Date of Submission
8-2026
Type of Work
Exegesis and Creative Work
Principal Supervisor
Dr. Toby Wren
Keywords
Regenerative practice ; creative practice research ; autoethnography ; boatbuilding ; right relationship ; Kinship ; Living systems ; custodianship ; more-than-human ; Polynesian-inspired catamaran ; Wharram Narai Mk IV ; ocean thinking
Audience
General (G) - suitable for everyone
Abstract
This exegesis asks how regenerative creative practice can be explored and illustrated through lived experience. The inquiry is situated inside the hand construction of a twelve-metre Polynesian-inspired catamaran in a boatyard in Brittany, France, built by the author, her husband and a growing volunteer community through the non-profit, the Floating Stories Lab. Conducted through Creative Practice Research and an autoethnographic method, the exegesis treats the build itself as a site of inquiry. It follows writers who frame research as a living relationship to be grown with, sustained past the point any single project would call ‘finished’.
The Living Framework, the exegesis's conceptual core, develops across seven movements: regeneration as distinct from sustainability; relationality and right relationship; ocean thinking and living systems; making as research; material stewardship and custodianship; the limits of materials science as a measure; and a definition of regenerative creative practice tested against the build itself. Two material decisions, over Okoume plywood and fibreglass, anchor the exegesis's central finding: that ethical attention belongs at the level of systems and accountability, not at the level of materials judged inherently good or bad. Constraint, financial, material and relational, repeatedly functions as a teacher, and different modes of attention, technical and meditative alike, are shown to generate different, equally necessary, kinds of knowledge.
Tested against a materials-engineering hierarchy, the build performs well on most measures available to it, though it falls short of that hierarchy's highest rung: refusing to build a new vessel at all, an option no newly built vessel can ever claim. Tested instead against a multi-capital framework for regenerative business, it registers real gains in cultural and social capital, gains a purely financial account would miss, while remaining short on financial and founder human capital, a gap the exegesis argues is structural to the wider economy regenerative practice currently operates within, not a personal failure of execution. Together, these instruments show what the build has actually contributed: a community that gathered around the process of building before the boat existed to belong to, a lineage of knowledge passed between mentors, builders and volunteers, and a demonstrated discipline of testing regenerative claims honestly against real practice, using more than one instrument, instead of asserting them from a desk.
The exegesis contributes to creative practice research and regenerative design discourse an interdisciplinary model for testing regenerative claims from inside constrained, lived practice, and argues that the practice's value lies in the critical reflection it makes possible, and in the people, mentors, volunteers, family and community it reaches along the way, more than in any single finished, virtuous object.
Recommended Citation
Richard, A. (2026). Entangled Practice:Living Regenerative Creative Practice [Master's dissertation, SAE University College]. Creo.