Methods for performing legacy: anarchiving Jean Spencer’s feminist art practice

Abstract

This thesis offers as a key contribution a methodology for devising creative and
performance work from archival materials. These methods harness notions of
‘anarchiving’ (Massumi, Manning, Zaayman) to identify the creative potential in
archival encounters and to develop performance material as a response that feeds archival legacies forward into the future. Underpinned by feminist new materialist notions of assemblage, temporality, and agential realism, I position this anarchiving methodology as a critical feminist practice. Engaging with archives through movement and speculation, and sharing those encounters through performance, allows for a multiplicity of locally enacted meanings to emerge from archival material. This potential for embodiment and multiplicity challenges traditional historiographical methods that point towards the discovery of a singular, universal, patriarchal truth: a practical method of anarchiving is then offered as an alternative to the masculine realism of academic discourse.

I harness Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory’ (1986) to structure this practice
research project and make clear the multiple narratives it contains. The thesis and the practice sit alongside each other, allowing the reader agency in constructing their own experience, much like the anarchiving process itself. The methodology will be useful for practice researchers engaging with any archival material as creative stimulus, but it has been developed here specifically in response to the archives of Jean Spencer (1942-1998), an artist working in the late constructivist period in the UK. Jean was also my great aunt: her death when I was five years old meant that I grew up surrounded by her artwork, by snatches of memory, but without the artist herself. An anarchiving methodology, then, allows me to investigate my encounters with Jean and her archives, to perform the process of engaging with her work, and to feed forward her legacy in the shared space and time of performance.

Date of Award	3 Sept 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Rachel Hann (Supervisor) & Jane Arnfield (Supervisor)