Paper short abstract:

What can be gained through engagement with the correlations between ethnographic and artistic methods of creation? This anthropologist examines compared processes of collection, replication, and communication through experiences of engagement with local artists in Homer, Alaska.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographers are encouraged to understand their interlocutors as theorists in their own right, as experts in their own lives; I hope to explore how approaches to art-as-theory and theory-as-art may benefit ethnographic method. This paper draws on preliminary research for my broader dissertation in cultural anthropology on co-produced epistemologies of environmental change in Kachemak Bay, Alaska. The location of my research, my hometown of Homer, Alaska, is known for its high per-capita of artists, sometimes attributed to the "cosmic vibrations" and beauty of the place. Specifically, this paper will draw on my engagement with local textile artist and printmaker Mandy Bernard; I was inspired by her January 2017 show Patterns of Place, created during a monthlong residency at the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska (https://www.mandybernard.com/installation). Bernard's focus on natural patterns and engagement with senses of place through her art mirrors my own interest in the role of landscape in human lives. Exchanges with Bernard have solidified comparisons of each others' processes: collection, replication, creation, and the constant tensions of embodied creativity against necessary explanation, communication, and self-promotion. This paper seeks to explore the corollaries between artmaking and ethnography as forms of anthropological knowledge production, as well as the productivity of exchanges between artists and ethnographers.