[-empyre-] Research in Practice

[Bronwyn Platten]

Hi,

 

I too welcome the opportunity to be invited to this discussion. It is invigorating and refreshing to read others perspectives particularly as I am currently planning post-doc funding and devising further forays into academia.


In late 2008 I was awarded a full-time studentship as the sole artist in a cross-institutional group of researchers based in four universities in the UK. The group included engineers, architects, healthcare professionals, anthropologists, sociologists and one artist - all involved towards interdisciplinary research to improve and innovate healthcare infrastructure. I received my PhD in 2012 but my research was not located in an art school, as I perhaps would have previously aspired, but rather the School of the Built Environment, The University of Salford, Manchester.

 

My own reservations of not being at home (in an art school) were often challenged by the interest and enthusiasm of those with whom I engaged from across the built environs, social sciences, healthcare and arts. Embarking on my doctorate, I had initially feared for my own identity as an artist, that I would be subsumed, inculcated into the ways of different methods, values and sensibilities. There were sceptics and doubters (including myself) as well as provocative comments as to the relevance of my particular approach in context of the wider research aims of the interdisciplinary team. Yet these challenges strengthened, informed and refined my inquiry.  While some of the ‘hard’ evidence of engineering may have left me lost – and left me feeling more fudge brain than axe sharp at times - the shared endeavour, debate and even the irritation of some encounters have been thrilling, sustaining and transformative.

 

I have been provoked by commonalities presented between scientific and artistic practices in the context of the research degree, of both shared and distinctive aims experienced and encountered by fellow doctoral candidates from across disciplines. Here, Maria’s perspective resonates for me, indeed I also ask why should an artist question the validity of undertaking doctoral research. And I agree that it is uniquely helpful to do so. As an artist and curator, I have had previous experience of engaging with medical science while working in NHS Trusts and have written on the creative synergies between the arts and sciences. Yet it has been my experience of undertaking the PhD that has synthesised the various streams of my practice as whole body of work and in the process gave me a new awareness of the contextual relevance of my practice in an expanded interdisciplinary field. Perhaps, however such potentials would not perhaps been possible had my research been purely located in what I described of as at home – the art school?

 

Here, Simon’s point that the hybrid creative research approach particularly those that span disciplinary fields are perceived as supporting expanded levels of engagement. Such research takes a level of risk and connection that allows for unique knowledge to be formed – literally knowledge that is not possible without shared suspension of potentially hierarchical disciplinary distinctions. To succeed in interdisciplinary practice, there has to be willingness to embrace other kinds of approaches, to suspend judgement, in order to really listen and learn an/other(s) language. And, subsequently, to learn to understand and communicate across more than one of these languages at once. Nevertheless, while I had freedom to explore and the support to do so, I also had to fulfil the requirements of funding bodies, sometimes in a language that I did not always perceive of as my own. Critical to the success of my research, has been the skilfulness of my supervisory team (across engineering and the visual arts) who were able to both agree on the path taken and provide timely support and direction.

 

I admire engaging across disciplines, to challenge and to be challenged by someone who brings a completely different encounter with positions of and to knowledge. For a long time, I have wondered about the value of locating any serious researcher in one disciplinary context – arts or otherwise. If fertilisation of approaches across disciplines are to be encouraged, there needs to be greater awareness of and evidence of the ways and methods of undertaking and supervising interdisciplinary approaches.

 

During my doctorate I was inspired by the debate from across disciplines surrounding some of the contested dimensions of my thesis. While mine was always an arts-based approach – albeit informed across healthcare, feminism and phenomenology my interest now is also how and where it will be located as knowledge. While I recognise that perhaps as many people who will ever read the text have already done so – and that it is now up to me to write the book – I am interested to discover where I post Phd as interdisciplinarily informed will set up a new home? My dilemma is not perhaps as artist-researcher rather more one of location, similar to the Dewey decimal system for my insights and further research may be relevant to 100’s; 300’s; 500’s; 600’s, 700’s…?

 

In terms of being, I am currently continuing to work as an artist-researcher but not at the moment in any academic post. However, currently faced with a major gallery exhibition that will open at the end of this month that includes artworks from the doctorate - I am longing for a library of expanded dimensions. The gallery setting may appear too ‘disciplinary’ these days but I wait to be tested. My most recent performance took place yesterday morning in the Clifford Whitworth library at the University of Salford. This work, ‘Body to brain and back again’ was staged in between the shelves of books of one new found home ‘the 600.s’.

 

 
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