Archive NiTRO

GRAYSON COOKE, CRAIG BATTY, TULLY BARNETT ––– As leaders in creative research in our institutions, we want to foster success, engagement, ambition and sensitivity to the needs of the sector. As artists, we want to focus on making and supporting creative work.

TULLY BARNETT, EMMA WEBB AND JUSTIN O'CONNOR ––– We contend that work will need to be done to ensure that the policy can be implemented in a timely and resourced way and in a manner supports a bipartisan approach to cultural policy so that Revive can set a foundation for the sector for decades to come.

SUSANNA CASTLEDEN ––– Being an artist and an academic is about contributing to the cultural capital of a community. From its inception a work of art is created to engage, however, navigating how to measure the success of this, what the cultural impact is, remains difficult to measure and evidence. This ‘wicked problem’ seems to be pertinent for funding bodies, galleries and universities alike.

JOSEPH TOLTZ ––– Artistic practice researchers had been battling internally (within the academy) for years for peer recognition and a slice of the awards and grant offerings. Inclusion in ERA may have seemed like a victory in 2009, but it was fairly pyrrhic. Is it any wonder that academics engaged in artistic research are weary?

VANESSA TOMLINSON ––– Endless questions linger about creative research processes – and everyone reading this article would have heard these before: what is the threshold (size, length, importance) for a work or a body of work being accepted as a creative research output? Who is qualified to endorse this decision? How do we have parity and consistency across artistic disciplines with different working methods, timelines and artefacts (a feature film may take longer to produce than a poem, an exhibition of works longer to paint than an improvised music event)?

PROFESSOR JULIAN KNOWLES ––– By way of background, I have been working as an academic since the mid-1990s across four different institutions... and my career has been built on creative practice research and the leadership of creative practice-based disciplines and schools. In that time, I have worked as an ERA code leader and Head of School at three of these institutions and assessed ERA for all four rounds...