Alix BEESTON

Project at the MaCI

February 2025 – April 2025
 

Dr Beeston’s MaCI project aims to recast feminist literary, film, and photography history by analysing the material realities and effects of women’s creative work as they are revealed through unfinished projects. Existing accounts of the development of literature and the visual arts tend to track with histories of publication, production, and circulation. But limiting our understanding of women’s creative labour to projects that circulated as “complete” works carries significant risks, since sexist and racist patterns and structures shape the processes by which a given project does or does not achieve completion.

By shifting focus from product to process through the study of unfinished projects—specifically projects by women writers, filmmakers, and photographers in the United States across the twentieth century—Dr Beeston will closely historicise the exigencies and institutional economies of women’s creative labour; newly theorise the creative act via fragments, drafts, and ephemera; and revalue and disseminate women’s unfinished creative work.

Innovating interdisciplinary methods for studying and writing about unwieldy, fragmentary archives, this project has potential for wide applicability in feminist studies and across humanities disciplines, as well as in the arts. It will intervene in debates among feminist scholars, artists, and audiences about how to account for women’s achievements without mythologising the artists or dematerialising their work. It will also develop an ethical framework for scholars and practitioners working to recontextualise and reimagine women’s unfinished materials in the contemporary moment.

During her MaCI fellowship, Dr Beeston will undertake sustained, archivally driven research into the unfinished works of US women artists and authors, notably the filmmaker and writer Kathleen Collins and the writer and activist Tillie Olsen. This research will inform an ambitious multi-book, multi-format project that will demonstrate how the study of unfinished creative labour can fundamentally reshape our understandings of the nature and boundaries of the art object, the processes and lived conditions of creativity, and the ethical and political considerations around engaging with incomplete materials.

Dr Beeston’s time at MaCI will allow her to undertake experiments to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges of this project. Taking advantage of MaCI’s resources and contacts for creative research, she will connect and collaborate with practitioners, researchers, and students in Grenoble in exploratory and applied inquiries into reimagining unfinished works in new times and places. She will also build on her extensive experience in public engagement by taking up opportunities to share her in-process work with specialist and non-specialist audiences.