Future resource: Ph.D. student collaboration

ABSTRACT

Future Reflections Research Group (FR) was a collaboration of three Ph.D. student researchers that developed in parallel with their doctoral studies at Chelsea College of Arts (London, UK) between 2007 and 2010. The group's performative presentations, critical/creative writing and relational art addressed the interplay of theory and practice in art research as an emerging field of enquiry. Taking the art research conference as a main site of investigation, FR questioned the relevance of this largely academic format for valorising practice-based research. What emerged over the group's eight projects can be described as the beginnings of a shared sensibility that used reflective and reflexive techniques to interrogate the relationship between ‘art’ as an extradisciplinary creative practice and ‘research’ as a knowledge enterprise subject to university-based conventions. Written as a dialogue, this paper discusses how FR as a student-led collaboration ‘practised theory’ reflexively, with this understood as a particular kind of reflective work, operating towards a shared praxis of art research within the group. While the respective Ph.D. projects of FR's members informed their shared research, this collaboration developed aspects of both form and method that were not anticipated at the outset. The paper explores ways of resourcing collaborative Ph.D. student research in post-doctoral work and beyond. This reflexive potential suggests a means of making practice-based research more sustainable, with earlier enquiry providing a resource for later investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• reflection
• reflexion
• resource
• student work and post-doctoral research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Marsha Bradfield is an artist, curator, writer, educator and researcher. She is currently a visiting scholar at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL and co-directs Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre. For the last decade, Marsha has worked almost exclusively in collaboration, exploring cultural production through co-authored projects. This research-based approach often results in experiences that Marsha later represents in publications and performative lectures. Her accounts combine the rhetorical styles of fact and fiction as she works with sites, objects, images, structures and processes. Marsha's current body of work explores the intersection of economies and ecologies in co-production and has developed through practicing with Precarious Workers Brigade, Critical Practice Research Cluster and many more people besides.

Katrine Hjelde (Ph.D.) is an artist, lecturer and researcher working as Course Leader for the Graduate Diploma Fine Art and as Senior Theory Lecturer, BA (Hons) Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL. As an artist she exhibits in Great Britain and Europe, collaborates with the architects practice b + r and works with the collective FLΔG, a group formed at Chelsea College of Arts in 2010, comprising of artists, students, former students, staff and researchers. FLΔG explores the relationship between art practices, art education and pedagogy, looking at forms of knowledge production and dissemination in the art school and beyond.

Notes

1. Future Reflections reflected on its collaborative art research through ongoing self-observation as a way of tracking and calibrating the group's practice. The collaboration was also reflexive, with its practice bending back on itself. Its research was self-referential, engaging Joseph Kosuth's sense that: ‘Art, it can be argued, describes reality. But, unlike language, artworks – it can be argued – simultaneously describe how they describe it'. See further reference to this later in this dialogue.

2. Consider for instance, Critical Practice Research Cluster, a group of artists, designers, curators, academics and others based at Chelsea College of Arts that developed forms of socially engaged practice through seminars, walks, games and so on. See www.criticalpracticechelsea.org for more information on the cluster's 10 years of practice.

3. ‘The Graduate School’ refers to the CCW Graduate School, with CCW referencing the cluster of Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, which are three colleges that are part of the University of the Arts London.

4. dOCUMENTA 13's Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev goes on to say, ‘These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges both ancient and contemporary.’ www.d13.documenta.de/#/press/news-archive/press-single-view/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=145&cHash=7028966b92a36d44f213cf8eaf026192.

5. See the Future Archive website for more information about this as a method and specific projects www.thefuturearchiveblog.wordpress.com/.

6. For a succinct discussion on ‘overidentification,’ see Parker (2007).