Writing a dissertation

In many ways I didn’t feel very well prepared to write this dissertation. The only real academic piece of writing that I had done before was a 2500 word essay in my first year of university. On top of that I chose a topic that I did not know much about and that had not been discussed in any lecture. But that, of course, was my own doing. I know that I can not work well under pressure so I decided to start researching the topic I had chosen very early on. Since May 2015, when we had to write our dissertation proposal, I spend several days per week researching.

When starting the process I didn’t have a thesis that I believed in and that I tried to defent and explain with the help of arguments. Instead I read all sorts of books and articles that interested me and hoped to develop an argument by doing that.

Identifying topics

I was interested in spirituality, religion, wellbeing, art, craft and values. The research started taking more shape when I came across a study that pointed out that people who are spiritual without a religious framework suffer from mental health issues more often than religious people or atheists.

Initially I thought it was possibel to find an explanation for that. I researched Nietzsche’s critique of religion to explain why spiritual people suffer from mental health issues more often. I sought to explain it with his theory of the bad intellectual conscience, that appears when we openly and obviously deceive ourselves. But that didn’t work, because all the things I could connect to spirituality also applied either to religious people or to atheists. The other thing I realised when familiarising myself with Nietzsche’s thoughts was that he also had a lot to say about the virtues and limitations of science. His writings on that topic made me realise that I can’t just take the findings of the study for granted, but that before trying to find explanations for the results, I need to question those results. The study did not take the causal relationship of the different groupt into consideration.

That lead me to analyse the different terms. Mental health, spirituality, religion, atheism.

I read texts from the areas of psychology, theology and philosophy to try and understand more. But of course I needed to bring art into it as well. Wassily Kandinsky is one of my favourite painters and I have read selveral of his writings on art. In “The spiritual in Art” or “The blue rider almanac” he describes a lot of interesting connections betweenart and spirituality.  I reread some of his texts and found another great book in the library, that became one of my main sources for the final draft of the dissertation. It is called “Art for whom and for what” by Brian Keeble. I was alsointerested in the philosophy of Simone De Beauvoir and her concepts of subjectivity. Rudolf Steiner’s approach to view the word, art and education interested me and I spent some time acquainting myself with his teachings. Kandinsky, Beauvoir and Steiner have certainly influenced this paper, but they did not make it into the final draft of it. Joanna Howells, a potter who I have worked for and who has become a good friend, gave me a book by the American Potter Mary Christine Richards. It is called “Centering in Pottery, Poetry and The Person”. This book, too became one of the main sources of information for the dissertation.

 Gathering and analysing Information

By this point it was summer and I went on a faimly holiday in France. We had rented a small cottage and I had brought all my books and writingpads with me to study. I had pretty much identified what sourceliterature was relevant for the dissertation I was about to start writing. The way I worked from there was to read certain chapters of the books and straight away write notes into my wrting pady. For very important or complex theories I drew diagrams. They help me understand and memorise information.

I had several writing pads for all the different people I was quoting:

• Several original texts of Nietzsche’s
• Chris shorts PhD: Nietzsche’s influences on German Expressionist art
• Keeble’s “art for Whom and for What”
• A book on the connections of Jungs psychology and christian spirituality
• Richards Book on Centering

When I felt like I had researched enough I made a digital file with different keywords.

I wrote all of the information into the different sections, giving every source thir own colour.

• Jung- Green
• Nietzsche-Red
• Keeble-Yellow
• Richards-purple
• Blauer Reiter- Blue
• Brücke- Brown
• Christianity- Grey

The Keywords which made the sections into which I sorted all of the notes were:

• Transformation
• Self/ego
• socio/political context
• Otherness
• Value
• Spiritual core
• primordial oneness/ dualism
• archetypes
• overcoming
• god/death of god
• nihilism
• science
• effective- ineffective knowledge
• dehumanisation
• critiscism of language/categoriation
• reality
• intellectual conscience
• art/work

I then started connecting the theories of the different people reg one keyword to each other and put different keywords together that seemed to be of one kind.

That’s how I formed my chapters.

Initially I had 5 chapters:

Chapter 1
Explanation of Art/Work relationship
Artistic transformation

Chapter 2
Criticism of categorisation/ language
Primordial oneness/dualism

Chapter 3
Dehumanisation
Socio/ political context

Chapter 4
Self-Ego (Archetypes)
Spiritual/creative core

Chapter 5
Effective ineffective knowledge
Death of god
Crisis of conscience

Only when I was writing my conclusion I realised that all those topics can be put into three categories:

1. Our perception of reality/ or environment
2. Developments that are detrimental to human wellbeing
3. Processes that restore the balance of soul, body and environment

Those three are now my chapters.

I now only have to rewrite the introduction and conclusion so that they fit together better. I will wait for the people who are proofreading the paper to give me feedback and then finalise it.

Effects of the research on my art practice and personal life

The texts I have read and realisations I have made during the process of writing this dissertation certainly resonate with me personally and effect my subject work. I am glad I had to do it but it certainly was hard work. I am really looking forward to handing it in and not have to look at it again for a while.

The different steps of researching, making notes, writing a text, then reading it over and over, changing it , reading it etc have also influenced the way I make things in the studio.

I have developed a methodology of making :