The Centripetal Force of Expression: Drawing Embodied Histories into Glassblowing

Erin O’Connor

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.3.3.08

Authors

Erin O’Connor New School for Social Research, New York, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.3.3.08

Keywords:

Embodiment, Expression, Practical knowledge, Art, Glassblowing, Epistemology, Ethnography, Phenomenology, Materiality, Innovation

Abstract

Getting at the tacit understandings of an artful practice is critical in coming to understand the processes of creativity. To achieve this, the researcher, specifically the ethnographer, must place herself in the position of the maker, that is she must herself, make and create. This article provides an account of arriving at the methodological imperative of in situ ethnographic research through actual ethnographic research on the relation of maker and material. From an in situ position, it theorizes the modalities of expression in practice, from problem-solving, to personal style, to the intentional drawing in of embodied histories in practice. This incorporation of varying embodied histories into a current practice is then explored as the possibility for affecting what is recognized in the field as ”new” or ”innovative”. We will see, however, that is affect is grounded more in the corporeal revealing of unexpected aspects of the material worked up.

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Author Biography

Erin O’Connor, New School for Social Research, New York, USA

Erin O'Connor, a Ph.D. candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York City, will defend her dissertation, "The Matter of Culture: An Ethnography of Embodied Knowledge in Glassblowing" in May 2008. Committed to theorizing from the body rather than of the body, she conducts in situ ethnographic research in the fields of knowledge, culture, and the arts. Drawing from her four years of fieldwork in a glassblowing studio, she has published on the modalities of embodied knowledge, relations of maker, tools and material, the significance of matter in language and social worlds, and imagination in Ethnography and Qualitative Sociology, as well as in the edited volumes, Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress, and Prospects (2007) and Practicing Culture (2007). She also works as a qualitative researcher for a National Science Foundation study of interdisciplinary work among young scientists and is planning her next research project: an ethnography of the invisible, which will investigate processes of perception, specifically how the visible is implicated in the invisible, in both art and everyday life.

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