Mary Butcher
University of Reading
Field Notes Compared: Scientific and Artistic Practice
As a scientist who has changed direction to become craftsperson then artist, I have found my research training has provided a firm base for my practice. Former fieldwork involved accurate, detailed recording of animal species in an area of wet land in the USA, resulting in extensive field notebooks experimental records and drawings.
Fifteen years later extensive travels in Eastern and Central Europe meeting isolated basketmakers, watching them work, gaining knowledge of their social and economic lives and a sense of the changing nature of their practices has resulted in a further series of fieldwork notebooks. Analysis of both sets of notebooks has been published over time. Both sets have a strong bearing on my own artistic production. Now, in a life of making for exhibition, writing and curating, my paper would involve a comparative study of the cultural practices and objects as exist in my field notes. Relating them to key anthropological texts such as Sanjek’s ‘Field Notes’ would provide a backdrop.
I would welcome this opportunity to look at my earlier work in detail, to reassess my activities in relation to my crafts practice of those times as well as my present responses to that work. As an integral part myself of the process of recording but with later insights and changing perceptions, from teaching and reading, the processes involved in the academic recording process could usefully be compared with the notebooks prepared in the making of work for exhibition and during artistic experiment. A comparison of such differing contexts and outcomes would lead to increased insight into the nature of the term ‘field work’ as used by contemporary artists.
