We work in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia) and are embedded within small universities with limited research dedicated to creative practice and where full time research positions as artist-scholars are rare. We outline here areas that we believe are often misunderstood, particularly by non-arts collaborators and assessors, regarding what artist-scholars do and how we generate knowledge. This pertains to the development of evaluation frameworks for creative research outputs that address both creative practice research and the expectations of university cultures and global standards.
Creative methods have experienced a surge of popularity in recent years, however, how creative activities relate to knowledge production requires extensive thought and articulation to provide rigour in research design.
Since there are no established standards for creative practice methodology, as exist in some other fields — creative practice arguably has broad methodological standards — this presents both a significant opportunity and challenge for researchers working in this mode.
Creative practice research is inherently interdisciplinary, i.e. engaged in collaboration with researchers who are not creative practitioners, or contributing knowledge into non-arts fields. In our experience, the depth of artistic practice is often underestimated by non-creative collaborators, or assumed to be illustrative, communicative, or achievable over a number of days or weeks.
Indeed, we have noticed the rise of artists and artist-scholars being employed on traditional research projects with the brief of research translation and communication.
However, in our view, the most rigorous types of research design position artworks as part of a broader context of knowledge-making that are inscribed and embodied in the practices and experiences of the artist. Inscriptions – as Bruno Latour liked to collectively call numerical data, graphs, visualisations and interpretive text – are part of a succession of connected outcomes (Latour 2014). A scientific image is relational — it is not separate from its set of inscriptions in representing the knowledge formed from an accumulation of practices. Neither will an artwork stand alone as a knowledge object in a substantial body of creative practice research within the academy. To be clear, we are not negating the capacity of an artwork to be experienced as stand alone, but rather advocating for the need for artist-scholars to better articulate (and be better supported to articulate) our research within the current frames of assessment in the academy. We see this conversation as part of an ongoing contribution to advocating and making change in the academy.
The methodological is then a key ‘metric’ in artists’ practice that needs to be better recognised and ‘counted’.
Outputs can manifest as artworks but vitally it is the methodological that is evident both in and beyond the artwork through the continuum of artists’ practice as a relational way of being, thinking, attending and resisting.
Creative practice research is adept at not-knowing, and is steeped in studio (both as place and concept) practices that are inherently relational and responsive.
Practice is not separate from the artwork output and this is a key difference from ‘creative methods’ employed by researchers other than artist-scholars. Resisting linear, neoliberal, measurable progression, artists’ practice involves an embodying of specific lineages, methods and theories that are implicit in the doing.
It is practice as methodology that underpins creative research and is therefore vital in thinking through evaluation processes.
Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Council describes research-creation as ‘sustained, reflective research set directly and actively within the creation process itself’ and Natalie Loveless ascribes to it a feminist prerogative as affective, embodied and situated (2019). This, along with European understandings of Artistic Research (Kellermeyer 2022), is perhaps helpful in thinking through precedents of standardisation as residing in the methodological and thus being vital in reviewers’ understanding of creative work.
It is our job as artist-scholars to articulate rigour in our research designs, to translate and make visible creative practice methodologies for our collaborators (practitioners or non-creative researchers) and assessors.
We see the development of standardisation of evaluation practices, as central to the fair assessment of creative practice outputs, as part of a broader context of knowledge production. Ideally this assessment and use of standard would be applied by knowledgeable researchers who are creative practice researchers themselves. We argue that we do not need to reinvent the wheel of ‘merit standardisation’, rather, we need to look at the existing world leading systems that Australia is increasingly a part of. This will strengthen our presence in the academy and make visible the work which will (eventually) contribute to shifting university cultures.
References
Kellermeyer, Jonas 2022, ‘Artistic research as the collective production of knowledge’, w/k – Between Science & Art Journal, <https://doi.org/10.55597/e8275>.
Latour, Bruno 2014, ‘The more manipulations, the better’, in C. Coopmans (ed.), Representation in scientific practice revisited, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Loveless, Natalie 2019, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Andrea Rassell is a Forrest Foundation Creative Research Fellow at the Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch), Curtin University. Andrea creates experimental films and moving image installations that explore scale, technological mediation, and the multisensory perception of the sub-molecular realm.
Jo Pollitt is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with the Centre for People, Place, and Planet and a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), Edith Cowan University. Her work is grounded in a twenty-year practice of working with improvisation as methodology across multiple performed, choreographic and publishing platforms.
Main image: Andrea Rassell 2023 Trafficking | Transmission | Translation, two channel video, HD, 08:19 loop