A performative approach to wool felting - Rhizomatic relations in visual arts making and art education

Samira Jamouchi will defend the thesis titled “A performative approach to wool felting - Rhizomatic relations in visual arts making and art education” for the PhD degree.

Jamouchi has followed the Ph.D programme at Faculty of Fine Arts, with spesialisation in Art in Context.

Summary of the thesis

This doctoral thesis is the first project combining artistic and scholarly dissertation to be completed and made ready for defence within the specialisation Arts in context at the Faculty of Fine Arts. In positioning creative practices within research, the University supports the idea that artistic research and written scientific papers are both needed to knowledge creation and that its dissemination goes beyond and expands the traditional written text of a monography.

The goal of this research is to explore not yet known moments, as not predefined moments, in wool felting processes and their potentials in different artistic and learning contexts. This research invites the participants of such shared felting process and the readers of this thesis to rethink how we could, not only should, introduce art in teacher education.

The research process and the goal of this doctoral study are entangled moments within wool felting in artistic exploration, art teaching and arts-based research. The transformation of wool fibres during a traditional handmade wet felting process unfolds whilst the participants undergo relational transformations to themselves and their surroundings. In this project, humans, materials and working processes are seen as interdependent relationalities enacting and creating each other.

The empirical and referential material of this study is generated during my on-going practices as artist, researcher and artist-teacher. Three public exhibitions, three published articles and a visual assemblage of my everyday practices are the core material that created the rhizomatic ramifications of the mantel (extend abstract).

The doctoral thesis, the book as a physical object, is shaped, organized and presented like four strata: a durational process of giving form to matter. This is in accordance with the research design and the ontological framework used. The study is in dialogue with post structural and new materialism theoretical and philosophical landscape. It applies and explores further arts-based research by activating a performative methodology in an emerging research process.

The result, beside three exhibitions and three scientific papers, are the questions produced that are related to artistic and pedagogical practices focusing on a performative approach to wool felting.

The main contributions of this thesis are 1) to provide / propose a research design in arts-based research that underlines rhizomatic and performative approaches and 2) to articulate a performative pedagogy that can be recognized by the following traits:

• An entangled pedagogy with co-components evolving in the same ecology;
• An iterative intra-action that is about co-making;
• A revelation of togetherness preserving diversity; 
• A combination of moving and movable practices and thought creation

See here for more information about the thesis, disputation and how to follow online.