Correlating theory and practice in fine art research: understanding practice as research; seminars for first year PhD students

ABSTRACT

I discuss my initiative at the CCW Graduate School for a first year PhD student seminar programme, Understanding Practice as Research which aims to address their art practice in terms of the aims of the research project and address the practice itself as research and so support the new area of practice-led research as a generative enquiry that draws on subjective, interdisciplinary and emergent methodologies.

We consider how addressing and understanding the artwork as embodying and evidencing it's research, its processes and research methodologies, might allow a more dialogic relationship between the studio practice and the written component – which rather than merely providing a commentary, exploration or contextualization for it, could become a critical vehicle for considering and disseminating alternative possibilities. The group considers the student's own self-reflexive mapping of the practice-led work as enquiry, exploring how the process of making and doing might challenge pre-conceived notions and suggest unforeseen possibilities for the project.

Approaching the practice as generative of critical analytical propositions has pedagogical implications for the teaching of creative practices as a learner-centered activity at all levels of learning where learning takes place through doing and making and the explicit reflection on that process, one that provides a rationale for the integration of theory and practice as the basis for research training even at Undergraduate level.

KEYWORDS:

• Fine art practice
• theory/practice
• reflexivity
• studio teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mo Throp is an artist and teacher; she is Associate Researcher at The Graduate School, CCW, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, London. She is co-convenor with Dr Maria Walsh of the Subjectivity & Feminisms Research Group at Chelsea and has a recent publication co-edited with Maria Walsh: Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women's Art, published by I.B.Tauris in 2015.