Fleeting occupations: the ‘studio’ as an extension of psychological inhabitation

Abstract

This article exposes part of the research that I have undertaken for my practice-based PhD, which explores the studio as a site of both mental and physical inhabitation for the artist who squats, moves, sits, shifts within. Considering ‘studio’ as a word that is descriptive, established within dominant structures of knowledge, there is already a pre-determined understanding of what is expected from such an environment. From the Enlightenment to modernist ideals, the preconceived notion of the studio has been essentialised into a ‘privileged site of production’. This article attempts to move away from the studio as a ‘site of production’. Drawing upon strategies embedded in the act of making, it discusses the studio as a site of action. The identified shift in practice from a concept to object methodology to a process-led methodology reflects the constant shift between thought, action and object. The article discusses this movement in relation to the alternative positioning of the artist and his/her inhabitation between mental and physical spaces of making. A series of informal interviews with a number of working artists are drawn on, in order to explore the evident relationship between psychological and physical spaces of making. It attempts to offer and discuss the ‘studio’ as more than a physical site of production and to locate it as an extension of the mind.

Notes on contributor

Andrea Hannon is an artist living in Warwickshire. She studied Fine Art at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at Coventry University School of Art and Design, where she is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Visual Art and Design. The subject of her thesis focuses upon the relationship between artistic process and the production of knowledge. Her research is concerned with the problematic category of ‘things known’, established within masculine hegemony, through which reality is encountered and the tensions that arise from inhabiting dichotomous frameworks of knowledge founded by such an authority. Her practice explores the subjective experience of ‘things known’ and the implications of knowing. As a practice-led enquiry, methods are defined within her practice that explore the relationship between thought, action and interpretation in work that is process led, in order to interrogate the dichotomous boundaries of knowledge.