Personal Information
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Given name: Amy









Surname: Sparks









Email: gilm0024@umn.edu









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Your contribution
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Title: Time Travel: Embodied Artistic Research as Tactile Archive, Ancestral Memory, and Pedagogies of Slowness









Format: Experimental format (4)









Main language: English









Abstract:
This laboratory invites participants into a live, tactile encounter with a reconstructed 1950s wool cloak transformed through arts-based educational research. The garment; altered with archival photographs, Irish lace, spray stencils, and layered stitching; functions as both artifact and method. It holds a lineage: Irish ancestors displaced by famine in the late 1800s, settling in Wisconsin on already-colonized land; a great-grandmother married at sixteen after losing her first baby; a grandmother sent away in 1952 as an unmarried mother. Their silence and hardness, once read as cruelty, begin to surface as sedimented grief shaped by migration, assimilation into whiteness, and the moral scripts of respectability.
Rather than presenting findings, this laboratory stages artistic research as process. Participants are invited to move around the cloak, examine interior and exterior layers, listen to short audio excerpts, and engage in guided material reflection. The inquiry centers how conceptual worlds are stitched into garments, rituals, and bodies, and how colonial extraction relocates itself across generations, from land to family to marrow.

A companion video and paper, Good White Women extends this research through performative layering and feminist self-critique; however, the cloak remains the primary research site: a living archive that resists efficiency and self-branding through slowness, tactility, and embodied attention.

This experimental format responds to the Forum’s call by foregrounding endangered embodied and domestic knowledges, those often dismissed as private or apolitical, and by positioning artistic research as a space where inherited goodness can be examined, unsettled, and turned inside out.











Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/428/17001244-F5B1-4242-9478-EF90952618AD.JPG









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Amy Sparks is an educational researcher and arts-based practitioner exploring critical whiteness, embodiment, ancestral memory, and liberatory pedagogy. Her work integrates arts-based educational research, performance, and material inquiry to examine how colonial inheritances shape teaching and learning. She centers slowness, relationality, and anti-hegemonic methodologies in both scholarship and practice.










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
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Requirements
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Additional information:
The laboratory will function as an open, durational space rather than a fixed presentation. The cloak will be displayed (worn or on a dress form), with documentation images and QR access to process video. Participants may enter and exit during the session.
Short facilitated prompts will occur intermittently, inviting tactile reflection using simple materials (fabric scraps, tracing paper, thread). The format emphasizes slow looking, quiet dialogue, and relational inquiry rather than lecture. The space operates as an unfolding research site where participants collectively examine how inherited conceptual worlds are materially constructed.










Spatial and technical requirements :
Open room or flexible studio space with tables arranged to allow participants to gather and work collectively. Seating for small-group conversation and shared making. Materials table for fabric, paper, thread, and writing tools.
Dress form or hanger for cloak display.
Video monitor or projector with sound to loop the cloak-making process video.
Soft lighting preferred for textile visibility.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
The work engages ancestral histories and colonial inheritance. Pseudonyms are used for living relatives. Participants will not be required to disclose personal histories; reflective prompts remain invitational. The inquiry may surface discomfort regarding whiteness, assimilation, and complicity; this is framed as generative rather than confrontational.










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