Abstract
This thesis provides an explication of Stitchography - a new critical-creative model for
practice-led research. I have coined this term, which draws on the visual metaphor of the
thread to define a multi-stranded approach to place-based research, and knots together
threads of practice as visual-aesthetic and textual outputs that propose new
conceptualisations of suburban place. The term encapsulates a set of creative approaches
that explore, record and re/conceptualise place through a walking-stitching praxis, that
centres on three key threads of inquiry: Place as Object, Place as Subject and Place as Agent.
Situated specifically within a suburban space, the walking-stitching interventions documented
and discussed within this thesis offer opportunities to slow down and to explore familiar sites
in unfamiliar ways. It recognises how our relationship to place changed during and postCovid19 and engages with a desire to explore the world outside of our doors from a time
when we weren’t allowed to travel, a time when people were walking in and rediscovering
the suburban place in a way in which they had not before. Building on the idea that people
are not simply users of place, but help to create and shape it, the thesis explores both solo
and participatory walking-stitching interventions which enable the walker-stitcher to become
actively involved in the experience of space in a range of new and thought-provoking ways. It
recognises a shift in arts and humanities research to acknowledge a move away from humancentred experiences to consider the wider ecologies of place. Inviting opportunities to slow
down and become involved with our local environments, stitchography recognises the
participatory nature of place.
Through this stitchographic practice I propose a methodological framework of entanglement
that responds to the intersecting and knotting of multiple threads. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
bodily consciousness and sensory experience (1962); Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the
rhizome (2021); Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-activity and agential realism (2007); Jane
Bennett’s understanding of vibrant matter (2010); and Donna Haraway’s theory of sympoiesis
(2016) form the theoretical framework that connects threads that tend not to be synthesised.
My adoption of a position between embodied phenomenological and new materialist
perspectives, has enabled me to identify a new stitchographic space for thinking about experiences in, on and with place that makes it possible for me to move between purposive,
discursive and conceptual understandings of place.
The entangling of theoretical and philosophical perspectives is echoed in the new relations
established in a series of participatory walking-stitching workshops and a public exhibition
during the summer and autumn of 2023. The interaction with others involved in these events
contributed to a knotting of ideas and emergent thinking, directing and informing practical
understandings of stitchography, and the development of a new stitchographic lexicon.
Recognising a textility of writing that enables language to emerge through practice, I develop
terms that reconceptualise place as more than spatial-geographical to consider the material,
bodily and sensuous.