One Month of Doctoral Work — Reflections and Achievements
Today marks one month since I officially became a PhD student and began writing my doctoral research. Over the past five weeks in Malaysia, I met with my supervisors, visited temples, and made countless sketches on site. During this time, I mapped out the foundations of my research: why I am undertaking this PhD, how my artistic practice transforms into research, and what methods I bring into this study.
Below is a clear summary of what I have developed and defined during this first month.
1. Site-Responsive Embodied Fieldwork
I work through an embodied, site-responsive fieldwork practice that combines sketching, movement, and conversation. In temples, cemeteries, museums, community spaces, and natural sites, I draw, dance, walk, and speak with people as a way of listening to each place. These gestures become part of my research, allowing me to gather stories, memories, and cultural traces through the body.
2. Semi-Rehearsal Performances on Sites
My practice includes semi-rehearsal performances developed directly from my time on sites. After sketching and moving in temples, cemeteries, museums, and community spaces, I return to the studio to refine these impressions into drawings, gestures, and simple props.
I then write proposals to site owners or organisers, explaining how the performance responds to that environment.
The final performance—often created together with my daughters or close collaborators—emerges from this layered process of visiting, sketching, making, and performing, transforming everyday sites into moments of shared cultural reflection.
3. Studio Work: Collaging & Sketching
My practice moves fluidly between fieldwork and performance. After visiting sites, I return to the studio to translate these impressions into collages and sketches. Studio work helps me shape gestures, props, and ideas for performances.
This cycle—observe → sketch → collage → propose → perform—allows everyday environments to become spaces of reflection and shared cultural memory.
4. Making Props & Installations from Burlap and Existing Artworks
A significant part of my practice involves creating props and installations from burlap, recycled artworks, and found materials.
I often cut and reshape older paintings, transforming them into new forms that carry traces of previous ideas—a process that mirrors the palimpsest at the heart of my research.
Burlap, with its historical resonance and tactile rawness, becomes a grounding material for masks, costumes, and sculptural objects. These handmade items serve as vessels of memory, connecting movement with material history.
5. Research Through Reading & Writing
Reading and writing form an essential backbone of my research.
I read widely across anthropology, folklore, ritual studies, and performance theory, allowing these ideas to shape the gestures, materials, and narratives I create.
Daily writing—notes, reflections, site observations, and short essays—helps me process what I encounter in temples, cemeteries, museums, and community spaces. Writing becomes a bridge between theory and performance, clarifying intentions and guiding proposals.
6. Exhibitions, Visitor Engagement & Feedback Practice
Exhibitions form another essential layer of my practice. I design them as interactive, reflective environments, where visitors can encounter research materials, masks, sketches, and traces of performance.
Visitors’ responses—conversations, memories, spontaneous gestures—become part of my research.
Their feedback helps me understand how stories resonate across generations, how materials evoke memory, and how cultural narratives travel through gesture and movement. Exhibition spaces become living laboratories of engagement, shaping future performances and deepening dialogue with the communities I work with.
A Non-Linear Practice — A Thread That Winds and Unwinds
My practice is not linear. It is a continuous winding and unwinding—like a thread, like cloth.
Here I resonate deeply with Richard Schechner’s idea of performance as woven behaviour, and with the etymology of text itself: “Text” comes from the Latin texere—to weave.
From the same root come words like texture, textile, and context. A text is a fabric. A practice is a fabric.
Shakespeare even used “to text” to mean “to write.”
My practice is exactly this: a weaving of forms, gestures, objects, and understandings. Everything interlaces. Everything becomes cloth.
What I Have Already Accomplished This Month
-
9 out of 15 collaborators for The Pulse Between Worlds have responded
(reference participants, informants, co-creators). Counterparts. -
Pilot performance developed and the accompanying academic writing has begun.
-
Background research on mystical beings has grown into my solo exhibition
(opening in about a month). -
I am actively taking notes on Performance Theory and identifying key authors
relevant to my research.
What I Begin Next Month
-
I start keeping a systematic calendar, documenting:
-
how often I sketch on sites
-
how I move ( dedicate spetial time to it)
-
how gestures relate to the spaces where I draw (make a note)
-
and how movement character changes with each environment.
-
-
I continue reading in performance studies, ritual studies, religion, and anthropology.
-
I deepen my understanding of how these theories connect to:
-
embodied gesture,
-
material practice,
-
intergenerational movement,
-
and site-responsive performance.
-