This research started at the end of my Context and Audience unit once I had finished the unit and submitted for assessment and was waiting on my final Major Project unit. Since then I have returned to this topic several times as my understanding has grown.

All art begins as an idea. Something stirs within our imagination, which grows, taking shape and direction according to our interests and artistic practice. This might be a slow process or it might be spontaneous and created on impulse. Education provides us with tools to make sense of our ideas, which become real as we produce our art although art needn’t come through the path of formal education as many famous artists are self-taught. An idea is shapeless and without meaning or structure until we begin to test these ideas by producing work. Unless we keep our work in a cupboard or under a blanket or buried in the files on our computer and never show anyone, we must engage with an audience and show our work. This is about entering into a conversation. This conversation can be part of the process of education with tutors and peers; it can be with family or friends with less understanding of my work or, perhaps most scarily, it can be with a shapeless, amorphous mass of an external audience whose reactions are more difficult to second-guess.

One interesting point here is that my creative practice is ongoing and open-ended, leading to new insights and directions. It does not stop when I have created a body of work, held an exhibition, or shown my work in a book. The feedback and my response to that feedback have become an integral part of my process. As artists, we lose control of our creations as others always find their own meanings and interpretations with likes and dislikes which are different from our own. Once we share work, either with an audience or with partners who will share in the making of the art, there is also an opportunity for feedback and new insights, which can change the very nature of the work we produce and the nature of our practice. The course notes often speak of a developing practice. Now that I am preparing for my final unit in my degree; I have given thought about what this term means. It seems clear that I will never stop refining my practice. It will always be developing and never complete and polished. Is it also fair to imagine that now I am set on this path of learning that I will not stop learning? As I share my work whether with an audience or with partners interested in developing shared works, I will continue to re-interpret my works and reconsider my creative processes and output and to re-access the tools I use within my practice. This cannot be considered as a one-way process. As my ideas change by engaging with others, so my audience and partners with whom I share the creative process will also change after engaging with me. Many years in the past, when I studied Physics, a part of the course was to consider how we measure anything. For example, if measuring the temperature of a beaker of water we wait until the water and the thermometer reach equilibrium. The water changes the temperature of the thermometer, but at the same time, the thermometer changes the temperature of the water. This is one of Newton’s Laws. (Redish, 2005) Using this logic found in physics but applying it to the arts, my audience is not an inert partner in my work. They view it, then voice or leave written feedback of their opinion. In extreme cases, an audience might throw things at an artwork or seek to damage it. This, in turn, can influence other people who view my work and can influence the artist as he or she continues to work. This idea of creation and of feedback would seem to be crucial elements in practice-based research. The definition of practice-based research is that, in order to explore a research question, we need to create things as part of this process. “The research is exploratory and is embedded in a creative practice.” (Gauntlett, 2021) Ann Schilo’s book “Visual Arts Practice and Affect” brings together contributors who discuss how art begins, whether through engagement, conversation, reflection, and what goes on inside our heads,  “we are interested in the slippages, associations, disjunctions, and reflections that occur in our encounters with art and when we speak to one another.” (Schilo, 2016, p. xiii) This reflection on ideas and the production of art has many steps, but I will initially focus on the gaining of knowledge through research. It seems basic that the more we read and the more ideas we question and test, the more our experience grows. I would add that this can become a feedback cycle where we take on board the comments of others and revise our practice accordingly. Graeme Sullivan raises an interesting counterpoint to this idea, “Oftentimes what is known can limit the possibility of what is not and this required a creative act to see things from a new view.” He goes on to explain that research must be not only “systematic and rigorous” but at the same time “inventive so as to reveal the rich complexity of the imaginative intellect.”  (Sullivan, 2006, p. 20). Much of Sullivan’s writing tries to explain practice-led arts research and what sets it apart from other kinds of research. This echoes a point that Stephen Scrivener writes about, distinguishing between practice-based research done for the purposes relating to the creation of an “art object and the art making process… the art making process is understood as a form of research and the art object as a form of knowledge” and research done for the point of gaining “knowledge and understanding”  Scrivener concludes that if research is an original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding then the creation of art “is undertaken in order to create apprehensions (i.e., that is objects that must be grasped by the senses and the intellect) which when grasped offer ways of seeing the past, present and future, rather than knowledge of the way things were or are. Hence, in the context of making art I would define research as original creation undertaken in order to generate novel apprehension” (Scrivener, 2002)

I do not agree with all the points Sullivan and Scrivener make such as the implication that only research in the arts is inventive and that this is what sets it aside from research in other fields. However, having said this, it does seem obvious that knowledge and learning using practice-led research face unique challenges, such as the challenge over “whether knowledge is found in the art object or whether it is made in the mind of the viewer.” (Sullivan, 2009, p. 47) In the absence of a precise definition of what practice-led arts research is, many, like Sullivan, tell us about the gaps and what this research isn’t. Sullivan quotes Australian Art Critic Benjamin Genocchio, who tells us that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” (Genocchio, 2001, p. 28)) The term of artist-researchers is introduced. People who “delve into theoretical, conceptual, dialectical, and contextual practices through artmaking.” (Sullivan, 2009, p. 62) I like this description best.

Regardless of these discussions on the merits of art research, it seems that a practice which involves an iterative process of traditional research, the creation of artworks, feedback, contemplation of how the art sits with others and then taking on board such comments to potentially revise the original artwork. Is certainly a form of research. This is a powerful and helpful tool to anyone trying to develop their practice and to find their place in their particular research interest using an ever-expanding body of work.

It is interesting to consider an art practice which is isolated and never seeks the opinion of others. What might be the outcome were we never to show anyone our work? I ignore for a moment how that would work out when engaging in study and having work assessed. As I mentioned earlier in this text, many years ago, I studied Physics at college, so I will share a theoretical experiment designed to show the gaps in understanding of quantum theory. Erwin Schrodinger proposed that a cat be placed in a sealed box with a radioactive substance and a Geiger counter, which would trigger the release of poison and would detect radiation. The cat could be thought of as both alive and dead at the same time. (Howgego, 2019) This is clearly impossible which is what the experiment set out to show. Is the undisclosed artwork hidden in a drawer or as an unopened file on a computer hard drive like that cat in a box? Were all the rolls of unprocessed film left behind by Vivian Meir or Garry Winogrand a legacy which should have been left undisturbed as without the author starting a conversation, how could we know the basis or the planned outcome of their idea? In developing, printing and then selling these works after the death of the author and without their tacit approval and sanction, perhaps for financial gain, how does this relate to the original artist’s wishes? Perhaps death itself opens the box and the cat escapes as the archive passes to a new owner.

References

Gauntlett, D. (2021) What is practice-based research?, DavidGauntlett.com. Available at: https://davidgauntlett.com/research-practice/what-is-practice-based-research/ (Accessed: 7 January 2025).

Genocchio, B. (2001) Fiona Foley: Solitaire. Annandale, NSW: Piper Press.

Howgego, J. (2019) What is Schrodinger’s cat?, New Scientist Science Definitions. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/definition/schrodingers-cat/ (Accessed: 30 January 2024).

Redish, E. F. (2005) Newton’s Law of Cooling with Euler’s Method, Department of Physics, University of Maryland. Available at: https://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys374/fall05/exams/sol_ex1/Ex1P5-S.htm (Accessed: 22 January 2025).

Schilo, A. (2016) Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowledge. Edited by A. Schilo. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Scrivener, S. (2002) ‘The art object does not embody a form of knowledge’, edge. Working Papers in Art and Design. Available at: http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades (Accessed: 7 January 2025).

Sullivan, G. (2006) ‘Research Acts in Art Practice’, Studies in Art Education, A Journal of Issues and Research, 48(1), pp. 19–35. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475803.

Sullivan, G. (2009) ‘Making Space: The Purpose and Place of Practice-led Research’, in Smith, H. (ed.) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 41–65.