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

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.