Thinking through artistic research: Evolving compositional practice

The Practice: Cold Water Swimming as Research Methodology

Beginning in the Body

The shock of water at eight degrees against my skin becomes a methodology. Friday 25th July, Kingston Beach, Southern Tasmania, a few minutes after sunrise. My body enters the Derwent's winter embrace after weeks of absence, of sickness and lingering coughs, of forgetting what it means to be held by more-than-human rhythms. The weak liquid warmth of dawn light seeps across sand as I wade purposefully into water that bites, demands presence, that strips away everything but the immediate interaction between flesh and element.

This is where my research begins: not in the library or music studio, but in the liminal space where body meets water, where the technological apparatus of daily life dissolves into salt spray and the urgent need to keep moving before numbness sets in. The act of submersion itself — clothed or, on special occasions, naked — becomes epistemological practice. No wetsuits, please, ever! I need to feel the water pushing on my skin. When I do enter the water without barriers, these moments represent a complete shedding of technological mediations. They return me to a more primary mode of knowing through the body's engagement with elemental forces.

The water's bite against my torso, the miscalculated wave that hits me before readiness. These are not merely sensory experiences but methodological moments. They demand a kind of attention that cannot be delegated to devices or translated immediately into language. Twenty metres out, maybe fifty, I realise I am further from shore than anticipated, my fingers too numb to register their own function as they stroke through dark water. This moment of preemptive panic, of checking for sand beneath feet that cannot even feel, becomes crucial data: the recognition that embodied knowledge operates in registers unavailable to technological capture or recounting.

Each morning's encounter varies in intensity. Some days I arrive before dawn, when phosphorescence traces my footprints in wet sand and colors jet across the sky in pink and purple trajectories. I breathe in the salty air on those mornings and move up and down the beach. Other mornings demand only my listening: sitting at water's edge, tuning bodily systems to the water's changing rhythms without agenda or instruction. This attentive receptivity without agenda opens onto what posthumanist feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis might recognise as "posthuman feminist methodology." These are ways of knowing that emerge through sustained bodily engagement rather than analytical distance.

The acoustic dimensions of this practice sometimes extend beyond the water itself. On occasion, my violin accompanies me on these early morning encounters. As I improvise freely, the steel strings and old wooden body tend to respond to these morning encounters with long bows that slow and speed up within a single stroke, grainy sounds, and microtonal evolutions that resist conventional harmonic structures. Field recordings, when I bring the equipment, attempt to capture ambient textures, though when I listen back, they are inevitably flatter than the dimensional richness of lived experience. These sonic explorations serve not as core methodology but as peripheral ways of developing and documenting insights that emerge from the primary act of bodily submersion. The binaural headphone walks along the shore's edge, the hydrophone dropped into suitable spots; these technological extensions help articulate what the body learns in water, but they remain secondary to the fundamental practice of entering the sea.

This embodied practice grounds my research in recognition that knowledge emerges through sustained physical engagement with place and environment. The daily ritual of submersion, whether accompanied by listening exercises, musical response, or technological documentation, creates conditions for understanding that exceed the parameters of conventional inquiry. Yet it is the act of entering cold water itself that remains central: the body's negotiation with temperature, current, and depth that cannot be delegated to instruments or translated immediately into language. Here, at the water's edge, methodology becomes a practice of embodied attention; a commitment to knowing through rather than about the material world that holds us. This foundational practice of embodied submersion extends beyond singular encounters into a sustained methodology that embraces seasonal variation and weather extremes as essential research conditions.