Tamryn McDermott

artist | researcher | teacher | arts administrator

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The dialogic processes of writing, revising, prompting, collecting, assembling, distilling, handwriting, and stitching is a sounding; a call and response (like the to-and-fro of a path or a video set in a palindrome loop). Following the path of my art education reveals the ongoing, emergent process of becoming artist/researcher/teacher (McDermott, 2021).

 

My recent practice involves collective exhibitions, hand-made artist books and journals, arts-based research with undergraduate student participants, and recontextualized, reimagined installations of past artworks.

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Recently I have focused on discovering what an intermedia journaling and artistic research practice looks and feels like. This investigation led me to learn new skills in video/audio production and editing. I would like to continue to develop this part of my practice and consider how intermedia art practices can inhabit spaces such as classrooms and less-formal "art" spaces. How can my work encourage public engagement, be interactive, and exist within alternative digital spaces such as augmented and virtual reality spaces? Through this work, I continue to explore concepts such as distance, connection, and translation as they relate to the visual and performative.

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I envision my practice entering an intermedia/performance space as I continue to learn new skills and develop this direction in my work, exploring my experience as a visual artist, researcher, and teacher through an artistic practice that manifests in both analog and digital form.

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As an artist, I integrate writing into my process as a practice of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005); writing to arrive somewhere new. My sketchbooks are filled with writing and extracted quotes, set into new contexts on the pages. The visual journals I used as an art teacher throughout my K – 12 teaching experience document my learning and emergence as an educator through an intermixing of text and visual explorations. These records are in flux; moving ideas, images, marks, letters, and words around on pages. The marks I make become more than marks. My marks are transformations that travel through me and are informed by my past, present, and my future. What happens when I settle on a mark and bring it into existence? What happens when I return to that mark? The marks I make exist in the then, now, and later; they are in a constant state of revision and becoming, open to movement and change (McDermott, 2021).

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References

McDermott, T. (2021). Artist’s writing notebook. [Unpublished]. Arts Administration, Education, and Policy, The Ohio State University.

Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A Method of Inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications Ltd.