stockings, a soft pink nightgown, and a green buttoned cardigan.

Figure 1.

II take the photos as something to come back to and to write about or make Mouth Notes of when I can talk again. But something feels missing. They don't capture the complicated feelings of these moments. I have more to express in this moment right now. I want to see as a researcher and wonder as a researcher and explore and express as a researcher right now and I have no access to verbal language.

I don't want to wait to share my experiences.

I feel creativity for exploring expression now. 
I look at my second practices again.
I pick ones out that I could explore with... use as soft prompts..?

Or think with..?
And I collaborate with them.
I scale them up.

Follow their newly forming relational assemblage rhythms and fixations and attune to the wholly new articulations, accidental suggestions.
I once thought that improvisation meant fast moving motions and responses.
Being slow and soft with open responses and directions... moves to my pace and brings new ways of sustainable moving and making with.

A slowly and softly morphing second practice assemblage that is specific to this week's thinking and doing.
And this is freeingly fragile.
This generated flow.
This whole new flow and ineffable energy... when I work with them.

This is one of my happy messy creating places.
A second practice portrait of bespoke, responsive second practicing (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The five unique and individual line drawings representing the Second Practices Recumbent Researcher, Doubt, Things to Think With, Bricolage and Palimpsests, and Sensitive have all been enlarged and combined to create a new abstract image composed of a mix of thin and thick, abstract black lines. The image has a white background.

Figure 2.

I relearn how to do simple object cuts from images on photo software.

I do simple object cuts on packing air cushion images I find from online.

I play with opacity because my bodymind doesn't really feel fully rendered.
I make dematerial collages with the photos I have taken.
I want to share how it feels to me to be bedbound.

Housebound.

Quiet.
I want them to exist without verbal explanation.
I call them Self Portraits of the Researcher (Figure 3) and Researcher as Landscapes (Figure 4).
The sky and land and atmosphere filled with my stained and smelly pajamas, comfort crochet jumper, compression socks, sleepy skin and blanket patterns.

Figure 3: A postcard-sized image titled Self Portrait of the Researcher. The image is a collage of exposed legs, from the upper thighs to the feet, with a small piece of nightgown draped across the upper left thigh. The upper body, arms, and head have been replaced with a collection of product images of packing inflatables in translucent purple, grey, white, and clear. The postcard is a light-grey portrait rectangle. It is set against a white background.

Figure 3.

Figure 4: A digital collage of six sets of lower bodies and legs. Three sets of legs point upward and wear dark blue pants with a repetitive light-blue circle pattern, chunky green-and-yellow crochet jumpers, and compression socks. These represent the sky and the ground. The other three sets of legs point downward and wear burnt-orange shirt dresses and compression socks. These represent soil. The image is presented on a light-grey landscape rectangle, set against a white background.

Figure 4.

"[...] disability artists and activists have mobilised visual media to subvert and upend that tradition of representation, to "stare back" and perform, what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls "visual activism" (Dokumaci, 2023, p.19).

When I share some of them months later... I can see people leaning in and feeling that time... my experience. Invisible bodymind vague essence. I have never created like this before. I didn't know I could. Not only in a dematerial digital collages way... a new way of expressing for me... but there is a surfacing of creative expression that I had never made through before in a research environment. And... this emerging research second practices "modality" gives me energy... takes care of me and what I am needing to express. Affording me agency during a time I would usually not have felt any as a researcher. This goes on to inspire more ways of exploring practicing when I can't talk or write. Photos of last night's sweaty, sick sheets and pillows become crinkled dematerial collage landscapes.

I begin calling these second practice moments, research expressions, as there is no productivist focus on outcomes or outputs. There is just connecting to impulses to create and learn. And a desire to share with people through whatever ways I can. I keep playing with and expanding these relational formations and assemblages of second practices.

During 2023 and 2024, layered ways of thinking and doing that I call second practicing modalities emerge from my explorations with second practice assemblages and scaling attunements. They are complex clusters of safe ways to express myself.


Diagrams.
Digital and dematerial.
Research expressions.
Collages.
Bodymind as narrator.
Soft prompts.
Pace agency.
Point of view videos and photos and audio.
And little videos.


They can be explored together.
They don't have to be explored at all.


But my second practice modalities are trusted embodiminded sustainable spaces to create through and begin from.

That can support and aid and inspire me. 

I have explored them all to create this exegesis.

I have counted on all of them to create this exegesis.

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