The more art, the more science: narrative interpretations of art (and life) Solveigh Goett University of East London, UK <solveigh_goett@hotmail.com>	volume 5 contents journal home page conference home page copyright
		abstract ° full paper
...this fabric which I want to display to you now did not turn out completely tidy, is not surveyable at one glance. Many of its motifs are not followed up, many of its threads are tangled. There are wefts which stand out like foreign bodies, repetitions, material that has not been worked out to its conclusion. This is not always intentional; I myself had first to work to master the material, and I make you witness of this work process. (Wolf, 1984: 142) Some thoughts on narrative, art and science: an introduction Narrative is an inherently human mode of meaning making - an imaginative process of weaving 'a fabric of cohesion,' Jens Brockmeier (2001: 255) writes,  'pictures and words, imagery and narrativity [...] interwoven in one and the same semiotic fabric of meaning.'  Art is concerned with opening up new meanings and possibilities of understanding the self (Scrivener, 2002), art practice as research engages with 'experience as it is lived, felt, reconstructed, reinterpreted, and understood' (Sullivan, 2005: 96) through sensory and imaginative practices.		to cite this journal article: Goett, S. (2008) The more art, the more science: narrative interpretations of art (and life). Working Papers in Art and Design 5 Retrieved <date> from <URL> ISSN 1466-4917
Art and narrative, both relational practices (Cavarero, 2000, Bourriaud, 2002) are inextricably linked in spirit and method, as their lines - told, drawn or spun - loop and twist around each other in continuously shifting patterns; both bring into consciousness the multiple and manifold diversity of potential links to be made and imagined in investigations of the fabric of life. In art practice as in storytelling 'it is in the movement from place to place - or from topic to topic - that knowledge is integrated' (Ingold, 2007: 91), made, understood and communicated. From pre-disciplinary origins in ancient creation myths unravelling the mysteries of the universe, from the fairy tale that was the 'first tutor of mankind' and still is - albeit now in Disneyfied version - the 'first tutor of children' (Benjamin, 1999a: 101), to  modern therapeutic uses as 'narrative repair' (Neimeyer &Tschudi, 2003: 166), stories have been helping us to make sense of the world and to cope with the vicissitudes of life. Combining entertainment and education, accommodating the complexities of nature as well as culture, narrative relates the uniqueness of each individual self and life story to the universality of human experience within an intricate web of mutuality, a 'form of culture [that] remains when nations, languages and faiths have long since died' (Shah, 1991: intro).  Before art, 'liberated into the freedom of purposelessness' (Bredekamp, 1995: 96), became separated from science and technology, research in practice and theory was embedded in an understanding of a nature-culture continuum that only relatively recently has been re-conceptualized in contemporary discourse (Ingold, 2000, Massumi, 2002). The Kunst- and Wunderkammer of early modernity, for example, forerunner to museums, galleries and universities alike, could be defined in contemporary terminology as a hands-on learning resource centre and interdisciplinary practice-based research facility, and as such is receiving renewed attention in current discourse (Bredekamp, 1995, Schaffner & Winzen,1998, Stafford & Terkamp, 2001) as new models of knowledge are discussed and proposed. Narrative, meanwhile, is continuing to make its way in images, words and sounds into new realms through new technologies as they emerge and shapes them in the process (Schutt, 2006). Links between art and science might at times have weakened but were never broken as their narrative threads have continued to grow, from Goethe's narrative and poetic reasoning via the memory work of Freud, 'the poet as scientist' (Brockmeier, 1997: 195) to the narrative turn in the human sciences in the mid 1980s. Narrative concepts and methods of analysis have since been embraced by academics across disciplines - from history and anthropology to psychology and sociology - as well as by the legal, medical and therapeutic professions (Riessman, 2001).
Benjamin, fearing the 'increasing atrophy of experience' (Benjamin, 1999b: 155) as  a result of the story being replaced by information - 'no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries (Benjamin, 1999a: 88)' - might have underestimated the  ' almost uncanny persistence and durability in the tale' as it 'constantly appears in different incarnation' (Shah, 1991: intro).  The philosophical concept of the narrative self can be traced back to David Hume's 'Treatise on Human Nature' written in 1739 which proposed an understanding of the extended self as 'a bundle of impressions strung together by the imagination [...], a fiction albeit a useful one since it lends continuity to life' (Piefke, 2001). As neuroscientists began to investigate the physiological foundations of narrative thinking, Michael Gazzaniga (1998: 2), 250 years later, came to a similar conclusion: 'biography is fiction. Autobiography is hopelessly inventive.'   Mark Freeman (Ruppel et al, 2007: 32) addressing the issue of fidelity of method to the phenomenon that is analysed argues 'that much of the work that gets done in the social sciences, in its aim of being scientifically objective, actually ends up distorting the phenomena and in that sense ends up being less, rather than more, faithful to reality.' Therefore narrative inquiry, a more personal, involved and subjective approach, might be more scientifically valid than research conducted from a detached perspective through abstraction and generalization - hence the paradox 'the more art, the more science' (Ruppel et al, 2007: 33). If artists feeling uncomfortable with the imaginative, inventive and subjective methods of their own trade look towards science for more objective and unambiguous ways to validate their research, their gaze might be returned; neuroscientists are suggesting that the imaginative processes of narrative reasoning are embodied in the physical fabric of our minds, with consciousness always lagging ever so slightly behind action and experience (Massumi, 2002: 28, 29, Penrose, 1989: 569 - 571), trying to make sense in retrospect, attempting to create coherence in hindsight. It seems that science itself is destroying the myth of objectivity of the reasoning self-in-control (Bickle, 2003: 195 - 207) it helped to create.  This paper traces some of the infinite number of potential narrative threads through 'the complex and delicate fabric of our meaning constructions' (Brockmeier, 2005: 3)  as they loop, stretch and weave across boundaries and beyond accepted ideas. The artist/writer/researcher moving 'in a meshwork of interwoven trails' (Ingold, 2007: 90) at times gets caught up in the 'creative entanglements' with things (Ingold, 2008), each a 'particular gathering of the threads of life' (ibid), meandering  - not always unintentionally - rather than getting straight to points along threads of experience and lines of thought.  Whether it will be possible or desirable to reach firm conclusions in the end - or whether there can be an end at all - remains to be seen. In art, life and research openings might be more valuable than closures, as Tim Ingold (2007: 170) argues: 'what matters is not the final destination, but all the interesting things that occur along the line.'  Rules, concepts and habits: some stories to think with about research When a woman returns from a supermarket and says, 'Guess what, I saw Dick in the cheese department, but he wasn't with Betty, he was with some new woman', that is the beginning - and the middle - of a story, though we do not know the end yet. We tell each other stories all day, and we daydream and fantasise, and when we fall asleep we tell stories again. (Lessing,1999: 5)  Artists stand up and speak about quantum mechanics, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum (2006: 165) writes, pleased and proud that physics has finally supplied reasons why the world is not as perceived by reductionism but actually more like the artist sees it. Such an attitude, he argues, seems to indicate that artists' faith in science is greater than the trust in their own convictions. Why, he asks, do they need such validation?  To make the point he tells a story. Imagine, he says, a typical Hollywood movie style Western saloon, a group of men playing Poker around a table in the corner. A stranger enters with a chessboard under his arm, observes the game for a while and then says, you know, I have a game here that you might be interested in. He sets up the board, explains the rules and soon a game is underway. After a while someone asks, 'Didn't you say you had a game to show us? Where is it?' When the stranger points to the chessboard, the man is astonished. 'Impossible,' he says, 'where are the cards?' If we understand a game as a card game, he concludes, then chess is not a game. The same principle applies to whether something is scientific or not - criteria are not given, but made, more often than not to protect territory and deflect critics.  A game however does not merely consist in following rules but unfolds in being played, in movements of unpredictable trajectories, in constant surprises, unexpected encounters and uncertain outcomes - as does innovative research. Whether understanding research, art and life as a game, journey, story or fabric in the making, the researcher, always on the move entangled in a mesh of ever shifting relationships, might feel vulnerable and unsteady - thus rules can be welcome guides until we are ready to take a leap into the unexpected, leaving, in turn, traces of our movements behind for others to follow and to divert from. Methodological frameworks are temporary guidelines, not so much solid scaffolding but better envisaged as safety nets where rules are ropes - swinging, unrolling, twisting, fraying - not made to tie us down but rather to give the confidence needed to swing away and let go as we move beyond in search for new meanings, tying in the process loose ends from one to those of another in the making of new links. 1 An exhibition with the title 'The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef' took place this summer at London's South Bank inspired by the crochet models of hyperbolic space by the mathematician Daina Taimina. Hyperbolic space while common in nature is 'so conceptually challenging that for a century mathematicians were unable to visualise what this type of space might actually look like [...] there is no formula that accurately describes hyperbolic space, so computers can't model it either.' (Bellos, 2008: 8)  Having exhausted all conventional ways of model making usually employed by mathematicians Taimina finally resorted to the needlework skills she had learned as a child. While hyperbolic space cannot be woven and is very difficult to knit, crochet proved to be the perfect way to model its potentially infinitely growing surface as it curls and unfolds back on itself. The crochet model is not merely a material, tangible representation of a concept but itself a hyperbolic structure.
The solution for the conceptual problem of hyperbolic space, it turns out, had been sitting all along on the sideboard in the living room in the frills of doilies and tea cosies, yet it took over 100 years for the connection to be made between the familiar textile object and the abstract concept, to see the potential hyperbolic structure in the crochet loops and to develop in joining maths and needlework,  'a more complex embodied way of thinking about the world both mathematically and physically.' 2 Walter Benjamin (1987: 58) in his memories of a  'Berlin Childhood around 1900' recalls a game he used to play with his socks. Rolled up they looked like little bags with a present hidden inside, but when he tried to pull the present out, the bag mysteriously disappeared and he was left with just one thing, a sock. He recalls not getting enough of this astonishing experiment. It taught him, he says, that form and content are the same and that extracting truth from texts requires the same care and attention as exploring the content of a rolled-up sock. There can hardly be a better story to make the case for practice-based research, for playful exploration and thinking through the hands in the quest for knowledge and understanding.  In Benjamin's experiment the rules of the game emerge in the playing and become its conclusion to be related to the reader as a story linking a memory of the past to concerns of the present.  Experiments both in science and art can be understood as playful explorations, tentative stories lines put forward. Science and narrative, Roald Hoffmann (2005: 308) suggests, are not only compatible but inseparable: not only are experiments narrative constructions and alternative hypotheses competing narratives, but theories are also storied: 'Continuing the story is the motive force for experimentation and the weaving of theories.' (2000: 310) Narrative threads help us to understand and remember what might otherwise be just disconnected fragments of information. 'Narrativizing science' (Avraamidou  & Osborne, 2008) helps to communicate its findings to a wider audience. It is not surprising that the most successful book written on the history of art has been Gombrich's 'Story of Art'. Rather than an anthology Gombrich (1995: 13) offers a narrative of 'how the story of art hangs together. To memorize a list of names and dates is hard and irksome', he writes,  'remembering a story needs little effort.'
As the eye and imagination are faster than the word, visual stories have been used as memory aids from ancient memory theatres to modern day memory contests. Meaningless lists of information and random sequences of numbers can be visualized and recalled as a story which, however bizarre it may seem to the outsider, makes perfect sense to its creator. This is how memory champion Ben Pridmore remembers a sequence of playing cards in images akin to a surrealist's landscape: 'a puppy teaching a lesson to a Maori, who was holding a microphone over a necklace owned by Naseem Hamed, who was using a pair of tongs to hold up a bag of sherbet and pouring it into a sieve in front of an auctioneer, who was selling a tentacle which was growing out of a superhero in a suit of armour, who was planting a flag in my dad's old garage.' 3  Stories thus are not mere entertainment but have a practical, instrumental purpose. The storyteller, Benjamin writes (1999a: 86), is a teacher giving counsel:  'less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story that is just unfolding.' In his words such 'counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom' (ibid) - but as the power of the story is rediscovered and employed by economists and politicians to influence attitudes and behaviours, narrative researchers, be they artists or social scientists, aware that a good story is a convincing one that easily - even unnoticeably - slips into consciousness and embeds itself in experience, need to be alert: ready to unravel stories as their threads are spun, in touch with counter-narratives, on the lookout for narrative gaps and following traces before they become erased.  Stories are not reports concerned with chronology, order and facts, storyteller Michael Rosen (2007: 36) says, but their purpose is 'to engage people's feelings.' In their affective dimension, for better or worse, lies the power of stories. Steve Denning, former director of the World Bank's knowledge management turned expert on leadership, innovation and business narratives used to believe, he told listeners in a lecture at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) that knowledge was 'solid and objective and direct and abstract and analytic' and storytelling 'nebulous and subjective and indirect and unscientific and basically not worth a damn' (Denning, 2003: 5) until he discovered the potential  of stories to shape and influence political and economic developments. In his accounts of virus stories that can be put into circulation to interrupt ongoing unwanted narratives and the remarkable success of motivational tales, storytelling, 'the passport to the 21st century' 4, becomes a quantifiable value.   What does storytelling add up to? [...] An economist, Deirdre McClosky, has added up how much persuasion amounts to in the American economy [...]. She has come to a total of 28 per cent of GNP. If we assume that storytelling is two-thirds of this, that means that storytelling amounts to 1.8 million dollars.' (Denning, 2003: 22). While the RSA describes itself as 'a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress' 5, it is not difficult to imagine that storytelling can equally be employed with less benevolent aims as a world-making tool. Stories can help and heal, entertain and educate, but they can also haunt and destroy.  For the narrative researcher there are no recipes to follow but many patterns to explore (Andrews et al, 2008). Visual methods as proposed by researchers from word-based disciplines (Riessman, 2008) might vary considerably from artists' understanding of visual research.  As we devise our own methods, 'techniques which embrace their own inventiveness' (Massumi 2002: 13), there is inspiration to be found among the plots and genres of the 'stories we live by' (McAdams, 1993) as artists, be they fabrications or fables, short or never-ending.  The inclusiveness of narrative concepts of the self and the world, transcending boundaries and bridging gaps between science and art, thought and feeling, fact and fiction, the personal and the political proposing ever new links to be made across time, space and scale open up new ways of knowing ourselves and others as well as inserting new narrative threads into the fabric of life, that interrogate, subvert and change storied realities and experiences. Narrative embodied in our very materiality and equally at home among fragile threads of the imagination ties in with embodied practices of making and the acts of the imagination that characterize art practice.  Textile Tales: some notes on collecting, making and writing And then the bed linen, the shirts, the embroidered handkerchiefs, the ties that mother gave to me every year for Christmas. The proud joy of giving, which she ironed back into them after every wash. That's also burnt. I used to think, things like couldn't be burnt. One has to experience first before one can comment, on one's own body. Or on one's own underwear. Well. (Kästner, 1944: 155) Working with textiles, investigating themes of identity and memory, I have become intrigued by the power of the ordinary, the strong emotions that are evoked and sustained by such humble items as curtains, socks, blankets, towels or pyjamas in people's life stories.  Textiles are an integral part of human existence: essential for survival, they accompany us through the journey of life and are thus intimately linked to lived experience, become part of memory and carriers of tacit knowledge, their power to evoke feelings and experiences revealed in the stories of which they are part - the past, Proust writes,  'somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect' but unmistakably present in some material object.' (Benjamin, 1999b: 155) Such things, taken seriously, will reveal their unexpected significance (Glenn & Hayes, 2007) when we attentively  listen to their stories.  The everyday textiles at the heart of my research can be understood as the literal fabric of life in sustaining and supporting the body, narrative as a metaphorical fabric of life creating a sense of self through meaning construction. In conjunction, we might say, they hold body and soul together.  Narrative concepts, methods and matters are interwoven in theory and practice as I investigate the role of everyday textiles in the narration of the self. I collect stories in words and materials and retell them in the making of things that relate their own stories. The following notes from a project in progress consider, in samples and examples, narrative approaches in collecting, making and writing. Collecting ourselves and others I am about six years old and my father has gone on early shift, so I creep into my mother's bed and put my arms around her. She is soft and plump and her nightdress was celanese. I can feel the texture of it in my head even now. I loved my mother and we would have little chats when she awoke. (BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience 2006) Storytelling is a craft, Benjamin (1999a: 86) writes; it is the artisan's and the storyteller's task 'to fashion the raw material of existence, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful and unique way.'  Our research practices and projects are embedded in our own experiences and life stories. For neurobiologist Matthew Belmonte the bright yellow raincoat that his mother made him wear when he was a child reminds him of his dependence on her, represents order but also protection. 'My theoretical and narrative constructions in science and art, ' he writes, 'are the same sort of protective gear as the impermeable coat that I once wore to primary school; they hold nature at arm's length, close enough so that I can make some sense of it, but far enough so that I won't be overwhelmed.' (Turkle, 2007: 74)  Our memories are wrapped in cloth. Virginia Woolf's (1989: 72) first memory is of her mother's dress, not her face. The arrival of a new sibling may be remembered through the blanket the baby is wrapped in, the death of a grandparent through the curtains being closed.
I kept my father's jumper after his death - 'like a transitional object in reverse, reminding me of his permanent absence'  (Attfield, 2000: 149)  - that he wore from before I was born till close to his death, a material manifestation of time contracted in memory as it 'inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration' (Bergson, 2004: 80). It is solid and heavy belying what is often described as the ephemeral nature of textiles  - what strikes me when I hold it is how small it is and how small my father's role was in my life.  It was knitted by my mother from the wool of a sheep that my father looked after before they got married. While the jumper shrunk with repeated washes, my father expanded as a result of the 'economic miracle' in Germany. My father never got rid of that sheep and my mother never lost her tightly knitted grip over him. A story, like a garment, can be well-knit or badly-knit in many ways, and even if well-knit, might not necessarily fit. My mother's knitting was like our relationship: scratchy, uncomfortable and embarrassing.  Textile artist Waltraud Mattern remembers her father through a pair of soldier's socks that her mother pulled over her boots when she put her to bed, so it would be quicker to take the children to the shelter when there were air raids during the night. From these socks of the father who never returned from the war she made an art object: 'Memories of a Father I never knew'. Socks were made from the hair of concentration camp inmates for German submarine crews and railway workers during World War II. My father served on a submarine, my grandfather worked for the railway -  what did they wear, what did they know? Narrative gaps open up unexpectedly in the fabric of life like black holes - can such holes ever be mended? As I remember the heaps of discarded clothes in Christian Boltanski's work I feel again, in my head and on my skin, grief and despair.  In each memory textile knowledge can be traced: the connectivity between body and thing in their 'reciprocal becomings' (Massumi, 2002: 96), textiles as physical manifestations of connectedness: the tears of pain and happiness, the sweat of anxiety and excitement both part of the self and absorbed by the cloth, perception and affection, inside and out, body and object interwoven in memory. The white gloves of his grandfather that John Kotre (1995: 1-5) chooses as guiding image in exploring 'how we create ourselves through memory' only exist in his imagination, but through them, the colours, shapes, smells and textures in and around them, their fit, purpose and history, Kotre reinterprets family relationships, perceives spiritual connections, sees decisions confirmed and guilt cleansed, draws guidance from the past for the future. An Italian cloth nappy reaches my collection together with a story. 'As I am writing,'  the sender says, 'I can feel the soft spread of the ribbing and smooth baby skin. On the washing line they fluttered like banners. When that was over I kept them and there are still some in the village house under the stairs which are used as dusters.' Each story and each thing collected or recollected opens up new lines of enquiry. Collecting is gathering things in patterns of meaning, 'the imaginative process of association turned material,' (Winzen 1998: 22). Collecting of data, evidence, references, facts or figures part of any research narrative. Some materials I acquire or keep with a particular purpose in mind, but more often than not what attracts me to a story or fabric is a rather vague potential I sense in it, something that grabs my imagination that is still quite unresolved, fuzzy and difficult to pin down and articulate. In that sense, I collect possibilities and potential of things to be. Research narrative and life story interweave as the project moves on.  'The collection encodes an intimate narrative' Cardinal (1994: 68) writes, 'tracing [...]  the continuous thread through which selfhood is sewn into the unfolding fabric of a lifetime's experience.'  As I collect textile materials, memories and metaphors off the washing line and on-line, from behind the curtains and the back of bedroom drawers, from family history and works of literature, from poetic imagery and intellectual discourse, the stories of others in the retelling become part of my own. As threads of experiences and lines of thought interweave, I understand that ' it is invariably oneself that one collects.' (Baudrillard 1994: 12). Reflecting on the impossibility of detachment as my research continues I ponder the implications. At night I re-read the adventures of Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert, 2005) in their quest for knowledge, mindful of the pitfalls of collecting.  Making Things From what I find, feel and imagine, from my and other people's material memories, I make objects and collections, things to entice the narrative imagination and open up new meaning constructions. A white tablecloth, a gift from an aunt-in law, evokes nostalgia for a family unity that never was to be - as I listen to the stories of those who chose exile and the ones they left behind, my own tales of longing and separation blends with theirs as I give them shape in the making of things.
I come across the story of a couple in hiding. "During these two years in the cellar,' I read, 'his wife very slowly knitted a skirt, which she unravelled as soon as it was finished, only to start again" (Herzberg, 1990). Like in Penelope's weaving, time is marked, made and coped with in the making. Textures of unspeakable memories take material shape as I assemble things from my family's past, become tangible as I build memory blocks from old pieces of knitwear with unknown pasts. Making is not, Ingold (2000: 68) argues, culture shaping nature, applying a preconceived design idea to pre-given materials to give them form and meaning, but a reciprocal process of becoming between maker and material; the maker in mutual, sensuous dialog with the material works 'from within the world, not upon it.'  Thus making is better understood as weaving, he suggests, because weaving emphasizes 'movement as truly generative of the object rather than merely revelatory of an object that is already present, in an ideal, conceptual or virtual form, in advance of the process that discloses it.' (Ingold, 2000: 64)  Weaving is world-making, an intermingling of mental and material processes in the making of experience 'continually and endlessly coming into being around us as we weave.' Making is weaving is narrative as 'every movement, like every line in a story, grows rhythmically out of the one before and lays the groundwork for the next' (Ingold, 2000: 64 - 66). For Kerstin Kraft (2004: 279) it is knitting that materializes such experiences of infinity. Weaving, done on a loom and limited by its size, she argues, is an activity of settled people, of stability, planning and geometrical form, lending itself to mechanization and thus leading to dominance of woven cloth over other fabrics, a dominance also apparent in the interpretation of textiles as text and the paradigms of weaving that underpin language and theory of Western civilisations.  But while the woven sheet fresh from the loom might be a flat plane marked by coordinates, in use, folded in the wardrobe, crumpled on the bed, fluttering on the washing line, made into protest banner or Halloween costume, torn into strips to bandage wounds, knotted and twisted into ropes to end a life or escape into a new one or making a statement in the art gallery 6,  the sheet, 'laboured cloth' in the words of Janis Jefferies (2007: 283) from beginning to end, just like the knitted sock or jumper is a hybrid on the move, 'boundaried boundarilessness' (Maharaj, 1998: 191), always closely related to the  body as centre of experience and activity, always storied as we recollect and imagine lived experience: 'How big, how enveloping, is an old sheet when we unfold it!' (Bachelard, 1994: 81) Past experience recollected provides pathways for the unfolding of potential, for the virtual to be actualized as new links are made between matter and mind, past and future (Bergson, 2004). Memory brings 'to the world the possibility of an unfolding, a narrative, a hesitation' (Grosz, 2004: 186); a hesitation to follow habit and instead take a leap into the unexpected and unpredictable. Whenever we diverge from rules and habit in thought or action, we create new connections, actualize virtuality as it appears 'in the twists and folds of formed content, in the movement from one sample to the other.' (Massumi, 2002: 133)
In their sensory qualities of contingencies rather than certainties and their affective dimensions the stories of our life always exceed that which can be said in words. Sensory knowledge is lived and felt, but, 'in the 'hyperliterate  world of academia,' David Howes (2005: 1) says,  'it would seem to be the fate of the senses that their astonishing power to reveal and engage should forever be judged and 'sentenced' in the court of language.' (Howes, 2005: 4) Writing text My writing, I am told, brings together many voices, but carries not enough of my own. My voice, I reply, can be heard in the links I make between the words of others, in the weaving of patterns in the writing. But more importantly, loud and clearly, I speak with my hands through the things I make. Storytelling, even in words, Benjamin (1999a: 107) notes,  'in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone', but a practice of soul, eye and hand working together. My arguments are made not written, presented in the textures and folds of the fabrics that I display not in the text that accompanies them.  An art-based approach allows the researcher to engage with and convey knowledge beyond the word through multi-sensory means, visual correspondences, touch and textures. But as long as academic rules demand a written component to accompany such knowledge to fulfil criteria of validity, the role of text needs to be carefully considered.  If we accept that knowledge beyond words exists and can be communicated as such, the need for text seems to be an institutional rather than intrinsic one. The issue at stake is how to engage methodologically and scholarly with what Jorella Andrews (2007) describes as 'hard-to-articulate knowledges-through-contact', 'knowledges that are rooted in pre-linguistic, pre-rational and pre-objective bodily logics, correspondences and exchanges.' Freeman suggests moving towards a 'more poetic way of writing' in research,  'using words in such a way that they can carry the weight, and the depth, of the phenomena in question.'  Such writing, he says, 'will be less orientated toward arguing, convincing, making a definite case, than toward appealing, suggesting, opening, pointing toward the possible.' (Ruppel, 2008: 33) Theoretical discourse, particularly on matters of memory, movement, affect and narrative, while short on textile references is thick with textile metaphor, of folding and looping, threads and weaves: as our minds are embodied, the concepts we think with and the metaphors we live by are based on physical and cultural experience (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, 2003). Metaphor is conceptual thought 'based on cross-domain correlations in our experience' (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003: 245) beyond its expression in language; like narrative thinking,  metaphorical thought seems to be embodied in the mind and mapped in the brain, shaped beyond cultural diversity 'by the common nature of our bodies and the shared ways that we all function in the everyday world.' Careful attention in the writing to the use of metaphor is therefore of double importance: metaphors reveal unspoken concepts underpinning written arguments and they provide means to give non-verbal concepts arising from thinking through the hands verbal expression thus prolonging their path and extending their presence in the writing.
Text and textiles are closely related beyond their joint etymological roots. The spinning of yarns and the weaving of tales (Batt, 2000, Benjamin, 1999a: 91) bear witness to a relationship that has been fundamental in the making of the fabric of life. Long before the times of books and print there were stories being told while textiles were made; now the spin doctor rather than the miller's daughter is spinning straw into gold and making silk purses out of sow's ears. We form networks and search the web, but as ever pull strings and tie knots, follow patterns and embroider the truth - textile work thus giving 'physical evidence of human thought and actions.' (Kraft, 2004: 275). Language needs to be used in a way that safeguards consistency and coherence between artwork and text. Whether an argument is presented as a battle of positions to be taken and defended or a weaving together of strands, whether understanding is seeing or grasping, the mind a machine or a brittle object, theories buildings or containers, ideas people, products, commodities, resources, cutting instruments or fashions, whether we understand life as a game, pilgrimage, journey or fabric (Lakoff & Johnson 2003) - the writing needs to reflect the spirit of the artwork. How to write is only one part of the issue - we also need to decide what to write. Describing the art and its making in words not only undermines the premise at the heart of art-based research - that the art presents its own argument through the artefact - but also highlights the inadequacy of language to convey the richness of the artwork.  'When language attempts to describe the concrete, it is caught in an infinitely self-effacing gesture of inadequacy', Susan Steward (1993: 52, 53) writes; attempts to describe an object 'threaten an infinity of detail that becomes translated into an infinity of verbality' (Steward,1993: 52). But language also has advantages, particularly the ability 'to 'sum up' the diversity of the sensual, or physical, world of lived experience' (Steward, 1993: 53) and therefore has its uses in summarizing and concluding. If we use text to explain the artwork however, we reduce its meaning, taking away from the audience a multitude of potential links to be made beyond the stated and verbalized conscious intentions of the artist. As Benjamin argues, 'it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. ' Referring to the work of Leskov he writes: 'The most extraordinary things, marvellous things are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.' (Benjamin, 1999a: 89) Such amplitude of meaning needs to be protected - after all, if a text could convey accurately and comprehensively the meaning of the artefact, the artwork would become redundant. The interests of the artist go in the opposite direction.  Art and text - as long as the latter is still a requirement  - need to complement each other. There is no point in repeating in the text what is more eloquently expressed by the artefact. The text needs to take on a supportive role, following up links from the artwork into the narrative contexts in which it is embedded and reflecting upon, providing guidance into wider cultural contexts of thought. The artwork, immersing the audience into a multidimensional experience, allows a freer flow of the imagination and a more intimate bodily engagement. Where the text leads outwards into a network of intellectual inquiries, the artwork leads inwards into a web of mingling memories and affective responses.  Both making and writing are creative, imaginative and inventive processes that need to disregard narrow imperatives of unambiguity lest their richness is put at peril.  Roger Penrose (1989: 549) describes his mathematical thinking, done in images not words, as 'one feels one's way towards some hoped-for goal' among inspirational ideas, routine guesses and aesthetic criteria of judgement; logical arguments and known facts, he says, are usually more hindrance than help and 'Rigorous argument is usually the last step!' (Penrose, 1989: 545) Scholarly research, I am told, needs to be rigorous. If rigorous argument comes last in the mathematician's work, should it be given such prominence in art-based research? Academic rigour and unambiguous language can only be desirable if certainties and single-minded clarity are the aim of the game. But if we want to explore qualitative transformations in a complex and continuously changing world of evocative things and moving affects, we need methods engaging with coherences, connections and contingencies. Methodological and theoretical research frameworks rather than understood in images of hard wooden window frames marking separation and reinforcing borders, might better be visualized through the textile image of softly moving curtains that frame the window as permeable and shifting boundaries marking fields of ideas without restricting their flow. 'Vague concepts, and concepts of vagueness,' Massumi (2002: 13)  suggests, can 'have a crucial, and often enjoyable role to play.' Sometimes creative enjoyment needs to be rescued from shadows cast by academic anxieties.  I wonder whether knitting socks can be scholarly research and choose the question as the title for a conference paper. There cannot be any foregone conclusions. Some afterthoughts 'Take joy in your digression,' Massumi (2002: 18) advises. 'Because that is where the unexpected arises.' It is in the poetics of the story - 'always inclined to borrow from the miraculous' (Benjamin, 1999a: 88) - rather than in the facts, figures or formulas of research reports that arts-based research is embodied and embedded and thus most likely to yield innovative and inspired results.  There is a special relationship, though not an exclusive one, between narrative and art as there is between text and textiles. From their entangled bundles of storylines methodological guide lines can be drawn, in sympathy with the aims of the research: method appropriate to matter, form and content closely aligned, as the story 'bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter's hand.' (Benjamin, 1999b: 156) As experiences materialise in 'hairy, networky things' (Latour 2004), matters of concern rather than matters of fact, each thing 'gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties.' (Latour, 2005: 5) Artists need to take part in such assemblies, but our most important task has to be to make new things for people to gather around as storylines continue to be woven and unravelled. Endnotes  1 A braided rope model, albeit more schematized and organized than the one I envisage, is also suggested by Sullivan (2005: 104,105)  2 Quote from exhibition text on display at 'The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef',  4 June  to 17 August at the Hayward Gallery, London. See also the website of the Institute for Figuring, http: //www.theiff.org/reef/index.html, retrieved 8.9.2008. For research on links between maths and knitting see Harris (1997)  3 Memory Champion Ben Pridmore was featured in "Superhuman: Genius" on Monday 18th August, 9pm, ITV1. Review by Andrew Pettie, Last night on television: Superhuman: Genius (ITV1)   http: //www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/08/19/nosplit/bvtv19last.xml, retrieved 31.8.2008  4 Storytelling: Passport to the 21st Century http: //www2.parc.com/ops/members/brown/storytelling/Steve.html]  5 http://www.thersa.org/about-us  6 The Bed (Rauschenberg 1955), The Unmade Bed (Cunningham 1957), Les Temps Ordinaires (Boltanski 1996), My Bed (Emin 1998) References Andrews, Jorella 2007, Critical Materialities, Summit: non-aligned initiatives in education culture, Berlin 24 - 28 May 2007, http: //summit.kein.org/node/252, retrieved 10.12.2007 Andrews, Molly, Squire, Corinne & Tamboukou, Maria 2008 (eds.) 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