The fictional narrative centres on a commune based in the Southwest American desert with live/work pods where fictional characters are invited to make work and explore concerns during their residency. The narrative is located in a fictional architectural floorplan with pods representing an area of specific research: Healing, Illusion, 90s Science Fiction TV, American Desert, Ritual and Transformation.

Using this written narrative to navigate concerns parallel to her practice, the character’s imagined interactions, discoveries and discussions are observed and fed into the making of artworks. Through this methodology there is a blurring of fact and fiction where the fictionalised artwork that has been imagined undergoes a ‘trans-materialisation’ or a ‘re-materialisation’ as it is made in the real world.

This paper begins by describing the fictional narrative employed in the research, the location, the characters and their conditions. It then notes how materiality reacts to the fiction, and ends summarising with theoretical structures and diagrams that underlie the research. Pivotal texts are Burrows and O’Sullivan’s 2019 Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy and Lambert-Beatty’s 2009 Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.