This is my attempt to create diagrams to explain the relationship of theoretical research and practical making in conjunction with the process of the creative cycle.

A ‘Klein 4 group’ diagram is where three of the elements in the group, produce the fourth element. Krauss used this digram to plot sculpture. Her group of four elements consisted of ‘landscape, architecture, not-landscape and not- architecture’. She intimated that this closed group was Structuralist, or Modernist. Krauss then ‘expanded’ this group to add, on the diagonal, the elements marked sites, site-construction, axiomatic structures and sculpture. She did this to demonstrate how sculpture (in the 1970’s) positioned itself against landscape and architecture. This expanded diagram, or ‘the expanded field’, was defined by Krauss as Post-structuralist, or Post-Modern.

I used Krauss’ expanded diagram to attempt to describe the creative process. Using her term axiomatic, or fixed, and idiomatic to suggest natural and fluid. These are the elements in the square, fixed (axiomatic), not fixed (not axiomatic), fluid (idiomatic) and not fluid (not idiomatic). expanding this 4 group I have put the elements of the creative cycle problem (question or brief), analysis (development and research), solution (outcome) and synthesis (review and development). Suggesting that the problem, or brief, is fixed and not fixed, the analysis, development and research is both fixed and fluid, the solution is fluid and not fluid – opposite to the brief, and the synthesis, or evaluative process, is both fluid and fixed.

I made another diagram to explain the creative process, using this time a CREEK diagram, or at least part of one. Taking the existential plane of the individual I inserted a 4 group to illustrate the creative cycle, and then made the hermeneutic plane a vertical intersecting plane to demonstrate that research going in and practical work going out is interpretive but not in opposition to the existential plane. So the research and outcome input and output) travels through the middle of the individual navigating the creative cycle.