ABOUT | More than Words

I am an artist, musician and creative animateur and I have worked and played with young children for over three decades. Links to my work:

Magic Acorns

Arculutron

This research is both a creative and a scholarly endeavour that attempts to reconceptualise young children’s onto-epistemologies through improvisation and the temporal arts.

My research takes vital materialist, posthuman approaches to expand and disrupt understanding of how language and communication are conceptualised in early-childhood-education. It focuses on how improvisation practices in the temporal, performing arts might enable new ways of understanding children’s multiplicitious engagements with the world and asks what these arts practices might offer early childhood pedagogy.

There is a profound lack of interest in the actual knowledge of and abilities of children and therefore very little research with two-year-olds that seeks to understand their emergent thinking as situated knowledge. This project seeks to give children’s onto-epistemologies deeper consideration.

My research-creation will use improvisation practices to research and think with children through movement, sound, gesture, and materials. Positioned in an ontology of mobile and multiple subjects. it intends to expand understandings of precognitive, non-representational and nomadic thinking that will help to explore and contribute to a shift in the status of language within vital materialist philosophy.

Its aims are:

to make visible two-year-old children’s ontologies, knowledges and capabilities, particularly around communication and language.
to co-generate understandings of improvisation in the temporal arts as pedagogical method through an experiential arts-based residential workshop for artists and educators
To contribute to the understanding of video as a generative mode of flexible, participatory, research-creation practice with young children.

This project uses innovative 360˚ video techniques to create audio/visual data.This more-than-human technology observes in ways radically different to 'framed video. It makes tangible young children's entangled knowledge through relation and movement in ways that are not perceptible to the adult gaze or traditional video technology.

This is my portfolio documenting a range of activities relating to, contributing to and inspired by my PhD journey.