Lucy Irvine
October 2024
Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University
Abstract
Emergent Knowledge Practices tests the epistemic potential of emergence through woven sculpture, community collaboration and experimental pedagogy. My textiles-based methods, applied as relational spatial practice, broaden discourse around emergence, a phenomenon which is usually simulated in computation, and less often directly participated within or made by hand. Through material practice and writing the project refines methods, concepts and forms that make non-reductive knowledge tangible, accessible, applicable and actionable beyond my own discipline.
The project draws widely from philosophies of science, complexity theory, cultural theory, geography, architecture, design, textiles and sculpture. Key scholars used to build the argument for a non-reductive spatialisation of knowledge include Doreen Massey, Wendy Wheeler, Michel de Certeau, Tim Ingold and Paul Carter.
This thesis articulates Geometries of Knowledge, a concept materialised in practice and substantiated in the written component. It envisions a generative meshwork of relationships for coming to know emergently through, with and between different forms of knowledge. The concept is equally used as an analytical tool that makes visible reciprocal and reductive relationships in knowledge making.
As well as presenting a novel self-organising methodology, this thesis contributes new models and maps for emergent thinking that are particularly relevant to architecture and the formulation of emergent design. More broadly, Geometries of Knowledge offer a speculative architecture for knowledge that could be useful in thinking more emergently about the maps and models we use to locate knowing in the sensate world.
Research Outcomes
Made of Holes 2016
Made of Holes is a generative woven form where the emergent whole supersedes the sum of its parts. In the weaving process each stitch attends to the form’s evolution as it organises itself relationally and with reciprocity. The stitches and interstice in the completed work are a trace map of action and self-organising adjustment: the surface tells of its own emergent processual formation. By weaving with cable ties and irrigation piping, which are ubiquitous in the Australian urban fabric, I subvert the original intended use of these spatially homogenising and unitising products to challenge the urban morphologies they might otherwise conform to and proliferate. Though the sculpture itself is not representationally analogous to a particular phenomenon, Made of Holes can be understood to model emergent knowledge as it exemplifies working relationally towards an outcome that is not antecedently known in advance. First commissioned for Dark Mofo, Hobart in 2016, Made of Holes has subsequently been shown at three other galleries, further testing the work’s dynamic spatial qualities in different architectural contexts and affecting people’s experience of those spaces as they move around and look through the sculpture.
Index 2017
Index is a permanent outdoor public artwork commissioned in 2017 by Holmesglen Institute of TAFE for their Moorabbin Campus, on Melbourne’s south-eastern outskirts. In this tertiary education setting, the work grapples with representing the interaction between different kinds of knowledge in one cohesive form. The word index holds multiple meanings. As a sign of measure, itemised references at the end of a book; I wondered what kinds of knowledge and learning might remain unmapped by these systems. In contrast, indexical marks in a contemporary art context refer to traces of bodily gestures. Where categorical systems speak of top-down strategies, indexical language can be seen as bottom-up tactics; by combining these the sculpture appears like a rationalised model gone rogue. In response to the site and context, Index was conceived as a dynamic waymarker and a novel pedagogical tool: a visual aid that modelled the multiplicity of learning.
Place Patterns 2017
For Place Patterns I collaborated with eight women from the Tuggeranong Knit ‘n’ Knatter over 55 club, as part of a wider community project organised by independent curator Sara D’Alessandro and conducted through Tuggeranong Arts Centre, on Canberra’s southern fringe. Over a six-week period, I invited the women to respond to geographical and geological maps of their local area and to translate these through their own skills and local knowledge into knitted vests. The aim was to explore community-based knitting as an interface between embodied knowledge and cartographic data, to see what potential mapping tactics might emerge. The women were photographed wearing their completed vests at two prominent locations that had been included in many of their maps. Through the duration of Place Patterns maps were transformed from objects of knowledge to become material things of body and place. The Tuggeranong knitters became alternative map makers turning the projected fixtures of maps into relational surfaces.
Thank you to Janette Hatch, the leader of the Tuggeranong Knit ‘n’ Knatter over 55 club along with Jan Barnham, Liz Brown, Isabel Devlin, Maria Hall, Barbara Marsassovich, Roslyn McDonald and Pat Skien for their participation in this project.
Surface Strategies 2017
Surface Strategies was a site-specific woven installation presented at Canberra Airport for Design Canberra 2017. The work reimagined the immense sixteen-metre-wide window in Departures as a cartographic substrate, an expansive longitudinal and latitudinal gridwork across which the aeroplanes outside traced diagonal straight-line trajectories as they took off and landed. Expansion joint foam usually fills unseen, in-between spaces in a building’s structure, was woven into a dialogue with the airport’s architectural veneers. Using this extremely light and bulky product, I was able to write large each gesture of my body, mapping movement in convoluted loops. In the weaving process the work became a wayfaring map, orientating to its surrounds but also finding its way between different spatial-representational systems. The emergent map interwove networked, reductive and relational cartographic lines. During the twenty-day festival, an estimated 255,000 people experienced Surface Strategies as they arrived, departed and worked at the airport.
Mapping the Space between Me and Us 2017
Mapping the Space between Me and Us was a pedagogical experiment undertaken with staff and students at Holmesglen TAFE that accompanied the launch of Index, a permanent public artwork commissioned for their Moorabbin Campus. Participants co-created a large-scale loop-woven skin out of brown paper and masking tape that eventually mapped the related locations of each person in the lecture theatre. The collective map did not simply join the dots between where people were situated; the weaving’s constituent and processual qualities generated the map’s emergence. In other words, the connections socially and materially grew between participants as they wove and worked together. As such, Mapping the Space between Me and Us provides a different kind of world map, one that does not universalise but enworlds by heightening the sensate capacities of its makers and their relation to each other. This alternative world map is an intersubjective artefact characterised by holes, loose ends, stretches, tears and mends: ongoing processes of relational cartography without one fixed position or surface.
Little Systems 2018
This site-specific woven installation developed a new emergent capacity in the formation of structural surface. The work has no internal armature and was therefore reliant upon whatever structural support the architecture of the exhibition space could provide. The innovation of working back into the loop weave- distorting, adding and subtracting anywhere –achieved a more self-supporting and adaptable surface tension. Because the form could start, end, extend or contract at will, the weaving was only constrained by its own surface tension and the affordance of its immediate environment. I argue that this new responsive capability came from an increased discontinuity: it was the discontinuous nature of the self-supporting weave that afforded a new relational quality when forming the work in situ. The work’s mutability, of being one of many possible forms, draws on an incompleteness of knowledge and a movement-by-movement capability rather than expressing totalised control over space.
Embodied Geometries 2019
In 2019 I taught two classes at the RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design in the framework of Caitlyn Parry’s Design Studio Human Emerging/Emerging Human, through which undergraduate architecture students explored how their own bodies could interrogate and participate within design practices. Over the two classes we experimented with the concept of embodied geometries, architectonic surfaces, forms and spaces generated by hand that challenged the conventions of digital and parametric design with which students were familiar. In our first class, for example, I gave the students a series of spatial-material prompts through which they began to explore the classroom’s dimensions. Gradually the class built an immersive model that traced their own movement and interactions in the given space. To capture the learning from and responses to these experimental classes, I concluded by asking the students to each complete a discursive knot: reflections written on a foam loop that was then manipulated to create new intersections of ideas. The discursive knots revealed what the students had learnt from working collectively towards unknown outcomes and materials-based spatial engagement, resulting in an increased awareness of embodied, social and emergent aspects of design.
Given Conditions 2022
Given Conditions was a large-scale site-specific installation made in and for Civic Square as part of Design Canberra 2022. I argue that due to the reductive geometries by which it was designed, Civic Square fails to relate to bodies, its own cultural and social function or the wider CBD. Given Conditions explores the limitations of these geometries and emerges from them. This urban intervention extended the discontinuous structural surface developed in making Little Systems (2018) at a more ambitious architectural scale. Weaving discontinuously, opening, closing removing and adding to the surface in response to its surroundings emplaced the work. As the work grew, it responded relationally to the reductive geometries enabling a reciprocal counterpoint to emerge. The emergent form maps my movements in the iterative process of coming to know space, as constituted by social relations and as realm of sensate possibility.
Thank you to
Rosny Arts Centre, Tasmania; Holmesglen TAFE, Melbourne; and Design Canberra, Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, Tuggeranong Arts Centre and Cox Architecture, Canberra. The Tuggeranong Knit’n’Knatter over 55 Club members Janette Hatch, Jan Barnham, Liz Brown, Isabel Devlin, Maria Hall, Barbara Marsassovich, Roslyn McDonald and Pat Skien. The students at Holmesglen TAFE and RMIT Architecture and particular thanks to lecturer, Caitlyn Parry from RMIT.
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Scheme (RTP) Scholarship