A-child’s-eye-view,perspectives on research-creation exploring early childhood literacies through a museum display

A multimodal sensation

‘When the artist refuses to produce an object as the object of her work, when the artist refuses to be the subject of the work, when the philosopher refuses to write at a distance, when the work becomes the practice, when the practice invents its own language, research-creation deeply threatens the power/knowledge that holds the academy in place. (Manning, 2020 P221 P221)

In this multimodal sensation, I propose that research-creation affords the potential to create a multimodal text that operates as one outcome of collaborative arts practice and research. The usefulness of the proposition within research-creation is to orientate towards what is possible, to speculate on futures yet unmade and carry the awareness that we are never sure what a body or a mind is capable of.

I begin by explaining my encounters with the concept of multimodality working as a freelance artist on research projects. I then explain how research-creation as an approach afforded an opportunity to think and write differently, drawing on traditions from art practice and philosophy. I describe how research-creation engages with concepts and art practice and affords the potential to work in new ways and generate new thoughts. I then activate some of these ideas by creating a multimodal text through my art practice. This combines images and words from a research project as cut-up, juxtaposition and collage. It is intended to be stand-alone and remain distinct from the rest of this text. I hope to express findings from a research project and an exhibition, to explore feelings and share a sense of place. I insert this text object into this multimodal sensation as both a proposition and provocation.

I am a freelance visual artist; I describe myself as a journeyman, from the original French journee, as I get paid by the day. I also journey around to find work. For the last two decades, some of this work has taken place within research projects that vary in scale and disciplinary focus. I engage with ideas and thoughts from contrasting fields and am required to come up to speed quickly. I cut corners and make assumptions. I try not to define myself by what I am not, yet on this occasion, it is important to be clear that I am not a multimodal scholar. I do not experience knowledge as well laid out city plans with transport routes and services. Knowledge for me is evolving in multiple directions, emergent, bricolage, mackled together from things and thoughts that are to hand. I have contributed to many research projects and change programs yet the critical lesson I carry forward is to avoid working in a groove and look for the newness and potential within each new project.

Multimodality

I have encountered the term multimodality on occasions when my visual arts practice has been put to work within research in education and community settings. I am concerned with making, thinking, and doing and how these processes enunciate communication beyond formal spoken and written language. I imagine this as more than visual communication through codes and representation. I am interested in speculation, affect and what it means to be alive.

I am drawn to the ideas that multimodality generates in that it expands the possibility of what a text can be, what it can do and how it enters the world. I first encountered multimodality within my art practice through my work as a creative educator in schools. I read literature on multimodality and treat it as a friend to research-creation. Manning and Massumi (2014) use this phrase as a way to describe how ideas, objects and processes enter into and work alongside research-creation. I play with concepts and treat them as propositions. Multimodal scholarship challenges fixed ideas of what a text is and expand texts to encompass multiple senses and feelings. This changes what it is to read, what it is to understand and what it is to be understood. These ideas and flows make sense of time spent in a playgroup with young children, paying attention to situated communication, thoughts, desires, and actions. Playgroups are filled with rich meaning. Meaning that does not come to spoken or written language easily.

Research-creation

I utilise research-creation to activate specific theoretical ideas within my practice as a visual artist (Manning, 2015) these concepts challenge the ways the academy traditionally validates knowledge. I will now briefly describe how I understand research-creation (Manning and Massumi, 2014) and how it is relevant to this contribution. Originating in Canada and North America in the early 2000s the term ‘research creation’ is applied to research which foregrounds artistic practice and is used by funding bodies and research institutes to help provide funding streams for artistic-orientated enquiry within research establishments (Loveless, 2019). Research creation as a category of inquiry is contested and has generated much debate. According to Truman (2021), it is not a clear methodological approach or bounded set of disciplinary practices. There is debate over whether the term should be capitalized or hyphenated or treated as a noun or a verb.

By drawing attention to acts of thinking-making-doing and incorporating motion and flow (Manning, 2007) Research-creation is well suited to exploring the emergence of literacies in young children. As an adult walking into any early years setting, it is impossible to ignore an atmosphere rich in expression and communication. Meaning flows between children, adults, parents, and carers, it is felt and experienced often sitting beyond spoken language expressed through gesture, movements and sound.

Within my art practice, I rely on my intuition. Decisions are made on what feels right and what feels wrong, what I feel I should and shouldn’t do. Much of the reasoning or rationale for doing or making something is not thought through. Practice emerges from situations, stuff comes from stuff, and trains of thought carry things forward. I call this the secret plan of practice; I often keep the plan secret from everyone including myself so it can be written into the future.

Research-creation has grown in popularity as one way to talk through what art practice or the ‘work’ of art can activate within research. The word research can create separation and disjuncture between the subject/object of study and what is to be found out. Research can extract knowledge from the assemblage of relations where it can produce something that only appears to make sense. To avoid this separating out, what Manning describes as a parsing (2013) some writers hyphenate the term to research-creation to emphasize the singular nature of the concept. Research-creation draws attention to how artistic research interacts with the world as an active and expanding assemblage of thinking making and doing (Truman, 2021). It is sensitive to the way many artists imagine the process of making, creating and thinking (Cambre et al., 2020). This is to orientate forward, to think of what is not yet and speculate on multiple futures. My work as an artist/scholar is concerned with creating something new, often a thing, process or concept. For this reason, research-creation proposes a way to think, write and make within the complexity and mess of research.

This writing is not presented as an example of research-creation. However, central to it is an aspiration to present a multimodal text that uses images and fragments to share thoughts feelings and ideas. I describe this as an active assemblage or a ravelling of the parts of a project as it is an attempt to share how things felt. Research-creation orientates around propositions rather than research questions (Manning, 2016). This writing as a multimodal sensation makes this proposition.

Proposition 1

Research-creation with a focus on emergence and process in a minor key affords a context for the possibility of writing differently within this journal.

The emergence of literacy in very young children

In 2018, I was commissioned to work as an artist-in-residence on an ethnographic research study exploring the literacy practices of children aged between one and 3 years. I worked in a playgroup visited by young children and their carers based in a regional town in the United Kingdom. The study took place over 2 years within ordinary, everyday community contexts. These contexts include community playgroups, parks, farms, outdoor spaces, and a museum.

The study employed arts-based methods to build a picture of how young children employ and combine different methods of communicating. This included the agencies of sounds, gestures, and movements, in different contexts of their everyday lives.

The research aimed to provide a more complete account of children’s literacies, enabling deeper exploration of the role of materiality and place in literacies (Hackett, 2021).

The research project explored how literacy was woven into how young children experience specific environments and materiality. This would include exploring the place of objects whether educational, playful, or every day within childhood meaning-making engagements. It partnered with the local museum with the aim of sharing some of our findings through a co-produced exhibition.

The project aimed to be immersed in the complex milieu of childhood spaces, paying attention to flows of communication through words noises, smells, gestures, and mark-making. This milieu includes but is not limited to people, objects, ideas, emotions, smells, light, touch and time (Springgay, 2020). We questioned the possibility and usefulness of epistemological distance, yet recognised our respective disciplinary traditions, rigour, and values.

As part of this research project, the research team committed to co-producing an exhibition in a temporary project space at a municipal museum in a northern town. The team aimed to co-produce the exhibition with children and their carers, and playworkers to share the insights emerging through the research. We hoped to collect and display objects and images that would share some of the ideas that were emerging within the fine grain of the project. This included affirming the significance of everyday objects, movement through space, mark-making, sound and light. We wanted to engage with the multiple and rich ways young children communicate with adults and each other as they are on the cusp of developing formal spoken language.

Multi-modal texts 13 images to each image and around 100 word

I aspire to produce a multimodal text as heuristic and attempt to communicate thoughts, feelings, and memories that are unclear but feel important. A text to be felt and experienced but not understood, to be visited yet not consumed.

It is offered as an intervention and presented as an experiment in research-creation. This insertion acts as what Loveless (2019) describes as a boundary object, neither purely an art object nor an object of research, but rather something that falls between both. I present this middle text as a heuristic, experiment, and provocation. It is a multimodal, combining images and words that together aspire to communicate ideas, feelings, and findings. As a proposition, it aims to communicate meaning in a form that is not generally accepted within academic publications. Words and images are afforded equal status and aspire for something other than clarity. In the space between the image and text, the edges bleed and territory collapses, meaning is fluid.

Extra-Ordinary-Objects was a play with words. We worried it might be too clever. We were interested in how objects were part of childhood worlds. The roles they played in developing language and communication. Everything was movement and noise and smell and taste. The objects were mixed with light and space and touch. Their edges seemed less clear, strewn across the floor in the world of playgroup. In the museum, however, no matter how close we positioned the objects in the cases they still felt separate. We learnt that words printed over photographs are hard to read for people who find it hard to read.

A museum display is a multimodal text that holds images, words, and objects. The case is the frame and the edge of the page to be folded over as a reminder. The whole text is understood as a display, a showing, a laying out, a laying bare. The written texts are reference points. The words do not mean anything on their own. We placed natural things from the world outside with toys and trinkets. A stone from the beach with a feather from a walk with a plastic toy. Sponge Bob Square Pants keeps one eye on things, peeping from a toffee tin.

I can hear the noise of the plastic sheet as it rustles next to my ear. I remember the worry as the wooden spoons came out and everything that made a noise would be bashed to bits. Grumpy Doll got her face drawn on with green pen. Everything is movement and noise and experience and emotion. Fleeting friends found when sorting pasta into pans. Brief conflict in sharing the plastic dinosaurs. We move between stations inside and outside there is a need for freedom of movement. I sit cross-legged with my tripod and take photographs with long exposures.

Grumpy doll with raised fist represents her unchanging mood. Grumpy doll would ride her pushchair chariot around playgroup demanding attention. Grumpy doll has a nickname she is called Grumpy Doll. Grumpy Doll helps us to talk about what it feels like to be grumpy and a little angry about things. She helps us express our feelings with our faces. A smile, a wink, a laugh, a sigh, a breath. Grumpy Doll reminds me of a time I told some children that dinosaurs ate bogies. I don’t know why I did this, Grumpy Doll made me, and I can’t ask her why.

The certainty in the way the marks were made. The flow of the body into lines. A dipping down from the knee and waist while in the flow of a single action. To score a line that is an extension of a body in movement, a dance without music into the world. This is not in preparation for something, this is a purity of mark that calls for attention. A trace of childhood movement that will always and forever defy any form of capture other than the texture of its traces. Remember that life emerges from scribble and scribble is never completely arbitrary. We make and follow many lines.

Describing objects in words can feel pointless. A teething ring carved from the discarded bone of a Sunday roast. Something to cut your teeth on. A shard of discarded clay pipe. An out-of-focus marble. We used to call ones like these Googlies. They were worth three ordinary marbles. Googlies were extra-ordinary marbles, in a class of their own. A milk bottle top and the tyre from a toy tractor. What makes a real object and what makes a toy? What separates the adult from the child? What do children make of things?

An assisted ready-made. It feels fine to talk of Duchamp in a text that belongs in the middle. An unmoored text with opaque frames of reference. If the reader cares enough, they can find the difference. The distinction between the ready-made and the assisted ready-made is not essential to read a pull-along unicorn. It is only relevant if you care about the difference between a snow shovel and a broken arm or a bull and a bicycle seat. Everything in a text does not have to be relevant to mean something important. Unicorns like childhoods are mythical creatures.

The middle leg is a repair. I became attached to the idea of things-on-strings. The pull-along toy represents freedom of movement. The caterpillar proved hard to find. I wanted a repair that was crude, home done, and honest to itself but that demonstrated a level of care. A repair as opposed to restoration. My addition is not part of the text, it is more a form of handwriting. A lot can be learned from it if you care to look. The repair is an invisible modality. Apparent to other repairers but for most, it is the background noise of an untuned piano.

The image used on the front cover of the book about early literacy. The image announces its own rhetoric sideways. Carefully chosen welly boots. Worn for their spots and not their practicality. Grumpy Doll is going for a ride. She will visit all the stations. I have scrubbed the green ink from her face. I think that literacy for all of us starts as something felt. It emerges in movement and flows. Literacy is affective and in process for adults as well as children. The world comes to language rather than the other way around.

And then three images that must go together because they make no sense apart. Attuning to the way coloured light falls on surfaces. We make paper collages and light them from behind. The project falls onto the surfaces of things and tells its story in abstract shapes. Light begins to colour things in. On the way up the museum steps on a stone floor full of fossils, light from high-up stained-glass windows creates magenta in the middle space. The world is not a text to be read, it is an unfolding and a refolding. Something to move into with openness and grace. This is a thing I feel I have learnt.

Sometimes it is not clear what is real and what is a reflection. Sometimes the reflections appear more real than the real. The museum constructs ideas of childhood around the objects it has decided to keep for posterity. We cannot save everything, so we make our selection. A museum display is a text, a collection, a story, a gathering together, an active assemblage, a ravelling, an interpretation a start and a finish. It is something that can be written and something that can be read. A Janus dog on wheels can look back at you and itself from two directions.

Conclusion

To author a multimodal text is to pay attention to the meaning that comes from the middle. I turn to metaphor and reference the magenta in the image of the reflected light on the museum floor. In the photograph, taken one-handed on my phone as I carried boxes of objects up the spiralling stairs, the red and blue light from two sources are overlaid and produce a strong magenta in their mixing. The image however does more than this, it mixes the ancient trilobites of the stone floor, the glassmaker who made the windows, the builders of the museum, the movement of the sun, the warmth of the reflection of the light and the way it made me stop in my tracks. For me, it references the impossibility of not paying attention when the world comes up with something that cannot be ignored. Multimodality is a way of letting language grow and shift and take new forms, a way of letting the unexpected emerge from a text. It allows us to resist the urge to press the publish button and define the edges of something finished. Multimodality is information and communication technology that enables us to read the world differently. I wonder if we knew this as young children in a time before we could speak.