SORCE Collective

A conversation between iowyth hezel ulthiin and Megan Hughes.

We are considering pur conversations about research as oral teachings about our individual research methodologies, as also representing ways of making and doing life. The extent to which we are able to articulate these approaches represent the fundamental grounding of what and how we know. SORCE seeks to elevate the embodied, oral wisdom maintained in our culture as we attempt to articulate how we know what we know. Recently, I decided to reach out to the SORCE community, asking makers, how do you come to know using Research-Creation? Below is a the transcript of a conversation I had with creative researcher Megan Hughes.

iowyth: I’m curious to know how you find your craft ends up interacting with your research.

Megan: I’ve just finished my Master’s thesis, my Major Research Project (MRP), as it’s called in the Fashion department here, that was an exercise in research creation. I’m a hat-maker, a milliner, so I wanted to connect my making with my theoretical interests for my final project.

I actually didn’t come at my project initially with the research creation as a research question. I came to it wondering why making was such a consolidation event for me. When it comes to thinking, I am interdisciplinary. I’m a researcher, I was a data analyst for the government for over a decade; I’ve been an elementary teacher. I’ve been around a while and I’ve had a few incarnations of work. Something that flows through all of my interests is using my hands, resolving what’s in my mind as a physical artefact. It’s not that I need to make a specific thing, rather that I’m fiddly and that motion of making helps me to understand. 

I put my questions into a tacit metaphor through these materials, and if I can make things work on my studio table, at the same time I subconsciously make new connections with more theoretical things that I’m thinking through. It’s a twin process, because the things that I make inspire new questions. Research then gives me new ideas and ways to explore. Making also helps calm me,  if I get nervous about the process.

I believe strongly in the power of metaphor. You could see my works as artefacts. My master’s thesis, as I realized after, was an exercise in Research-Creation. I wanted to distil what the functional process is for me, to find out where it is that I’m stopping solely cognitive theorization and starting to make, and if there is a stop line at all, or if they are overlapping in some way. 

I did the thesis and drew some conclusions for my own work, as to what creative research looks like for me and how it democratises itself in both theory and making at the same time.

iowyth:  Could you tell me a little bit about your thesis project? 

Megan: I call it the “Everyday Divine,” because I make something every day, whether as a nervous release, or for problem solving, or just for joy. I’m always making something. So I wanted to investigate why. Making helps me relieve mental anguish, but there’s more to it than that. I find that I’m transformed when I am making. I feel calmer. My sense of wellbeing increases. I know through my research that this feeling of transformative resolution is a common thread for disciplines from art therapy to psychology, and sociology. There’s ritual studies as well, which I was looking into very deeply because I started to notice there’s a kinship between the process of making and ritual, at least in my life. The kinds of rituals that I’ve been exposed to through academics and also my life feel very of the moment, like there’s some change going on, and you need to put yourself in a dedicated space to enter the zone and let yourself freely associate damaged  or entropic artefacts; this is a common thread, through making, and ritual study in both secular and religious settings. My project was about discovering and explaining my process as a personal secular ritual for wellbeing and positive transformation and reflection.

iowyth: I find a very similar process in my own work. Something that comes up a lot in our conversations was this confusion around products asking, what are they? Are we trying to produce them? Is this what Research-Creation is? Is it a product? Is it a process? What I’m hearing from you is that it is a process of thinking and making, a unified movement.

Megan Hughes: Absolutely. As you’re thinking, you’re encountering. I went in to my practice with a new materialist perspective, saying to myself, this feather or this piece of wire is no better than me. It has no more or less function than I do. I am hands and mind. I try to release myself like this when I’m making. Just as you might get swept up in the epiphany of choral singing in a religious setting. I feel that. That’s where I want to go with my stuff. So in that way, I would say the process is much more important to me as a wellbeing modality, which is the subtitle of my thesis project.

I was also looking at how interest in craft increased over the pandemic. In the first year of lockdowns, I read that craft kit sales in North America were something like 200 percent more than the year before. That told me that I wasn’t alone, being at home making things. I knew, and wanted to explain how making helps me feel better. And other disciplines say the process is theoretically similar for other people. So, I wondered, how can I expose that? I’m interested in how making functions. For my Phd, I’m hoping to do more exploration into that line of thinking. What does this process look like for other people?

iowyth: This seems like a powerful lens, to look at how thinking becomes physical and embodied. That’s how I connect with it, too. This artefact happened because of this process. I wasn’t trying to make anything, it just came out. It’s not like you do this to make something. It’s that it comes out of an act of doing that has its own purposes.

Megan: Yes, for sure. To be honest, when I started my project I was uncomfortable with making without a plan. I’m a designer. I make hats as products for sale. I’m usually responding to the customers’ wants. So, in that way my hat production work is collaborative. In the last 2 years, for my master’s work, I’ve  been looking at Research-Creation as a way to open up my design toolbox, to be more responsive to what’s out there. I think my best pieces are really the artistic ones; they’re expressive. They come out of the process you and I have been describing here, as artefacts rather than design objects. 

I just took first place in a British millinery competition using a free-form discovery approach to millinery. It’s hard to go against that established crowd of competitors, and I’m very happy with my result. The idea is that I can use this methodology to let myself be with the materials and let the materials speak to me. I can still generate beautiful and special pieces. I didn’t design the competition piece beforehand. I had material choices and I went with the ones that called to me. I made it over Christmas break last year to distract me from my school work. It was incredible to see how this small side project fed the larger process work that I was beginning to write about for my thesis. 

iowyth: I often find that this process for me is either inspired or a total disaster, and nowhere in between.

Megan Hughes: Of course, there’s uncertainty. I did come away with a collection of hats that I would never have made before. I have been judged by some of my mentors, for what I’ve been doing in my thesis, using materials and objects that they would never touch. I’ve had to explain myself a little bit. You have to expect mistakes and some of them are great mistakes.

iowyth: That’s indicative of a process of working through instead of doing the design having it already worked out. That would be a process of reproduction, materially reproducing a plan. Then, there’s this process that says “let’s see what happens,” and that can take you places that you didn’t expect.

Megan: That’s very true, and it’s an enlightening process. I’m going to refer to “the zone” because that’s the ideal human focus, centering your mind. Athletes talk about the zone and artists do too. I think everybody can talk about the zone as leaving your ego to realise that you’re a piece in the system. You’re just here and you can examine the metaphorical content of your artefacts after the fact, deciding if you need to think of it as trash, and even that’s a little unfair. Everything you make finds its place over time. I don’t throw things away.

iowyth: Those times where I originally thought “this is trash,” these are things I have a spontaneous reaction to. I don’t always understand this reaction. Often I look back on it later and something has happened. I can think, “oh, that’s actually interesting.” Something will have shifted in my perspective where I can now appreciate it more. Sometimes I feel like in the making process, something will come out that’s unexpected. I might not have the language to understand what I’ve done. It’s almost like I have to catch up to myself.

Megan: Exactly. You don’t know what you’ve done till after and there’s a tumbling about that’s involved. So of course you can’t throw things away. In fact, I’ve looked at things that just don’t work and I thought, well, how else can I re-imagine that? It’s become something that calls to me as a problem to be solved. I’m into problem solving because when I was teaching things like math, I showed how we can solve problems through putting buttons on the floor and asking the kids to make patterns. Everybody would come up with a different pattern and talk about that. I look at my own work in the same way. 

I have specific standards when it comes to making for others, but when I’m making for myself it is because I need to express something. I will really love a material and need to see where I can push it. There’s an attachment that you can give up depending on who you’re making for and the scenario. There are pieces, I want to call them the abject pieces; I have made entire hats out of my scrap bucket and just play with the materials that are left behind. This teaches me a new way to handle the materials, to overlay them against something else. It’s fantastic.

iowyth: I think this could speak to any sort of making process or thinking process. This is the thing about Research-Creation that most confuses people, because it isn’t about the product. But it also isn’t only about the thinking. It isn’t the process exactly. It’s all of those things, and none of them. It’s almost like there’s a magical something in the gaps that’s happening, that’s connecting everything. That’s how I often think about it.

Megan: There’s a lot of magic, yeah. I just saw this definition of magic according to physics. They said that magic is just science that they haven’t been able to replicate yet. I love that. I thought it was amazing. 

I knew a lot of scientists in in my undergrad. I went to a small school. So I would mix with engineering students. I really believe the scientific method describes a form of basic human exploration. So scientists in the lab will be doing exactly what we’re doing, playing with materials. Maybe they have a tighter boundary, but it’s the same process. There’s really no mystery to me. It’s all about doing it and then doing it again and seeing it if it comes out the same or not, asking yourself why afterwards. I said this to someone in the fashion department and it started a small debate.

iowyth: I definitely think artists might be more open to this way of thinking, than scientists. This line of thinking presents a problem for some people. I am interested in looking at science. I find that gives me a lot of inspiration and grounding, staying connected to the material and finding magic in the material world, in these physical processes. I relate to what you’re saying about science and I’ve often thought of magic as this sort of science of the ineffable. I keep looking for the magic, methodologically, over and over again through time.

Megan: In my thesis, I was also asking what that magic is for me. There are many exciting moments in making that can only be moved through and considered later. Questions like: What is it in the process that becomes a transformative moment? What does it really make me feel? When I consider the pieces after I make them, I can find places that show where I was anxious and moving that energy into making something with my hands. I’ve also examined artefacts and observed more transformative and joyful connections.

After finishing my master’s thesis, I still wonder why I go to making in the first place? It’s elusive, that moment where you decide what you need to make, or that you need to make at all. There’s something special there. It’s an almost unbearable feeling, perching on the lip of conception. There’s an overwhelming need to solve a problem, so you pick up a piece of material. I’m not quite sure how it starts, but if there’s any magic for me in Research-Creation, it’s in the moment of intention where space and time and availability meet with the will and inspiration, all coming together. In that moment you create a situation where you can transform, feeling your way through the process to a point of reflection on the other side.