Beginnings of an auto ethnographic enquiry into

creative practice-led research.

Alison F Bell

What follows is a discovery of what is not known.

Through correlating texts and images, gaps appear;

thoughts have an opportunity to surface and formulate.

“Husserl’s writings seem to suggest that the

life-world has various layers, that underneath the

layers of diverse cultural life – worlds there

reposes a deeper more unitary life-world, always

already there, beneath all our cultural

acquisitions, a vast and continually overlooked

dimension of experience.”

Abrams,1997:41-42

Our multilayered

world is lived through

the experiencing self.

It is by exploring the

world sensorially that

we might recognise

our human-ness.

Intuitive response on reading of Husserl’s life-world; layers and depth

It is not what is seen.

It is what is known forever in the mind”

Agnes Martin,1991:15

‘Intuitions are holistic interpretations based on analogies

drawn from a largely unconscious database’.

Guy Claxton, 2000:50

Knowing and not knowing how one knows:

I ‘know’ this……….how?

“To live and work by inspiration you have to stop thinking.

You have to hold your mind still in order to hear inspiration clearly”

Agnes Martin, 1991:137

•creating alongside reading

•the one informs the other

•blurring the edges

•merging

•reflection in action

•reflection on action

•becoming…………

‘Sensing’ connections between what has gone before,

what is to come and the now………….

‘While in the liminal state, human beings are stripped of

anything that might differentiate them from their fellow

human beings—they are in between the social

structure, temporarily fallen through the cracks, so to

speak, and it is in these cracks, in the interstices of

social structure, that they are most aware of

themselves’.

Charles la Shure, 2005

Dark space and liminality;

in between, on the threshold, transitioning, hovering…..