Making Holes: Re-framing Authorship and Control through Co-Working Methodologies in Sculptural Practice.

Abstract

Making Holes is a practice-led investigation into the hierarchical dynamics between artist and material, asking what it might mean to treat materials not as passive instruments but as active collaborators in the creative process. Rooted in a sculptural practice that resists fixed media and is instead spatially and contextually responsive, this research unfolds through installations, found and made objects, text, audio, film and performance-lectures. Central to the project is the development of ‘coworking’, a methodology inspired by Marxist theorist Boris Arvatov, which seeks to dismantle traditional Western and colonial models of authorship and mastery by foregrounding relationality, agency and responsiveness. Abstract Drawing on Irish Indigenous animistic beliefs, the making practice embraces a world view in which materials possess intrinsic vitality, challenging anthropocentric and patriarchal constructs embedded in conventional artistic production. This is explored most explicitly through the work Phantoms of Form (2016-ongoing), a body of work that operates as a speculative fan fiction, engaging archival traces of historical female makers and reanimating their presence within contemporary practice. These hauntological gestures trouble linear narratives of art history and authorship. This document engages theoretical frameworks from Umberto Eco’s notion of the open work, Roland Barthes’s critique of authorial authority and feminist methodologies articulated by Hélène Cixous, alongside a range of contemporary visual art practices, including those of Elaine Sturtevant, Nadia Hebson and Joseph Grigley. It also proposes the Slippery I, drawn from feminist theory and auto-fiction, as a conceptual strategy to navigate identity, collaboration and multiplicity in artistic practice. Through this, the research investigates what forms of knowledge, intimacy, and authorship emerge when the artist is no longer sole author but one of many agents in a co-constituted process of making. This written component, in dialogue with the creative works, scaffolds a reflexive understanding of a maker’s role within a broader ecology of materials, histories and voices. It traces a shift from the binary of maker/material to a broader framework inching towards philosopher and physicist Karen Barad’s theory of “intra-action”, where artworks arise through distributed agency across human and non-human forces. In doing so, Making Holes contributes to contemporary debates on authorship, agency and material relationality in visual arts practice.