The Undulating Practice Method
How Modular Exploration Builds a Lifelong Creative Continuum
By Sarnia de la Maré
Introduction: Practice as Living Research
Across disciplines, serious creative work rarely develops in straight lines. It evolves through cycles of curiosity, immersion, refinement, and return.
Within the Continuum Approach, this process can be understood as undulating practice: a method of sustained, modular exploration in which ideas are entered deeply, developed fully, and temporarily set aside — not abandoned, but archived — for future reactivation.
This essay outlines how undulating practice functions as a self-directed learning system, a creative research methodology, and a foundation for long-term artistic resilience.
1. The Undulating Cycle
Undulating practice moves through recurring phases:
Attraction — An idea, material, or question generates sustained interest.
Immersion — Focused exploration of technique, language, and context.
Expansion — Testing variations, combinations, and applications.
Refinement — Selection, editing, and structural consolidation.
Resolution — Completion of a coherent body of work or skill set.
Archiving — Intentional shelving of the project as a completed module.
Return — Re-entry at a later stage with greater experience and perspective.
Rather than progressing linearly, practitioners move through these cycles repeatedly, building depth through iteration.
2. Modular Learning Outside Institutions
Traditional higher education is structured around modules: discrete units of inquiry assessed and then integrated into a larger qualification.
Undulating practice mirrors this structure organically.
Each creative phase functions as a self-designed module, combining:
research
experimentation
technical development
reflection
public presentation
The difference is autonomy. The practitioner determines pace, depth, and duration, allowing learning to remain responsive rather than prescriptive.
3. Portfolio as Evidence of Process
A dense, multi-layered portfolio is not produced through constant productivity, but through repeated cycles of completion.
In undulating practice:
projects are finished, not abandoned
techniques are stabilised, not merely sampled
ideas are resolved before being archived
Over time, this produces a portfolio that reflects intellectual and technical continuity rather than fragmentation.
4. Returning as Advancement, Not Regression
Revisiting earlier work is often misinterpreted as indecision or nostalgia. Within undulating practice, return functions as advancement.
Each re-entry occurs from a position of greater skill, broader context, and refined judgement.
Earlier material becomes:
a testing ground for new techniques
a comparative benchmark
a site of reinterpretation
a living archive
Return enables cumulative learning without repetition.
5. Focus, Time, and Deep Attention
Sustained creative development requires periods of relative withdrawal from distraction.
Undulating practitioners typically organise their lives around exploration, minimising competing demands in order to preserve cognitive and emotional bandwidth.
This is not absence of activity, but intentional devotion to long-form learning.
Depth replaces dispersion.
6. Assessment Through Meaning
Within institutional systems, assessment is externally imposed. In undulating practice, evaluation is internal and meaning-based.
A phase concludes when:
techniques feel embodied
conceptual aims are satisfied
outputs feel structurally complete
further work would be repetitive
Completion is recognised intuitively through coherence rather than compliance.
7. Resilience Through Cyclical Practice
Because undulating practice builds multiple resolved modules, it generates long-term resilience.
When one area stagnates, others remain active. When motivation dips, archived work provides grounding and continuity.
This reduces dependency on trends, platforms, and external validation.
The practitioner becomes structurally self-supporting.
8. Integration Within the Continuum Framework
Within the Continuum Approach, undulating practice connects directly to the progression:
Foundations → Orientation → Building Rooms → Integration → Transmission
Each undulation builds a new "room" within the creative architecture.
Over time, these rooms interconnect, forming a navigable ecosystem of skills, languages, and methodologies.
9. Pedagogical Implications
Undulating practice offers an alternative model for creative education, particularly relevant for:
neurodivergent learners
interdisciplinary practitioners
independent artists
late starters and returners
By legitimising cyclical development, it reduces pressure for constant novelty and supports sustainable mastery.
Conclusion: Practice as Continuity
Undulating practice reframes creative life as an ongoing research continuum rather than a sequence of isolated projects.
Through cycles of immersion, completion, archiving, and return, practitioners build durable knowledge systems grounded in lived experience.
Within the Continuum Approach, this method affirms that serious creative development is not accelerated by haste, but deepened through patient, recursive engagement.
The portfolio becomes not a record of output, but evidence of a life in practice.
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