How to do artist-ethnography: a quick guide

• Gather your kit (notebook, pen, camera, binaural headphones, sound recorder, spare batteries, bag for collecting found things, any other materials (clay, drawing pencils, watercolours etc.) and apparatus (tripod, camera lenses) as intended.

• Wear comfortable shoes and pack a rain mac.

• Observe attentively.

• Practice sensory observation and bodily attunement techniques on fieldwork trips.

• Use public transport where possible to reach your location.

• Pay attention to the habitual, the mundane, the everyday, the dull, the boring as well as the unusual, the intimidating and the extraordinary.

• Consider everything interesting, open and alive.

• Notice the unnoticed.

• Examine the taken for granted.

• Question the overlooked.

• Stay close, go slow and describe, exhaustively.

• Use all of your senses in examining your subject.

• Make connections.

• Trace things back to their origins.

• Speculate stories.

• Document your findings in a range of ways that might include –

-        Making fieldnotes (words, mind-maps, lists, drawings, diagrams, colour swatches, other)

-        Taking photos (get up close, pan out, find interesting angles and viewpoints, work thematically or more sporadically)

-        Recording sounds (soundwalks using binaural recorders recommended, contact mics, other)

-        Collecting stuff (litter, detritus, found objects, material residue, other).

- Making clay pressings of interesting textures and surfaces, using air dry clay or other eco-friendly materials.

• Consider the ethical implications of your explorations where others are present and/or observed.

• Return to the site, at different times of day, season, year.

• Refer back to your fieldwork findings to stimulate thinking, creating, making and writing offsite.

• Reflect on your positionality and subjectivity within the research often.

• Develop ongoing exchanges between fieldwork and theory

• Trust yourself, your interpretations are valuable.