'There is an increasing need for creative practitioners in higher education to justify their creative works as measurable research outputs. The impact, worth, relevance and contribution to new knowledge of such works is evaluated by tools such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the U.K., or the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA), and each creative work, or Non-Traditional Research Output (NTRO) is to be accompanied by a REF or ERA research statement in order to be counted as research. Similarly, any creative work (or artefact) presented for a Higher Degree in the U.K. and Australia, New Zealand and Canada needs an accompanying exegesis or critical component, a contextual declaration that justifies and grounds the work in a theoretical, historical context of artistic practice. These ERA/REF statements, and especially the exegetical component, can be seen as a form of manifesto, a declaration of the artist's intention and outcome. Equating the exegesis (or REF/ERA statement) as manifesto frees the creative practitioner from a prescriptive, mechanistic account of the work's impact and towards a more performative declaration of artistic endeavour. The exegesis as manifesto allows the artist in the academy to declare themselves, create presence and subvert traditional discourse binaries of academic/creative.' (Publication abstract)
'Although James A.W. Heffernan influentially defines contemporary ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (1993, 3), we argue for a more dynamic and fluid understanding of ekphrasis. In particular, we focus on the multiple and indeterminate perspectives created by ekphrastic poetry, emphasising the way ekphrastic poetry develops complex and interart relationships that cause a fracturing and/or stretching in the perspectives of both the poem and the artwork(s) it invokes. A powerful in-between or liminal ekphrastic space is created in which meanings tug, pull, swirl and merge. As new meanings are created ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, Victor W. 1979. “Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, 234–243. New York: Harper and Row, 234), an ekphrastic point of view emerges, problematising and questioning both-artworks-at-once and highlighting the provisional as it probes what can possibly be said in language about modes of artistic representation in artworks. Additionally, because poetic ekphrasis cannot fully represent, and always reinterprets, another artwork, it is engaged in processes of substitution through which poetic tropes stand in for some of the content of the original artwork. In applying these ideas to the relationships of ekphrastic prose poems to works of visual art, we explicate works by David Grubbs and Lorette C. Luzajic, as well as our own ekphrastic prose poetry.' (Publication abstract)
