the whale: Creative Textual Practices

This output defines ‘Creative Textual Practice’ as a descriptive theme for my compositional work and situates this in a contemporary and interdisciplinary artistic and critical context. It does so through the re-imagining of a medieval poem and further demonstrates how Creative Textual Practices can be employed as a method of articulation for practice research.

In this portfolio, I explore the ways in which material processes and ‘Creative Textual Practices’ in contemporary music and art both influence aspects of my compositional practice and can be used as frameworks to discuss the research undertaken through this compositional work. In identifying ‘Creative Textual Practices’ as strategies for composition, I describe the use of text, language and speech as both structuring and performative materials, and the ways that such Creative Textual Practices highlight the performative properties of text within my work. Julia Kristeva describes the semiotic-material meaning-making process, ‘productive violence’, (1984, 16) of working with text in this way. Through an exploration of the Creative Textual Practices of other artists, contained within the commentary portion of the work, I identify how contemporary artists employ text to embrace the familiar, unfamiliar, and uncanny, by intertwining the symbolic and semiotic aspects of written and spoken textual communication, described by art theorist Estelle Barrett as the ‘hyper-differentiated realm of latent and possible values and meanings’ in the work. (2011, 19) This context and framing is used to contextualise my composition the whale (2020) both within this theoretical and artistic discussion, and within the development of Creative Textual Practices within my personal creative work. Finally, the practices and processes defined through my exploration of ‘Creative Textual Practice’ are here directed towards reflection on, and articulation of, the research aspects of the project and the idea of ‘writing’ through a performance lecture.

Estelle Barrett, Kristeva Reframed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011) 


Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)