Sites of conversation: the table method

Through our lives we sit at many tables, eating, preparing food, playing, making drawings, doing homework, working and more. In other words, the table is a focal point where words and materials meet, cross each-other, collide or come together. The Phenomenology and Imagination Research Group (PIRG) is an independent research group whose aim is to develop research through active fine art collective practice. PIRG’s Table Method (tm) is a process that has grown organically over a period of five years and has been cultivated through a desire to bring words, texts, actions and materials together as it invites participants to respond to a text through conversation, the handling of materials and tools. The work draws from the new materialist turn through the ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karen Barad. Informed by Susan Kozel’s phenomenological enquiry, PIRG has extended its practice of conversation as a research methodology to include the phenomenological and material interaction that has become the tm. The tm is an unfolding dialogue between materials and phenomenological thinking, which expands the possibilities of what conversation can be and become, it utilises material thinking as a way to open out discourse beyond the constraints of language and other representations. This paper discusses the mechanisms and relationships at work in the process of the tm as drawing and material engagement enhance textual meaning.