Liz Crichton

This project explores the relationship between socially-engaged creative listening as an art practice and imagination. These explorations take place in the context of how we each might imagine our most ideal reality. Through a series of listening experiments, it asks the questions:

• How might an art practice that engages in acts of social listening help us realise experience differently and beyond what we know?
• How can such listening offer connection and meaning in a way that develops empathy trust and expectation?
• How can such listening help us imagine a more ideal possible reality that impacts on our desire and motivation?

My creative decisions are informed by ideas generated through listening experiments. This artistic exploration and reflection will investigate the relationship between our creative imagination and our sense of wellbeing.  I will construct listening experiments to generate reflective knowledge that will continue to develop and evolve as I explore listening as a transformative process, specifically investigating the role of the imagination in the listening process.  To dream of paradise, to imagine it’s possibility as an experiential reality, is now, when we are living with the brutalities of war and in an environmental crisis, more essential than ever.  Ideas of paradise enable us to escape, in our imagination at least, to a place where everything is as it should be both mortally and aesthetically. This research will investigate how socially-engaged creative listening can provide an avenue of escape from this hostile world that helps us live better in these times. 

Names of Supervisors: Dr Pernille Spence and Dr Louise Mackenzie