how to do dishes: a metonymic thinking through and breaking down

The first zine in this project was a series of hundred-word reflections (Lauren & Berlandt, 2019) [“four hundreds for me”] I wrote sitting under my desk at 7am in the middle of winter, underneath my a/r/tographic playmat. Somewhat compulsively, I wrote zine after zine as a sense-making exercise (Greene, 1987; Haynes, 2001), initially to examine my inability to participate in my own research. The turn occurs when I see these zines as a/r/tographic openings (Irwin, 2013) for and as research.

These zines unfolded to story reasons why I could not participate in my own research, including being tired [“four hundreds for me”], being overwhelmed [“how to do dishes”], discomfort around being a working mother [“Re/searching, art/making, m/othering”] and the feeling of drowning [“What Are You Doing in Gloomy Hollow?”]. I explored my inability to participate in a living inquiry that felt haunted by postpartum psychosis and the unravelling of significant childhood trauma [“eeexxxccceessss” and “[sur]renderings: contiguity and living inquiry”]. I folded a longtime friend into the process [“how to make a zine when your life is falling apart”] and started to see the boundaries between my personal zine-making and the zines made as da/r/ta by participants shift; they started to overlap. I started to see their grief for their schools mirrored in my own grief for my research [“an ode to our goals for education (or something”] and my drowning in motherhood as contiguous with their drowning in schools [“neither of these wolves can do it”].

This is an 8-page zine where I return to an earlier written reflection where I wrote about my painting teacher saying, ‘when you don’t know what to paint, do the dishes’. I employ the artificial intelligence Goblintools.ai to instruct me on how to do dishes.