MA Week 22 : Practice Based Research

Practice Based Research – 8^th April 2016

This session from Karen was based around four clips from Canterbury Christ Church University’sCentre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts. Pertinent points from the four clips: 

Goran Stefanovski

• He writes for the theatre so need to consider his audience from the outset.
• Ideas come from who we are – “sparks from crossed wires” – the idea gets you, not the other way round.
• Quality control – a battle with the material and oneself to get to the end. An exercise in perseverance.
• He is showing, performing and acting ideas, not describing them; the practice of theory.

I particularly liked the assertion that you have to wait for the idea. This has happened to me several times during the course. It is frustrating but I have learnt to accept these times and treat them almost as a short break. 

Bryan Hawkins

• He makes sculptures, paintings and photographs.
• He finds two difficult things – starting and finishing.
• He has worked on his own personal experience, then on others’ experience, the history and place. He also said that the idea comes to find him.
• He suggests going to a place repeatedly and letting it “seep into you”; he did this with WW2 pill boxes, drawing, painting, photographing in an almost spiritual way.

I identified with this very much, particularly the repeated visiting of a place. The place then becomes yours. I think you can then produce something more fundamentally representative of the place. Hawkins’s work is figurative but mine often becomes more abstract.  

Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin

• These people are film-makers.
• They had responded to place in their work. They let work take shape without scripts.
• Memory is one of their themes and they deal with its presentation and re-presentation.

Their film dipped about all over the place and I paid little attention. It was left to others in the class to point out that memory is not linear and this is the point they were making. I am such a philistine when it comes to film.

Rebecca Pattinson

• She uses analogue photography in the digital age.
• She believes that film has a tangible relationship with reality that digital doesn’t have, and that film makes it less possible to manipulate an image compared to digital.

I could understand her perspective although I don’t know if I share it. Both this artist and the previous one used silence in their clips. I didn’t even notice! My classmate Ali, who used to be a radio producer, pointed this out. 

Two things struck me from this session. The first was how I tuned out the latter two clips as they were not talking about anything that interested me directly. How often do I miss out on inspiration by not being engaged? Am I creating a “bubble” of my own by only tuning in when it suits me? The second was that the session was directly relevant and easily accessible, unlike some of the previous research methods sessions. It almost felt like this session should have taken place much earlier in the course. It offered clarity on what practice-based research is because it gave real examples from real artists.