In the Western philosophical tradition of thinking about the epistemological value of the arts and the aesthetic, the prevailing view is that all knowledge is based on reason. This notion precludes that processes of art making can be processes of knowledge production. The possibility of pursuing a doctorate in the arts reveals the urgency to expand this traditional discourse by including the arts themselves. My research project challenges a hegemonic understanding of epistemology and explores practice-based modes of expanding these traditional patterns of knowledge.

In my research, I investigate bobbin lace-making as aesthetic thinking and as spaces of possibility for new entanglements of art and research. Bobbin lace-making is based on a systematic alternation of twisting, crossing, knotting, and intertwining threads. I consider the making tool as a thinking tool: different strands of knowledge (threads) can be linked together in multiple ways. Structurally, following Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the rhizome, bobbin lace-making can be read as a mode of thinking: Potentially it morphs and shifts its configurations and outputs, grows in all directions, and provides multiple entryways. The generated patterns are integral to the process that produced them.

In the artistic experiment, I explore bobbin lace-making as a practice of aesthetic thinking. I not only rethink scientific methods in aesthetic practice but also reflect on my artistic concepts through theory and real-life issues in order to interlace them into a sustainable mesh of knowledge. Like a feedback apparatus, the artistic experiment stays in constant correspondence with the scientific and socio-political world in order to entangle in an aesthetic thinking practice that opens up for multiplicity and more inclusive ideas of knowing.

Christine Rafflenbeul (1983, DE) is an artistic researcher. Her profession oscillates somewhere between chef, seafarer, care assistant, artisan, and lecturer. She is a pragmatist at heart.

Rafflenbeul understands her work as fundamental artistic research on artistic research. She focuses on the artistic research experiment and its relationship to formats and methods of knowledge production in artistic research. By experimenting with handcrafts she investigates practice-based modes of thinking. She aims to make visible a reflective meshwork of situated knowledges through artistic research methods that make aesthetic thinking comprehensible and thus artistic epistemic textures recognizable.

Rafflenbeul is a trained chef. She graduated from HAW Hamburg with an MA in Fashion, Costume, and Textile Product Design. In her final thesis ‘in the mode of n-1’ (2021) she investigated the relationships of body, space, and fashion making with a strong focus on the development of her artistic research practice.