KFI Project exhibition ‘Knowing From the Inside: The Unfinishing of Things’, University of Aberdeen (2017),

Exhibition abstract: Things are never finished. They always overflow the ends set for them; that's how life can carry on. If knowledge grows from practical engagement with materials, with people and with places, in what form can academic research be presented and shared with others? Alongside conventional journal articles and books, this exhibition has been an opportunity for members of the Knowing From the Inside research project to experiment with this question. Rather than communicate polished research findings, somewhat removed from life, the focus of the works presented here is on the process of research. The exhibition is grouped around three modes of knowing with at the heart of the KFI project knowing with materials in Duncan Rice library, knowing with people in the atrium of James McKay hall and knowing with place in the foyer of MacRobert building. The exhibition will run over the summer.

As part of the group exhibition I presented a suite of drawing produced during the KFI project.

Catalogue description: The disciplines of drawing and anthropology have a shared ancestry. Ethnographic drawings are distinguished through their reliance upon the originating context. Defined by their setting, they are a mirror upon the maker’s captured view. Anthropology regards drawing as a means of documentation, one which allows for the embodied experience of the ethnographer, the phenomenological self, to be accounted for within analysis. As an anthropologist that writes and reflects on the work of contemporary artists, drawing is often a means of empathetically responding to my subject: to draw with them. This is not limited to the in-situ fieldwork sketch but is realized in correspondence with my art practice. Drawings response to other drawings: my own and others. Form governs this interplay. More normatively ethnographic drawings relegate a consideration of the pictorial to the process of making and not its final meaning. The form/content partition is upheld. But within an interdisciplinary practice the taxonomy of aesthetic form to context shifts. The role of aesthetics within ethnographic drawing is contested and ill-defined. But the potential of a drawn form to reach beyond its originating context, to hold both metaphor and concrete description as possibilities, is central to drawing’s ability to reach across disciplines.