This document is twofold:

A monograph focuses on a series of investigations into collaboratively generated narrative structures. My collaborators are my friends, human and otherwise, including the cats I live with, Marty, Nalah, Oliver, and Pikkul, and my fellow artists, designers, and tinkerers, Florence, Andalah, Atanas, and Craig. Using strategies of classification, categorization, repetition and improvisation, narrative structures are expanded with varying degrees of legibility. The investigation takes the form of a series of case studies of writing including beading and works on paper (stacks, pages, books) that engage with the questions: What personal narrative possibilities emerge from writing and making at the edge of narrative? How can these narratives be used to surface, shape and depict understandings of mundane experience? And how do these narrative possibilities emerge and change when primarily working collaboratively? I frame this investigation through the narrative theories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Peggy Phalen. Le Guin’s “carrier bag" narrative proposes a non-linear, esoteric, and personal accumulation of the everyday which my collaborators and I approach through photographic collection and organization. In creating this work, it became necessary to write of intangible experiences, while maintaining privacy and subjectivity. I repurpose Trinh T. Minh Ha’s “speaking nearby” as a way to write about intangible experience without claiming knowledge or expression of it, and Peggy Phalen’s performative “writing towards disappearance” to emphasize privacy and subjectivity in written experience.

The work is transformed and contextualized within fifteen exhibitions and numerous collaborative projects produced over the past year with my friends and frequent collaborators, Craig Rodmore, Florence Yee and Atanas Bozdarov. Expansive appendices, which are by no means secondary to the monograph, document and develop this larger collaborative project.