Creative Research and Teaching in Radical Environments (CREATURE)

The FUI-group Creative Research and Teaching in Radical Environments (CREATURE) aims to move humanities research and teaching into uncommon settings and spaces. As a creative and curiosity-driven collective, CREATURE brings together scholars from different humanities disciplines interested in rethinking methods of learning, research, and dissemination beyond the written word. We explore questions like: how can our research move into new spatial and cultural contexts, for example from indoor environments to the great outdoors? What new questions do evolve and which new challenges can we address when we develop research in conversation with society? And how can we as scholars transform research and teaching from words to wider actions?

Calendar

From 2025 to 2026, CREATURE will organise workshops and meetings focusing on the integration of creativity into both research methods and pedagogical design. These events are open to UiS employees, but registration is required. If you are interested in receiving updates, please get in touch with Melina Antonia Buns.

Forthcoming Events

Friday, 22 May, 09.00–16.00, HL K–056

Phytogram Workshop with Matthew Beach

This field- and lab-based workshop invites participants to an introductory session on plant-based slow photography. As a form of creative inquiry, slow photography foregrounds the formative roles of time and place in attuning to vegetal agencies, cultivating forms of entanglement through which organisms, materials, and environments continuously shape one another.

In the morning, at Sørmarka, we will forage for a variety of plants that then become co-authors of phytograms in situ: camera-less photographs made by combining plants’ internal chemical makeup with a simple photographic developer solution to index vegetal matter on light-sensitive film.

In the afternoon, at a science lab in Hagbard Lines hus, we will turn our phytogram negatives into positive cyanotypes, a photographic printing process that uses light-sensitive chemistry and ultraviolet light to create deep blue prints. There will also be an opportunity to continue our vegetal collaborations by working with dyes and tannins derived from the foraged plants to shift our cyanotypes’ tonality and colour.

Throughout, we will approach photographic practice slowly, using duration to cultivate sustained attunement to plants’ haptic and olfactory dimensions, the sonic atmospheres of field and lab, and the shifting conditions that move between them. This sensory receptivity decentres sight as photography’s primary perceptual register. The phytograms and cyanotypes that then emerge through these encounters carry the conditions of their making; such that Sørmarka participates directly in how our images form as a repeatedly engaged peri-urban Northern European landscape where birch woodland, transitional forest, and neighbouring botanic garden meet. The photograph’s altered surfaces render that participation perceptible, generating a situated, partial environmental knowledge.

This workshop is organised and run by Matthew Beach.

Charlotte Wrigley is responsible for this CREATURE event and can answer any questions you might have.

Registration required by 19 May, noon: https://nettskjema.no/a/625997

Matthew Beach is an artist-researcher and educator whose practice works across place, the photographic, and care in more-than-human worlds. His primary research strand, developed through his doctoral project, examines how the physical transformations and circulations of jellyfish, their connective tissues, and collagen-derived materials reorganise both how gelatinous life is known and how knowledge of it is produced through practice in the American South Atlantic. Secondary strands include expanding the role of vegetal dyes in photographic histories of colour image production and examining kinship relations with (sub)tropical plants through the emergent phenomenon of ‘aroidmania’. His academic writing appears in Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales (Open Humanities Press) and, with Catherine Nash, in the AAG Review of Books. His visual and critical work appears in TRIGGER #7: Ocean (FOMU – Museum of Photography Antwerp, forthcoming), produced with biologist-aquaculturist Travis Brandwood, as well as Eroding Forms (Ephemere), The Conversation, and Wonkhe. With Giulia Carabelli, he co-curates The Plant Forum, an interdisciplinary research assembly at Queen Mary University of London, where they are also developing, with Franklin Ginn, a new volume in critical plant studies under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. He holds an MA from the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and a BFA from the College of the Arts, University of Florida. Find him online at matthewbeach.org.

Past Events

Wednesday, 8 April, 14.15–16, HG N-105 

Cut, Paste, Teach!

Teaching involves constant acts of selection and juxtaposition. As we plan and prepare, we set goals, choose readings, sequence materials, and connect themes across teaching sessions. This hands-on collage workshop seeks to make those pedagogical decisions visible and tangible. Participants will combine personal photographs, text and images from course literature, thematic visuals, historical photos, and contemporary magazine clippings to create collages representing a course they teach. Through making and sharing, we'll discuss how collage and visual juxtaposition can reveal unexpected connections, disciplinary assumptions, and new possibilities for course design and creative teaching. In line with CREATURE's commitment to moving humanities teaching beyond the written word, this workshop treats collage as both an analytical and a pedagogical tool. This means exploring collage as a way to think through, not just about, how we teach.  

All collages will be scanned and compiled into a CREATURE zine documenting our collective exploration.

Don't teach yet? You can approach this through a research project instead. Neither teacher nor researcher? We'll find a way to make it work. All are welcome!

Wednesday, 5 November, 10-12, HG O-134

Art vs. Science: dueling methodologies in the classroom

In this two-hour interactive seminar, we will explore the tension between art- and science-based research methodologies, aiming to find productive points of contact and then examine how these can be integrated into teaching. Can “artistic” research be equated/integrated into “real” research? Can art serve as a valid research method in a university course?

To start the conversation, Charlotte Wrigley (science) and Allen Jones (art) will each don metaphorical boxing gloves and fight for a hybrid methodological approach stemming from their respective fields. Basing their presentations on the same poem, each will explore the potential hybridity to be found in the science/art of interdisciplinary research and teaching design and practice. For those who “hate poetry” (Ben Lerner), do not worry: the poem will be quite contemporary and provocative. The workshop will include a science-vs.-art creative writing game to open a discussion and exploration into the potential for fusing art and science in the classroom.

Monday and Tuesday, 8-9 December, whole day event, HG N-106/107

Walking & Writing: A creative methods workshop

What does it mean to write with the ground beneath our feet? The two-day workshop Walking & Writing invites scholars, artists, and educators to discover how the act of moving through space and being in place can coax out stories, textures, and relations that belong as much to soil, stone, water, wind, sound, and light as to human and more-than-human intention. The ambition is to develop a toolbox of playful yet rigorous methods for weaving together bodies, environments, and words, demonstrating that walking & writing can help us re‑imagine how we inhabit and narrate the world.

The first day, artist-researcher Helena Hunter will facilitate close encounters with more-than-human nature. Industrial designer Petra Lilja will then draw our attention to the rock beneath our feet. Drawing on the environment of the Sørmarka forest surrounding the University of Stavanger campus, both sessions blend fieldwork and movement, highlighting how embodied movement contributes to uncovering layers of meaning. On the second day, workshop participants will collaborate in an exploration of emergent methods, reflecting on how walking & writing can foreground more‑than‑human agencies—soil, stone, water, wind, sound and light—as active participants in place‑making.