Abstract A stack is never a single thing: it is an assemblage, a gathering of fragments placed one atop another, their weight shifting with each new addition. Unlike a tower or a monument, the stack is not built toward permanence or grandeur. It is provisional, contingent, and precarious. It can topple, re-form, or disperse at any moment. Yet it is precisely in this fragility that its strength lies: the stack makes visible the ongoing processes of collecting, layering, balancing, and negotiating that underpin my research.
The stack resonates with the bogscape in which much of my research is situated. In the bog, material is never static but accumulates through slow, compressed layering season upon season. This is not linear time, but each layer bears the traces of what came before.
To stack is to engage in rhythm the repetitive placing of one element upon another, the pause, the adjustment, the recalibration when the balance wavers. Like music, it is rhythmic, it emerges through embodied negotiation with weight, friction, and gravity. The stack, then, is a lived score, enacted in time.
The stack allows me to conceptualise my research not as a finished object but as a provisional and evolving form. It holds together the tension between order and disorder, intention and accident, gravity, and lightness. It acknowledges the temporality of practice, where knowledge is always in the making, always layered, always at risk of collapse. To work within a stack is to embrace instability, to recognise that meaning is not singular but accumulated, pressed together like the strata of a bog.
Thus, the stack becomes both a material image and a methodological orientation: an insistence that research is not linear progress toward a fixed outcome but a continual layering of practice, reflection, and entanglement.