Category: practice as research

I’ve been inhabiting a slightly strange space in my mind.   These last few weeks have been a period of reflection and summation in anticipation of the submission of the Teaching and Learning portfolio.

That work has run parallel with being present to the conversations around my elective unit of Introduction to Practice as Research (it sometimes plays in my head as Introduction to Research as Practice).

I’ve been learning new words.  

• Autoethnography.  

I am not sure this is for me.  The explorations of my practice are very much tethered to my identity but I have no interest turning myself inside out in the way that the definitions suggests.

Still, I am wondering and wandering the landscape of what my practise is and more importantly what it might be.  After reading an excerpt and a Guardian newspaper review I have followed my tutor’s suggestion and ordered A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. Why this book? The two drop-in sessions I attended this week have both been constructive.  Looking outside one’s own discipline for approaches on how to work is enlightening.

Reading Visualising Research (Gray and Malins, 2004) has stimulated my interest in reflective practice which is something I had only considered on a surface level.

For most of us, problems can arise in terms of time available and other commitments, and possible lack of research experience and confidence.

I recognise myself here.

I am looking at my notes from each of the sessions and they are mostly single sentences or a few words.

• The body as a site of knowledge and production
• Escape route
• Contextualisation can lead to overthinking theory before practice
• Playing with identities

As I write this I’m remembering WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.  I’m feeling inspired to reread some chapters.

I’ve made a mind-map (of sorts) in an attempt to draw some new connections between the different elements that make up my practice.

Although I have been exploring printmaking, the main component of my practice is photography and so I have recently revisited a book entitled Photographers and Research: The role of research in contemporary photographic practice (Read and Simmons, 2017).

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Mike Simmons draws a distinction between research in science and research in arts practice citing John Dewey.

The scientific worker operates with symbols, words, and mathematical signs. The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it.

He then goes on to discuss the importance of thinking critically about the relationship between practice and research, where he suggests taking into account one’s own subjectivity and relationship and how it relates to knowledge and any possible innovation.

He says that by closely examining one’s practice and work in progress, one will be able to question and test ideas using the method of ‘critical distance’ which is defined as ‘ideas, research and practical experimentation.’ 

I’m am looking forward to reading some of the case studies and I’m also already inspired by work by the cohort members.

It’s an exciting time of flux.

One of the biggest challenges on journeying through this PgCert will be the writing.  I’m not going to hide from that fact.  

• What to say?  
• How to say?  
• Does it make sense?  
• Will it be understood? 

The Introduction to Research as Practice, at its conclusion requires a 4,000 word essay.  We can supplement it with visuals such as maps, illustrations and photographs but these will still need to be surrounded by words.

I find it a challenge to sit down and write.  There are many ways in which one can procrastinate.  This is the freelance monkey whispering in one’s ear that one should be making sure all the commercial plates are continuing to spin.

Yet when I attend a writing workshop (there have been a few) and I am brought into the right headspace by the tutor, I find myself immersed, the words flowing freely, uninhibited by my own second guessing voice. 

Today’s IRP workshop session was split into two parts.  Lorrice Douglas our co-leader of the unit shared her practice.  It was a way of us getting to know her more and also her sharing how we might construct our final submission for the module.

I have started backwards in reading the conclusion of an essay that it is suggested we read called Research and the Self (Biggs and Karlsson, 2012) in which Morwenna Griffiths states:

“In arts-based, practice-based research the self is inescapable, because the person creating, responding to, working, developing or evaluating performances, artefacts and practices is central to those activities.”

This quote has given me pause for thought because I have never seen my practice as being about me since my focus is other people’s stories.  Of course I realise that it is impossible for me to remove myself, as the stories I am interested in are an intrinsic part of who I am, and especially as it is something I recognise in other artists whose work I admire.

The second part of the session was a writing workshop Writing as Practice with writer Joanna Pocock who also teaches Creative Writing at UAL.

She spoke about the creation, by Dorothea Brande in the 1930s, of ‘free writing’ as a pedagogical tool and its subsequent development in the 1970s by Peter Elbow.  I had previously used this approach having read about them in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg but the habits they should have instilled have slightly eluded me in recent years.

During the workshop we discussed making the obvious physical and mental space for writing but also more crucially, creating time as a space in which to write (and daydream).

Not surprisingly ten minutes of free writing, followed by a discussion, some reading and a lunch break led to a very relaxed 30 minutes of writing about the object we were asked to bring to the workshop.

Writing metaphorically is not my style so I was surprised by what I produced.  I think much of this was Joanna’s suggestion to create keywords of nouns, adjectives and verbs which derived from studying our object and thinking about its location within our living space.

It’s seems slightly cheesy as I read it back to myself, but in an attempt to get out of my own way, I’m going to leave it here anyway.

I am a long way from home.

I once lived in the ocean but I now see the sunrise from a bookcase in the opposite hemisphere from where I began.

It is so not lonely.  I now reside in a tiny colony with other molluscs and strange though it may seem we have a shared history.

We have all travelled here by way of friendship.  Gifts exchanged between dear ones.  Our purchase a symbol of those who are loved and left behind.

Our exteriors are are tough, resilient, created to protect our once fleshy undersides and interiors.  

Me, I shine.  My texture is smooth, silk like, but work your way around my contours and you will feel the edges and holes where others have rubbed against me.  Pummelled me.   My ridges and colours are scars not of my own making.

Tilt me toward the light and see what you want to see.  There is no one colour to describe me.  I represent the world.

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A long, intense and fulfilling day.  It was the first session of the Introduction to Practice  as Research unit.

I chose this module because since I graduated from my Masters (Documentary Photography & Photojournalism) in 2017 I have been trying to understand and formulate my own research process.  I am never quite sure if it is ‘correct’ and I am always curious about how other artists, particularly photographers gather their information.  Interestingly when working with students and their projects this is not an issue and it feels easy and right to suggest that they cast their own research net wide.

Looking at my own bookshelves, web browser and hard drives, especially at material I have collected over the last five years, it is clear that I have been trying to create a formula or a structure which would enable me to extract maximum information from my research. 

In anticipation of the module I had reserved some books from the university library.  A couple were from the reading list and some were sourced by browsing the digital shelves.  Of the latter group one of the titles that I found was Doing Your Research Project, (Bell and Waters, 1987).  

The opening pages around approaches to research have already given me cause reconsider my own practice.  Whilst my work is not specifically about seeking solutions it does involve other people and the gathering of qualitative data which will stimulate conversations around specific topics.

“Because the activity of action research almost inevitable affects others, it is important to have clear idea of when where the action research necessarily steps out the bounds of collecting information which is purely personal and relating to the practitioners alone.  Where it does so, the usual standard of ethics much be observed: permissions obtained, confidentiality maintain, identities protected.”  (Denscombe 2010a: 132)

For this session we were asked to read an extract from How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation (Loveless, 2019) and note one idea that we took from her idea of research-creation.   The extract was two short but powerful paragraphs.  Both of which resonated with me.

“the next logical, research-creational, pedagogical, step is this: to open the university up not only to different writerly vocalities, as decades of feminist, literary, Indigenous, critical race, deconstructive, and performance studies (the list goes on) scholars have done, but also to different tangible forms (for example, a song, beadwork, a performance, or a video installation) as valid modes of rendering research public.“

This first suggestion of opening up the university struck a chord as that morning I had been listening to the podcast Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast (6 Jan 2021) about the Bauhaus school and the interviewee Nicolas Fox Weber (founder of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation) stated that Anni Albers saw no distinction between craft and art.  I think he was alluding to the boundaries sometimes created by academic or the art market establishment. 

“It is with this in mind that I proposed to my students the following – slightly opaque – provocation as central to research-creation in its strong form: the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics. Following this, in a room full of students who self-identified as art historians and artists (along with a few sociologists and performance studies students), I, perhaps even more provocatively, proposed research-creation as a methodology that, therefore, necessarily sidesteps disciplinary allegiance.“

This second paragraph where she proposes to her students ‘research-creation as a methodology’ as a way of stepping outside of the boundaries of their major creative discipline, made me think about a conversation and a question that arose in one of our earlier seminars.

• are subject based departments the best way to organise research teaching?

I was recalling my own experience on my Masters where I was given the option to attend one module from another course (Photography Arts).  It was still related to my core discipline of photography but the module content Photography & Aesthetics was very much inline with my interests and the direction I felt my practise was going toward regarding issues of identity, belonging and values.  

It was a rich period of learning that expanded my personal network and led to the realisation that the lines between documentary and photographic art are becoming blurred.  This of course brings into question where the  boundaries of ethics lie.

The title of this post is a quote from John O’Reilly the co-leader of this unit.  I will elaborate in another post why this has stuck in my mind.