Sophie Durand
Creative part: "Emergence and Interconnectedness. An Analysis of Contemporary Arts Practice that Collaborates and Co-becomes with the Ocean, Coastal Landscapes and Connected Ecologies". Supervisor dr. Rūta Spelskytė-Liberienė
Theoretical part: "Emergence and Interconnectedness. An Analysis of Contemporary Arts Practice that Collaborates and Co-becomes with the Ocean, Coastal Landscapes and Connected Ecologies". Supervisor prof. dr. Marquard Smith
Photo: Sophie Durand at Käsmu, Estonia taken by Angela Elizabeth Ramírez Fellowes
Within a framework where empathy is deflned as a process this research seeks to produce and situate artworks in proximity to and in the ocean, within the coastal zones and connected ecologies and ask if the outcomes and processes of a contemporary arts practice can exist in a way that is empathetic to the systems that catalyse and sustain them. This question is approached using a practice historically engaged in memory and archive as form where encounters set narratives in motion and generate into larger investigations, collections and networks of meaning through a diverse range of methods. Breaking from these patterns of practice iterative creative work and accompanying text chart the emergence of a new series of artworks that attempt merge product and process; calibrating and recalibrating each aspect of an artwork’s coming into being to be simultaneous to each other and located in the present. Furthermore, through looking at modes of collaboration and co-becoming with environmental systems, the investigation and its outcomes examine notions of authorship and acknowledges that there are multiple factors that contribute to the development of an artwork; the subjective individual experience encroaching on the possibilities of expressed and experienced empathy and the capacities in which an artist and their practice might work with coastal environs.
