As I was lying in bed Monday night, thinking about my project, worried that I have not written anything in a while and yet still procrastinating (to others like myself who are procrastinators, I encourage you to watch this TED talk on procrastination: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator), I was thinking about Gene’s questions for us to answer and how to respond to them in a way that is both fun and clear. (My procrastination is paired with being busy grading papers, but I am sure each of us has a very busy schedule.) I have recently talked to my students about writing in such a way that is fun for them, otherwise writing becomes tedious and procrastination grows. But when we are interested in writing, it helps us to start and continue working. So, I will try to answer all of the questions that Gene asked, but I want to do it my own way. So, I will tell you a story.

When I was a little girl, I spent most of my summers in a little summer house on the bank of Klyazma river in a small provincial town, 250 kilometers east of Moscow in Soviet Union. On the second floor of a simple wooden house (which was like a cabin) was a huge rug made out of old fur coats. It was like a patched-up blanket, Russian style. There were pieces of rabbit fur and sheep wool, with patches of old foxtail hats. I remember laying on that warm carpet, the hairs tickling my skin. As I ran my fingers through the different textures, my mind wondered about everything and nothing at the same time. What were these animals like when they were alive? What kind of clothing had these pieces been made into before they ended up as a rug? I could feel my mother’s careful stitches putting these old pieces together into a single rug as I traced them with my hands. I imagined snow falling on fur hats and coats, sticking to the hairs, and could almost see my mother’s face with a foxtail hat wrapping her head, snowflakes dancing around, music from Doctor Zhivago playing in my head.

This memory emerged in my mind possibly because I have been involved in this project, which has a lot to do with memories, growing up, coming of age, letting go, moving away. This project also involved some stitching on my part (which my mother would undoubtedly criticize). My mother’s masterful stitching was already there, on my son’s baby blanket. I always found my mother to be very creative, as she continuously works on making things with her hands. To her these projects are often things she cannot help but do, otherwise she feels restless. I imagine, an artist might feel this way, if they cannot paint, or draw, or create art in any form. Or a photographer might feel this way, if we take away his camera. I always longed to find something like that for myself. I wanted to create something, something that both needs to come out of me and take a tangible form (like an emotion portrayed in a painting) and also be a natural and easy process, like my mother stitching a fur blanket. Not something she has to do for a class, but something she wants to do naturally. Ideally, it would be something that speaks to other people as well, something that evokes an emotional reaction or just simply makes another person happy. This class seemed like a place where it could happen, but I chose it intuitively, not deliberately.

Once I give it some thought, however, being in this class is a natural progression of things, as I have come back to arts (even if in a very subtle form) time and time again. Whatever was on my mind, whatever I was grappling at the moment, is what surfaced as a project, which in my case was my dealing with my children growing up. After my son left for college in September of 2017, it suddenly became urgent and clear that I was not ready for it to happen and felt left behind, suddenly feeling much older and lonelier. Fortunately for me, I have other members of the family with me, my husband and my daughter, but it became clear that time is going by fast and life is escaping from us sooner than we imagine.

The images of my children walking away from me became the theme, and as I have found each of them, I started to notice that there is a pattern. I felt a range of emotions with each of the images. At first feeling sad, melancholy, lost. I went to Russian classical literature and classical Russian characters like Kirsanov and Bazarov in Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, where they discuss (above other things) the generational gap and Chekhov’s Three Sisters where each character contemplates their life and what has it summed up to be. I also looked at Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie, a process in which you relive an experience. According to Nelson Mok (2017) perezhivanie is what ostensibly unifies emotion and cognition, and the individual with their environment. As I looked at the images of my children a bridge between the past and the present was created, as I travelled back in time, by reliving an experience in which this moment was captured in a photograph, and returned to the present, experiencing new emotions connected to the historical and material conditions of today.

Next came the idea of talking to them about their memories of those images. Most of the pictures were not associated with any particular memories for them (where most of the time they were not even aware of me taking the picture), unless it was a graduation day picture, which they both remembered vividly. However, I realized that they now created a new memory of discussing these pictures with each other and also in connection to the rest of the images I selected. When I asked why they think I selected these images and not others, my daughter said, “Because we are both on the picture,” and my son said, “because we are turned away from you, walking.” They giggled with each other as they tried to remember what they were feeling like in each moment, making fun of each other and it brought me a lot of joy to watch them. Suddenly my project transformed from being a sad and melancholy exploration to a transformation and creation of new happy memories.

My mother’s blanket, sewn for my son, found its way out of the closet in the next step, as Dora talked about texture in our class and as I wondered how I can introduce texture to my project. I was thinking of a background for the images, something to place them on, but also something that connects to what I have been thinking about. And suddenly I remembered about my son’s blanket, which was sitting in the back of his closet for years. As I brought it to class to share my thinking my progress I was asked if I worry about damaging it and I thought “No,” it has come back to life; it has been sitting in the closet for too long and now it has another chance to serve a purpose.

After that Lauren suggested an idea of printing the images on fabric, so that the textures (of the blanket and the photos) can talk to each other. This step delighted me, as I now realized that I will get to sew the images onto the blanket and my mother’s and my work will become one. At this point in the project, I was genuinely excited about it. I shared my progress with friends and my children, who were still trying to understand what it is that I am working on. In addition to the excitement, I was worried about the end result and if the project will speak to others. However, it was doing something to me that was helping me deal with the pain of my children growing up, so I decided if nothing else, this was a huge win already.

I contemplated adding text to the project as a way to give voice to my children, but also as a way to engage the audience (by asking questions), as well as a way to express my own thinking. As I worked on an audio track of my children talking about the images, I wrote down the things they said about them and placed them next to the image using different font types (one for my son and another for my daughter). I also wrote a little introduction to explain what this piece was and how it came to be. I gave it a title: Being a Parent is More or Less a Long Process of Letting Go. The audio track will accompany the piece, so that others can hear my children speak as well.

What happens next is yet to be seen. I want to write over the summer a more theoretical piece, which will trace my thinking. All of the visitors we had, all of the things we read, and, most importantly, all of the things we have discussed in class have shaped each of our projects. Writing this reflection could have served this purpose, of course, but it will take time to do a much more thorough analysis and the time is running out for me to finish writing this.

My thinking about arts-based exploration changed more as the semester progressed primarily from the work we have been introduced to by scholars/artist who visited our classroom. And as I trace it over the summer, I am hoping to end up with a written chapter that urges each of us to use research, including visual arts research, to understand ourselves, to help ourselves deal with pain and to heal, to gain new meaning, and to transform things.

What was unexpected was how my emotions changed over the course of the project, but this was also an unexpected reward. Another healing element is time itself. Together, working on this project and time passing, I look at growing up, letting go, and coming of age with a lot less sadness than I did at the start, not that sadness is bad. I think once my mother’s work became present in the project, I realized that I too once grew up and moved on (in my case far away from my family), and yet, we are still very close.

Strengths and weakness are difficult to understand and admit to. Weaknesses for me were inconsistency with writing, following the thread of the process. It will be harder to write it down with time (that is why I will work on it this summer, so that I can try and trace my work while I am still working on it). Strengths was probably how much thinking about the project I did. I thought of it in the context of making the project, but also throughout the day, as I lived my life, as I cooked food for my family, as I talked to my parents, as I fell asleep at night. Reflecting on it, trying to find connections, constantly questioning myself helped me on the journey to find peace.

I wish in the next work I create something from scratch similar to what my mother does as she sews and knits things. I was also intrigued by the idea of layering picture or using negatives of the images. I am also thinking of creating a children book with my daughter on emotions, which will also be using arts-based methods as part of my scholarly activities.

Last August, on the day my son was taking a bus to college, I came home from work, helped him pack the last few items, and then asked him what he would like for his last dinner at home before he leaves. I walked to the neighborhood grocery store to pick up a few items for the meal and as I picked up carrots from the vegetable stand, I started weeping, standing right there in the middle of the grocery store. I was so focused on my son over the past year preparing for this moment to come, making sure that everything was done right for him to leave for college, concentrating on him, that I completely ignored how I felt about it. And as I picked the carrots for the meal that he likes, I realized that it will be a long time before I cook it again, since he was not planning to come back until Thanksgiving. I was so overwhelmed by the emotions in that moment, wiping my tears away, slightly embarrassed to be crying uncontrollably in public, that I forgot half of the ingredients in the store and only realized it half way between the store and home. I thought to myself that I will ask him to run to the store and get it and started weeping again, because he has been so good with helping me with such grocery runs over the last few years that I realized again just how much I am going to miss him. When I came home, he saw me completely disheveled with red eyes, runny nose, tears streaming down my face. He thought something must have happened. When he asked me, “What’s wrong?” I answered, “My son is leaving.” He thought I completely lost my mind and looked at me as if I was crazy. “Have you just realized that?” he said. I did not know what to say. I think I am still realizing that.

As I type this now, his first year of college came to its end and he is back in his room and over the year I cooked that favorite meal for him many times as he visited a lot. Working on this project, watching my children walking away from me in the pictures, stitching their images printed on fabric on the blanket made by my mother, placed all of the emotions into a different perspective. I once walked away from my mother and I am now thousands of miles away from her. Yet, her presence in my life, in my thinking, and in my academic work is very strong. So, she is always with me. My memories have transformed and so did my emotions in the healing process of art making.

It has been the most joyous, interesting, thought provoking, and engaging experience taking this course. And I want to say thank you to everyone in class, all our amazing scholars-visitors, and, of course, Gene.

Mok, N. (2017). On the concept of perezhivanie: A quest for a critical review. In Perezhivanie, Emotions and Subjectivity (pp. 19-45). Springer, Singapore.

Reading Maya Pidnyck’s article on the poetics of erasure, I felt intrigued, amused, and joyful. I think the article connects to many things we have been talking about in class overall as well as it relates to each of our projects individually. In some ways, as we contemplated in the beginning of the semester what to create, we stared onto a blank canvas, a blank page, a blank space in our minds (if there is such a thing), wondering what it is that we want to make, feeling terrified if what we want to produce has any value, worried that we are not competent enough as artists to make anything “good.” Looking at a blank page differently, as Pindyck suggests, as not “the page that is a blank surface upon which to project your ideas and plop down words, but as a dynamic text with its own volition that can manifest in relation to a reader,” is a liberating perspective (Pindyck, 2017, p. 58). The text or the blank page is no longer an inanimate thing, which reminds me of Heesoon Bai’s article (2015) in which she problematizes the modern everyday ontology of separating the animate from the inanimate, showing that such separation has not just ethical implications for our environment, but also has connections to our everyday life, where we interact with “things” both animate and inanimate. In this case, when we contemplate creating something, it puts a lot of pressure on us as the “creators,” however, if we see our projects as alive, as dynamic, as something that communicates to us (and to others) something out of its own volition, it helps us feel as collaborators, lifting away the pressure.

Pidnyck (2017) says, “No writing should not necessarily be viewed as putting thoughts “down on paper” but as a process of relation to what the page already carries, both its visible and invisible elements, like its texture, its stains, its history, and its text” ( p. 59). As I spend time working on my project, stitching the images of my children walking away from me (printed on a fabric) to an old blanket that my mother sewed for me, as I was expecting my first born son, there is so much that each of these materials carries. All I am doing is interacting with them, as I am learning to understand both visible and invisible elements, interpreting them, and appreciating them. Pidnyck (2017) writes about the process of literacy and erasure, “The only way I can describe it is like this: the words rise above the page, by say an eighth of an inch, and hover there in space, singly and unconnected, and they form a kind of field, and from this field I pick my words as if they were flowers” (p. 60). This is so beautiful and so inspirational! To look at writing and reading as such a creative process, in which instead of sitting and reading a text, I am walking through a meadow, picking flowers, is a joyful and beautiful activity. This helps me to look at our art creating process as a fun, interactive, and collaborative work, even if my collaborators are fabric, thread, stitches and a sewing needle.

Pindyck, M. (2017). Teaching Literacy as and through Erasure. English Journal, 106(5), 58.

Bai, H. (2015). Peace with the earth: Animism and contemplative ways. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 10(1), 135-147.

I have recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book (2005) Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which Gladwell argues that rapid cognition takes place in a matter of seconds, in a blink of an eye, where we draw conclusion without awareness, unconsciously. Gladwell (2005) states that we live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it, however, learning to understand what happens in those few seconds is very important, according to Gladwell. He calls it “adaptive unconscious,” which is a mental process that works rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. Gladwell (2005) considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls, such as stereotypes. Among many examples he uses in the book to explore the phenomena of making such snap judgments, he looks at the idea of memory and verbal representation of memories, which was very interesting to me. For example, he states that recognizing someone’s face is a classic example of unconscious cognition. We don’t have to think about it. Faces just pop into our minds. But, he proposes that, if we were asked to take a pen and paper and write down in as much detail as we can what a person looks like (for example a person who sat next to us on the train this morning), describing their face, describing the color of their hair, what were they wearing, etc., we will do a lot worse at picking that face out of a lineup. This is, Gladwell argues (2005), because the act of describing a face has the effect of impairing your otherwise effortless ability to subsequently recognize that face. This is what her writes:

“The psychologist Jonathan W. Schooler, who pioneered research on this effect, calls it verbal overshadowing. Your brain has a part (the left hemisphere) that thinks in words, and a part (the right hemisphere) that thinks in pictures, and what happened when you described the face in words was that your actual visual memory was displaced… Your thinking was bumped from the right to the left hemisphere” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 55).

I suppose that this is what I was trying to say when I told you in class that our memories are destroyed when we use words to describe them. I have moved to a much happier place thinking about memories since then, as I now look more at transformation of memories and creation of new memories, new images in our minds. However, I think, it applies to many of us as we try to get the pictures out of minds and create art, often supplemented with some verbal representation. In turn, we try to appeal, I think, to the right hemisphere of those who are looking at our art, who will interpret our work by experiencing the art, the images, and only then trying to verbalize what they see by bumping the impressions about art to the left hemisphere. For example, in our last class, I was very moved by Amanda’s presentation of her work in progress. I feel that the etchings of her house resonated in my right hemisphere, which was followed by strong emotional reaction. I was in tears even when I was trying to tell my husband about it later that evening. I couldn’t quiet explain it in words though.

Now, I don’t think that there is a clear dichotomy between words and pictures, the same way that there is no clear separation between the two hemispheres in our brain, information is constantly exchanged, but it is still interesting to contemplate these ideas.

Update:

I have printed the images on fabric. Thank you, Lauren, for your wonderful suggestion. I have also recorded another conversation between my children about them images. They felt obligated to participate in my project, so I don’t know how useful it is. I also asked them to paint a picture. I left the video running as my daughter was painting and left the room (had to transfer laundry to the drier). The conversation that took place between them as I left the room was a lot more interesting than the one forced by me. Time will tell what this sums up to.

Oh, and I took one picture of them walking. 🙂

We were walking my son to the train, as he went back to college on Sunday.

I have found a few more images, by chance, of my kids walking. One was another screen saver on a tablet that I do not use very often. As I turned it on, the other day, I discovered the image sitting t here. It gave me smile, because it was evident to me that I have a thing for taking such pictures.
As I have collected a few more pictures, I think, I will take another video of my kids looking at them and discussing them. As I reviewed the first video interaction, I realized something. I spoke in class about memories and how they are destroyed once we put them into words as we write or talk about them, but as my children looked at the pictures and could not remember most of them being taken, I realized that I am not destroying, but creating memories, which was a lot more positive! Given my “Russian” tendency to gravitate towards sadness, melancholy, and nostalgia (which is seen even in this week’s title of the post), these were new emotions of joy and hope of thinking about my children and them growing up, which delighted me very much.
I have also decide to ask my children to make a free drawing of what these images make them feel like as they view the next set of images. I have prepared two small canvassed and some acrylic paints. I decided to use paint, because the colors have a potential to represent their feelings on an energetic level. I do not know if I will be using hem, but I would like to incorporate my children trying to express themselves in more than one way, using more than one mode of expression.

The image discovered as a screen savor on an old tablet.

I just want to say thank you to Gene, Cristina, and all of you for a wonderful evening!

Here are two pictures of me walking home through the park. I am safely home now. 🙂

Good night!

Trowbridge (2017) describes how being in the moment helps with self-awareness and focuses on multi-perspectives. I attempted to embrace these notions of self-awareness and multi-perspectives when I video recorded my children interacting with each other (and me) as they looked at the three images I share with you last week. It did not go as I planned, of course. They were goofing around, giggling, making jokes (not always good ones) and not sticking to the plan, my plan that is. And as difficult as it seemed (and frustrating at the moment), I decided to let it go and let them be who they are in all their silliness and then try and learn something from analyzing our interaction. I am working on transcribing the video to help me analyze what happened and begin to make sense of it. Certain things were very clear already. When I showed my kids the images and asked them what they remember about that day they said, “I don’t remember that day at all.” (They both remembered the graduation day and described how they felt in that day or even in the picture, which was great, but not the others.) At first, I thought to myself, “Great, where do we go from here?” But then I realized that the fact that they don’t remember it, is significant in itself! These moment mean a lot to me, because I was the one taking the picture and I do have memory of those days partially because of the pictures, to them these are just normal days, without any significant memories. And as we talked and as one reminded the other about the day and the details in that day we created a new memory by viewing the images.
Another thing that emerged was their awareness about my emotions looking at these images. The exchange that followed after I asked them about how they thought I felt about these images, was very interesting to me. My son, who was not aware of me taking the images, looked at the images for a long time and then at me and said that I was probably feeling melancholy, which in itself is, probably, not that groundbreaking, but I felt a connection created that was not there before through the process of viewing the images.

I will work on transcribing the video in the next week and perhaps write down my own narrative. I will also print out all the images that I have and bring them with me to class next week (03/21) to share with you and ask for your feedback.

See you all at the AMNH on Wednesday!

Anna’s Journal Entry

Update:

My son is home this week for a midwinter break, so I am hoping that tomorrow I will sit both of my children down to look at these three pictures and ask them to talk about them. If all goes according to plan, I will have a more substantial update for you in class on Wednesday. I have selected three images, one of which you have already seen. The bottom image is from Matthew’s graduation last June and the top one is from a few summers ago of them walking into the murky waters of Brighton Beach. I chose these three because in them I am always behind, on all three they are walking, and in all three my son’s gaze is away from me. I want to hear from my children there thoughts, their memories, their impressions, and make sure that their narrative has as much room in this project as does mine.

Inspiration:

I was very intrigued by the conversation we had last class with Wendy and the interaction vs. stillness of photographs, which was achieved by cutting out parts of the picture and then putting them together. I don’t know yet if this means anything, but I was so moved and impressed by how this process of carefully cutting different parts of a picture changed our perception of the images.

I am also endlessly inspired by all of your work and desperately trying to keep up. Thank you for that stimulation and motivation.

Two quotes have been on my mind since our last class, which have been driving my thinking.

• Using images as a way of seeing what is not sayable, something I think Wendy said in one of her videos, when she talked about her projects. I believe we all talked about it in one way or another, but I think it is very powerful to use images to represent something, show something, illustrate something, which cannot be said in any other mode.
• Another quote was brought up by Gene, who reminded me of Lisa Delpit’s work. “We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs.” I think it is very important to remind ourselves that everything we do in research will be shaped by who we are and understanding who we are and embracing our subjectivity is a luxury and strength of our work. Once it is done, it will be up to those viewing the work and up to their interpretations, which will be shaped by their beliefs. While it is daunting to think about how others will interpret our work, as we try to insure that we are understood, I think it is better to focus on representation of our thinking through our projects as transparently as possible, the rest is out of our hands anyway.

Going forward: 

I am hoping to have an update for you very soon with how the interaction went between my children. I am hoping that during this conversation, which I will video record, themes will emerge. I am also choosing quotes about memories, coming of age, and letting go from my fellow Russian thinkers/writers/researchers (Turgenev, Vygotsky, and possibly Bakhtin), as they undoubtedly shaped who I am today and my sentimental/melancholic nature. They may or may not find their way into the project. Time will tell.

I have been inspired by Gene who reminded me of a quote by Marcel Proust “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” As I shared the image of my children with you in class, I thought I would explore this idea of revisiting memories by looking at the pictures and adding to the image what we can’t see by including the voices of my children, their memories, their experiences. I think this will be an ethnographic/autoethnographic project where I would pursue multiple goals (and the time will tell if I do achieve any of them, but one must dream big!). Having read Pink (2011), I would also like to add a sensory element to this ethnographic/autoethnographic work, where I hope to appeal to many sense in those involved in the project and those viewing the work.

First, I would like to point out that I agree with Gene wholeheartedly that it is a mistake to decide where you want to go with your research before you do it, but it is tricky. You must  begin somewhere and have an idea of where you want to end up otherwise how do you start? What is important is to remain open to new ideas, remain flexible, remain open minded, allow things to change your path, so that your research project becomes (as what Ken Tobin calls) emergent and contingent. It seems that it is a lot harder to accomplish a project like that to pursues a clear goal set out from the start. I am certain that it is much harder (even with as little of research experience, as I have). However, I am also hoping that it will be more natural, more authentic, more meaningful.

Second, having said all that, I do have some goals set out already. In answering the question who is my art project going to server, I want to say that it will serve myself and my children who will become my coresearchers in the project (which is something I have yet to discuss with my son, but my daughter has already agreed eagerly), but I also hope that, whatever the project will end up being, it will evoke an emotional response in the viewers, who will be able to reflect on their experiences of growing up or being a parent, raising and letting go. I am trying to be mindful that my images will inevitably tell a story not just about our experiences, memories, etc., but will illuminate the privileges we have and I hope to be able to remain aware of that and critical of a system where not everyone can have these privileges. I don’t want to sound self absorbed or self indulgent by focusing on myself and my children in my project and hope that as the project unfolds, I will be able to find something that transcends to others by way of connection using different modes. Pink wrote (2011) “Photographs allow us to see modes that are visual: colour, shape, size, position, light. What they do not show us are modes that operate through the other senses – of touch, smell, hearing and taste – such as bodily movement, texture, three-dimensional shape, sounds” (Pink, 2011, p. 269). I am hoping that I will be able to tell a story by connecting images to others modes like writing, expression (perhaps through some recorded dialogue), color (if we decide to add a painting which reflects our memories, experiences), collage or anything else.

Pink (2011) wrote about the practice of sensory ethnography which involves the researchers’ empathetic engagement with the practices and places that are important to the people participating in the research (Pink, 2011, p. 271). I hope to be able to practice such empathetic engagement in my project. She also wrote about the two goals of such work,

“If ethnography is to become a useful – and by useful I also mean active and critical – tool for multimodality scholars, then it has a dual role to play. First, ethnographic research can indeed enable a greater understanding of practices, experiences and more. Second, a sensory ethnography that challenges the pre-set categories of multimodal analysis and breaks down the binaries between image and text can surely also create a self-critical and reflexive strand within multimodal analysis” (Pink 2011, p. 274).

I would like in my project to embrace what Pink highlighted above and my exploring the issue of raising children, watching them grow and letting them go, I will gain a deeper understanding of the practice for everyone involved in the project and I also hope to connect multiple modes of expression to create a fuller picture, more nuanced and more complete, which will hopefully also allow for reflexivity and transformation.

Both readings for this week appealed to my senses in emotional and intellectual capacity. I have recently experienced this with a lot of the readings, when I feel that every article/chapter adds to my existing collage of theories, each representing a puzzle piece that has been missing. Having found this new puzzle piece, I feel an incredible joy for placing it in the right spot (if there is such a thing) of a larger mosaic entitled something like “My Theoretical Frameworks/My Epistemology/My World View.”

I am going to pause in this reflection on the idea of heuristics and how both of the readings used the concept of heuristics to explain the need for arts based research. “In a sense, arts based research is a heuristic through which we deepen and make more complex our understanding of some aspects of the world,” wrote Barone and Eisner (2012) as they argued that each arts based research project aims to create a form that is evocative and compelling to the viewers and invites us to contemplate an issue (issues) introduced by the research project  (Barone and Eisner, 2012, p. 3). In the second piece, Eisner talked about the concept of generalizability as a heuristic, as he addressed both quantitative and qualitative research in education. “The generalizations derived from qualitative case studies are essentially heuristic devices intended to sharpen perception so that our patterns of seeking and seeing are more acute. We don’t use the generalizations drawn from the specific case to draw conclusions about other situations but, rather, we use them to search those situations more efficiently” (Eisner 2001, p. 141). I have been intrigued by the idea of using heuristics as a tool, or as Eisner puts it “a heuristic device”, in conducting research and creating opportunities for reflection and transformation, and it is interesting, although not surprising, to see that in arts based research the projects can be used as a heuristic to do the investigative and exploratory work.

My final thought is also based on the reading, where Barone and Eisner (2012) quoted Gombrich who said: “Painting is an activity and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than paint what he sees,” which makes me realize that as I create my collage of theories, I will inevitably see the puzzle pieces that fit into my epistemology. As I go on this journey of creating an art based research project, the process of creation will be based on seeing what I create, as I learn from my creation what it is that I am actually seeing. 

When I first took this picture, as I walked behind my children, I thought to myself, “There they go, walking away from me.” Emotions, according to Jonathan Turner (2002), are often mixed with each other and the result is not always as straightforward as it may seem at first glance. Happiness mixed with sadness will produce emotions like nostalgia, which is exactly what happened in this moment for me, when I felt both happy and sad to watch my children go (literally and figuratively). As we looked at this image together in class and as Gene talked about it, proposing for me to sift through my images looking for a pattern, I realized that I remember a few other pictures of my children walking together, which I took. I guess I like to capture moments of them walking, caught in an instant, taken without their awareness of it. I am intrigued by this idea and will go through my images to see if that could sum up to some kind of a project. I have already been quiet inspired by you all and am looking forward to seeing other images from the classmates who didn’t get to share on Wednesday.