Interdisciplinary artist Dr. Pam Hall explores the nature of knowledge and notions of the “local” in her work, making her a perfect fit for the CLEAR Artist in Residence (CLEAR AIR) program. Dr. Hall became a full time lab member, joining lab meetings and activities for a month before proposing a project about the nature of knowledge.

Dr. Hall led CLEAR members in a series of discussions about know we understood knowledge and different forms of knowledge in the lab, as well as the types of art collaboration we’d like to participate in. She used a series of prompts to facilitate collective thinking:

  • Knowledge is….
  • _____ influenced my thinking about knowledge  when they said….
  • three adjectives that describe knowledge are….
  • three verbs that describe knowledge-making are…
  • Our science is…

And we used various systems to comment on and prioritize the type of work we wanted to do together.

Image of collaborative decision-making about what kind of collaborative project we wanted as a group.

In the end, Dr. Hall sent each lab member part of an un-stitched lab coat. Each lab member was asked to do something with it that illustrated an aspect of our collective conversations about knowledge. Dr. Hall then sewed our lab coat pieces into a huge quilt–or perhaps it is a tapestry?–annotating it in the margins with her own input from our conversations. The result: