'Seaming, Writing, and Making Strange: between material and text'

Although prevalent in the process of practice-led research for the arts, uncertainty and ambiguity seem to be most powerfully present in the transaction between material and textual elements. This article discusses the productive aspects of ambiguity emerging in the process of translating the experience of making into a communicable language, and how this productivity can be heighten by the materiality and corporeality involved. In the course of the physical and emotional process of making, an ‘empathetic’ relationship can develop between the maker-researcher and the ‘body of work’—the artefact-in-process, documented material, fragmentary texts being put together, etc.,— maximizing the ‘stranger effect.’ Through the author’s own experience of oscillating between making and reflecting, this article aims to demonstrate how the practice of practice-led research can complicate the arrival at certainty, or settled knowledge, enriching the outcome as a result.