Mutual dependencies (edited by K. Meynell) explores a range of collaborative and inter-dependant practices, under the headings: Transcription, Pedagogy, Ecologics, and Symbiosis.

At the core of this idea is the acknowledgment of an interrelatedness of practices and the wish to expose these. Collaboration suggests an ease, which does not necessarily reflect the whole picture. These relationships can be fraught, not least because of the nature of subjectivity. Furthermore they exist not only in the moment, now, face to face, but also in a combination, art works to artists, and in precedent implying a lineage. This lineage is one that will be repeated and will be broken, modified or ruptured: the one in tension with the other. Educationally this can be understood as part of a performative process that necessarily takes into account the lived experience of our encounters with works, ideas and individuals.

As a publication from a Fine Art research group, this book will also set out to further the debate about how an artist might write the image (or image the text). In the wider context we see this not exactly as an artists’ book, and not exactly as an academic publication. It sits between, placing itself firmly within a fine art discourse at time when re-examination of what these things might mean is taking place (for example Goldsmiths course in Art writing, BookWorks publications etc). The context of Middlesex Fine Art Department’s interdisciplinary ethos, makes this speculative practice appropriate.