OAR: The Oxford Artistic & Practice-based Research Platform (Issue 3) – Featuring Dr Sharon Kivland

Title:	OAR (Issue 3) - That's All There Is
Publisher:	OAR - The Oxford Artistic & Practice-based Research Platform
Editors:	Jessyca Hutchens (Oxford University), Anita Paz (Oxford University), Naomi Vogt (UCL), and Nina Wakeford (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Editorial assistant:	Frances Whorrall-Campbell
Online ISSN:	2399-5092
Published:	Twice per year
Established:	2016

Sharon Kivland immerses the reader in her ongoing practice of revisiting and editing the words of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, recomposing these words as love letters written to her. The seemingly intimate correspondence foregrounds unresolved questions of desire, love and death.

This issue addresses matters of finishing, remnants and re-visitation in practice-based projects. Contributors apply a variety of disciplinary approaches to the problems of ending and returning, touching on procedures of data collection, analysis, and output. Bringing together alternative conceptualisation and terminology, as well as more performative artistic research responses through moving image and other media, this issue offers a wide range of frameworks to address matters which otherwise might seem closed. Forms include creative writing, moving image art works, accounts of field encounters, as well as an interview with an artist who left artistic research. Contributions overwhelmingly focus on the generative possibilities of tackling ‘finishing’, rather than getting stuck in a sense of impossibility or finality.

Through the work our of contributors, in this issue we surface interrogations which (we hope) are less anxiety-provoking than blunt questions about submission dates. At their most optimistic, our contributors offer the failure or disappointment of ending as an injunction to act, now, and perhaps differently. Perhaps we might live with different rhythms of beginnings and endings. Crucially, these contributions form a collective voice to counter the assumption of individual triumph or tragedy embedded in the question ‘When are you planning to finish?’. This collective voice enunciates a set of generative strategies which include revisiting, ‘un’-finishing and – the most notable response to our call for contributions – numerous refusals to let things settle or die without further intervention. Even after the death of Lacan, as Sharon Kivland proposes, one might write him love letters, an opportunity which hijacks any sense of embarrassment with the serious commitment of not letting it be over.

Dr Sharon Kivland is a Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Find out more about Sharon Kivland’s books and other works here.