‘The path that leads me home’: Eduardo Paolozzi and the arts of transnationalizing

This essay combines the discussion of the Scots Italian artist Eduardo Paolozzi’s transnational biography and exploration of multiple art forms with theoretical reflection on impact as a mode of academic research and practice. Growing up in Edinburgh in an Italian family, Paolozzi’s memory of his childhood was one of constant cross-cultural encounter and sometimes conflict. His career as an artist was characterised by international mobility and a preference for intermediality. His life and work have also been the starting point of a number of successful art-based projects in Edinburgh exploring multilingual and multicultural communication carried out under the auspices of TML. The essay will explore the confluence of the local and global as an optic through which to consider quotidian and creative understandings and practices of the transnational. The essay will then reflect on how these quotidian encounters contribute to theoretically inflected discussions of the transnational. I will argue that in this instance academic research and impact have been mutually informing and the latter’s determining contribution to the overall research project has been its contribution both to the revision of theories of the transnational and to the re-evaluation of creativity as mode of academic research: both of which need to be regarded as primary research contributions.