Entangled Practice

Exploring regenerative creative practice through lived experience

Angie Richard

Master of Creative Industries—SAE University Australia

This site documents the evolving creative exegesis accompanying my capstone project

Structure of the Exegesis

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Abstract

This capstone project explores the question:

How can regenerative creative practice be explored and illustrated through lived experience?

Through this inquiry, I document and reflect on my lived creative process unfolding in real time. My creative practice is multidisciplinary and inseparable from life, driven by a desire to make meaning of life and contribute, in some capacity, to addressing the pressing challenges that threaten the health and regenerative capacity of the complex living systems within which we exist.

My practice includes the conceptual design and planning to begin building a 41-foot Polynesian-inspired wooden catamaran and the creation of a Floating Stories Lab, a regenerative futures research and storytelling studio. Alongside this, the practice encompasses podcast production, writing articles and blogs, creative nonfiction, experiments with visual storytelling and short fiction, as well as surfing, sailing, and motherhood.

My practice, experienced through the lens of my life, becomes the ground for investigation.

Through reflexive, open-ended engagement, I explore how creativity itself can participate in regenerative ways of being that are ecological, relational, and culturally responsive.

Research Context

This project emerges from a personal and professional reckoning after two decades working in documentary filmmaking and storytelling.

Much of that work was fast-paced, extractive, and individually driven, prompting a growing question about the systems in which creative production often operates.

A turning point came while filming a climate security documentary in remote Indigenous islands in the South Pacific while living aboard a retired oil exploration ship.

“The contradiction was sharp, and it stayed with me. What does it mean to create not for platforms, markets, or institutions, but in co-creation with and for the living world?”

This question initiated a shift toward slower, place-based creative practice, exploring what it might look like to live and make from within the rhythms of land, ocean, kinship, and care.

Research Approach

This project unfolds as a meandering, iterative process of making, embedded with reflection and response.

Rather than extracting knowledge from the creative process, the research remains in conversation with it, attending to the subtle shifts, contradictions, and insights that arise along the way.

Through this approach, the project traces how creative acts might foster:

  • re-connection

  • reciprocity

  • and more livable futures shaped by relationship.

The research consciously moves away from creative practices grounded in consumption and novelty, and instead explores how creative work might emerge through listening, remembering, and relationship with place.

Ocean as Co-Researcher

Throughout this project, Ocean is approached as place, teacher, co-researcher, and kin.

Personifying Ocean allows engagement with her as an active presence within the inquiry, shaping how I listen, make, and reflect.

This approach honours a relational understanding of knowledge and situates creative practice within the wider living systems that sustain life.

Creative Practice

The creative work developed through this research includes:

  • blogging, essays and reflective writing

  • podcast production

  • visual storytelling experiments

  • the development of the Floating Stories Lab

These works function simultaneously as creative outputs and research artefacts, documenting the unfolding relationship between creative practice, ecological awareness, and lived experience.

A Living Research Document

This creative exegesis is presented as a living research document.

The site documents the process of the project as it unfolds through:

  • field notes and reflections

  • blogging, essays and research writing

  • documentation of the Floating Stories Lab

  • evolving creative works.

Together these materials trace the development of a practice that seeks to explore regenerative ways of being through storytelling, observation, and lived experience.