Conversation-writing: Small Stories Arising Between Spoken Word and Text

The Flightlines oral histories project adapts traditional techniques to fuel conversations between key figures in the field of contemporary ceramics and identify examples of ‘ensemble practice’, approaches that move beyond the focus of the studio in accounting for acts of creativity to include the entanglement of multiple, interconnected demands such as those of family, social/community, or wider global/ecological events. This multiplicity in approach is commonly found in the negotiation of women/parent artists and yet, remains a model curiously lacking in recognition for its flexibility, ingenuity, resilience, and contribution in artistic terms.

The following chapter explores how an academic can be witness to the drawing and redrawing of boundaries within a conversation, and use structural techniques to give emphasis to the ‘small stories’ often overlooked in conventional artists accounts to achieve what Bamberg and Georgakopoulou define as ‘a level and even an aesthetic for the identification and analysis of narratives’.