Abstract
The recent trend towards practice-based routes to knowledge has raised methodological questions concerning how best to research practices. Within the geography of art, the expansion over recent decades of collaborative and practice-based approaches has raised similar questions, along with concerns regarding the appropriateness of geographers not trained in art to undertake their own artistic practice within their research. This article grapples with these questions in relation to my own geographic–artistic research, through which I sought to generate boundary understanding or ‘knowing between’ different practices. I outline my own research method, which employed both qualitative interviews and practice-based research with artists, and present two case studies to highlight particular insights gained during the practice-based research, over and above those acquired through semi-structured interviews. These case studies reveal the insubstantial and fragile nature of boundaries between practices and levels of proficiency, and raise political issues for inter-disciplinary activities, problematizing in particular the role of the qualitative interview as a stand-alone method in research into practices, and recent calls for arts-based research only to be conducted by those proficient in art.
Introduction
[S]tudies deploying art as an empirical object are now augmented by geographers’ enrolment of a range of creative practices within their research processes. This expansion in both the forms of art under study and geographers’ modes of engagement is accompanied by analytic challenges and a promising set of intersections and exchanges.
1
This article both springs from and contributes to the analytic challenges, intersections and exchanges to which Harriett Hawkins refers in this extract. Over recent decades, geography’s interest in art has diversified hugely beyond the landmark iconographical work of Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. 2 During this period, geographic engagements with art have considered artistic practice as an embodied experience of landscape and a mode of place-making, as in Crouch and Toogood’s exploration of Peter Lanyon’s identification as Cornish, Quoniam’s exploration of Arizona or Matless and Revill’s analysis of Andy Goldsworthy’s erratic land sculptures. 3 The role of artistic practices in shaping diverse spatialities has also been investigated, as illustrated by Alison Bain’s investigations of the steps taken to defend the sanctity of a home-based studio against the intrusion of familial responsibilities, and Sharon Zukin’s discussion of the growth of cultural economic activity and the rise of loft living in formerly industrial spaces. 4 The growth of geographer–artist collaborative projects and of personal artistic activity undertaken by geographers is particularly notable in this period. 5 Harriett Hawkins comments specifically on the diverse nature of these collaborative dialogues and doings, describing a ‘growing body of “creative geographies” where geographers collaborate with artists or curators to make-work, carry out research, develop exhibitions or practice various different creative techniques’. 6 Geography’s engagement with art is increasingly practice-based.
This increasingly practical flavour to geography’s re-invigorated intersection with art – or geography’s creative re-turn 7 – is symptomatic of methodological developments across the social sciences more broadly. As social science research progressively integrates qualitative and collaborative approaches, qualitative research designs increasingly adopt arts- and practice-based methods. However, these developmental trends raise interesting issues concerning methodological choices both within geography and further afield. Here, I focus on two particular areas of debate, to which I seek to contribute. The first concerns the relation between dialogue and doing, or talk and practice, and condenses around the role of the qualitative interview in a changing methodological landscape that is increasingly concerned with practice. The second relates to inter-disciplinary dialogue between geography and art about the appropriateness of, and need for, artistic proficiency in the geographical doing of art.
The growing attention to practices in qualitative research has raised questions concerning the suitability of conventional interviews to such research. Russell Hitchings’ work is particularly informative here as, in referencing Alan Latham’s video-diary study, he notes that human geographers seem increasingly hesitant about interviews, specifically about their ability to access the ‘rough ground’ of everyday existence.
8
Recommending a number of interview strategies, including the presentation of alternative or hypothetical scenarios, taking a comparative approach and conducting interviews in a serial fashion, Hitchings concludes that [W]e should not discount interviews on routine practice because they superficially seem inappropriate. Other techniques will obviously access alternative aspects and I certainly do not want to argue interviews are the only tool for this topic. Videos should reveal the intricacies of what people do in ways that retrospective discussion probably cannot. Providing evidence of how practices are done could also prompt productive exchanges about the reasons behind this. My point is rather that researchers in this field reject the common qualitative interview at their peril.
9
While it is asserted that people can talk about their practices, they seemingly can only do so retrospectively to a certain degree or in a certain manner, suggesting that qualitative interviews provide only partial accounts of practices. As a precursor to what will follow in the two case studies presented later, brief comments made by two participants during their practice both illustrate the partiality of interview accounts of practices and prompt consideration of the intricate relations between what people do and what people say they do in different circumstances: I don’t normally do that, I’m doing it the correct way today. (Philippa Redman, see case study 1)
and I don’t normally work this size, I normally work much smaller. (Polly Woolstone, see case study 2)
While an interview question concerning participants’ customary practice would reveal what Philippa and Polly would normally do, the reasons why they chose to do things differently on this occasion and the implications of doing so for their practice might be missed in conventional interview accounts. The fact that interview accounts struggle to capture the contingency and intricacy of practices unsettles the status of the qualitative interview in research attending to practices. In this article, I discuss research that involved both retrospective interviews and practice-based research with artists, in order to explore this relation between talk and practice further, as a contribution to the debate concerning the status of the qualitative interview in research into practices.
Similar uncertainty also prevails over the degree to which it is appropriate for geographers not themselves trained or proficient in art to undertake research that involves artistic practice. While it might not seem unreasonable to argue that arts-based research must be good art as well as good research, such assertions raise issues regarding the assessment of artistic quality, the need for researcher proficiency in multiple domains and the possibility of circumstances arising in which these demands can justifiably be relaxed. Marston and De Leeuw, in emphasizing the differences between the practices of geography and art, argue that Of course, creative works must be judged in part within and by the traditions and legacies of practice of which they are a part, calling on geographers working with creative expression to gain some fluency in creative disciplines.
10
However, left unspecified here are what constitutes fluency and how much fluency is deemed necessary for creative expression to be deemed proficient. Is proficiency or fluency associated with length of practice, level of tuition, prestige of exhibitions, value of sales, career status or something else, either alone or in combination? Marston and De Leeuw’s emphasis on appreciating and cultivating the ‘slow skills’ at the heart of creative practice might suggest that length of practice is the crucial factor, but some determinant is still required to establish that those skills have been attained to an (unspecified) appropriate level. This relates to a second assumption implicit in the extract – that all creative works are produced within, and that all creative practitioners identify themselves with, particular traditions. It is unclear where either of these assumptions leaves creative works produced by hobbyists, who might have developed their own style of practice through the generation of their own slow skills over a period of many years but with minimal if any formal art education.
This is, perhaps, where Marston and De Leeuw’s discussion of similarity and difference between geography and art really comes into play. 11 For a creative expression to be deemed of artistic value, it would presumably need to be accepted as such by an appropriate body, but for that creative expression to be deemed of geographical value, it need not. With artistic practice understood as an embodied experience of landscape or a process of world-making, geographical interest might reside in artistic outputs irrespective of their formal accreditation as artworks.
A similar distinction arises in relation to Lafrenière and Cox’s development of a meta-framework to guide the assessment of the quality and effectiveness of arts-based works created within research contexts. Although these authors argue that a researcher-creator lacking training or expertise ‘should commit to developing her expertise with this medium and, in the interim, partner with a skilled artist to create arts-based work’, they also specify that this guidance is directed solely at the presentation of data rather than its generation, collection or analysis using arts-based methods. 12 Seemingly, then, researchers can legitimately use artistic practice as a research method even if they lack art training or proficiency, but cannot legitimately present their findings in artistic form if they lack the same. Hobbyists can practice their art but not show it because it is deemed to lack artistic value. However, as outlined earlier, a lack of artistic value does not necessarily equate to a lack of geographical value. The complexity of this debate concerning the need for artistic proficiency on the part of geographers engaging with art in their research is just one example of the analytic challenges identified in the opening vignette. 13
In this article, I outline my own research design and its implications for the debates concerning both the status of the qualitative interview in research into practices and the need for proficiency in art on the part of geographers undertaking artistic practice in their research. In the next section, I outline briefly the coming together of qualitative and collaborative research methods with arts- and practice-based modes of inquiry in the social sciences to provide context for the account of my own methodological development that follows. In this research, I employed artistic practice (including my own hobby practice) as a research method and required participating artists to work in ways that were unfamiliar to them, effectively de-skilling aspects of participants’ practices. The subsequent section presents two case studies, one involving three artists who participated in the research as a group, and one involving an artist who participated individually. The first case study illustrates the diverse relations between artists’ accounts of their practices in interviews and their accounts of those same practices during practice. The second case study illustrates the changing nature of one artist’s understanding of their own and other people’s practices during the course of a practice-based research session.
These case studies enable me to contribute to both the developing discussions around the status of the qualitative interview in research concerned with practices and the unfolding inter-disciplinary dialogue as to the need for artistic proficiency on the part of geographers seeking to undertake artistic research. I conclude by arguing that while people can talk about their practices in qualitative interviews, they might talk about them very differently in practice-based accounts, such that we should be cautious of relying exclusively on qualitative interviews in research into practices. I also conclude that notions of proficiency can be difficult to sustain, and that justifiable cases can be made for de-skilling as well as up-skilling on the part of researchers and participants in order to elicit additional insights into practices.
Methodological developments in geography and the social sciences
Methodological innovation has received increasing interest within the social sciences in recent years, with trends identified towards increasing use of both arts- and practice-based methods. Arts-based research has been hailed by some as a new methodological genre with promising avenues for innovation in research design and dissemination, and has been asserted by others to be not simply an extension of qualitative methods but existing in its own right, and with its own protocols, due to its constitutive rather than descriptive nature. 14 However, the common identification of images as qualitative data and the coverage of visual and arts-based methods in several handbooks on qualitative methods suggests that such a distinction is not universally accepted, and many have linked artistic activity with qualitative social science research practice. 15
There has also been a surge in practice-based and collaborative research methods, giving rise to knowledge through shared experiences and engagement in shared action or interpretative encounters. This explosion in practice-based research has led to the characterization of the current period of qualitative research as performative and experimental, and reflects a shift from seeking knowledge of or about external realities to generating knowledge from within particular practices and experiences. 16 However, debate also surrounds the relative merits of and overlaps between qualitative and collaborative approaches to research, with some authors advocating collaborative styles on the basis that they offer greater benefit to participants than qualitative approaches, and others questioning the feasibility of collaborative approaches in which there remains a perceived imbalance in power and voice. 17
As discussed in the introduction, similar trends are evident within geography. Over the last decade, the development of practical geographical engagement with art has been the focus of considerable discussion. It has been variously claimed that the intersection of visual art and geography remains underexplored, and that despite a historic tendency within geography to see the work of visual artists as merely illustrative, there are new understandings of visual art as conceptual and practical. 18 It has also been noted that few geographers have thoroughly explored artists’ and viewers’ practical processes, and that only recently have the tools of the arts been rigorously explored by social scientists. Similarly, at the art end of the spectrum, it has been observed that insufficient attention has been paid to artists’ experiences of bringing images about and that although what artists do (make art) has been well studied, what artists do in the practice of creating artworks has been less well studied. 19 Consequently, over recent years, attention at both ends of the art–geography spectrum has shifted from artworks as a subject of inquiry to artistic practice as a mode of inquiry.
My own research adopted this attitude towards artistic practice as a mode of inquiry. In addition to conducting conventional retrospective interviews with participating artists, I also worked artistically alongside participating artists, and varied the conditions of our practices, to generate comparisons between different practices. Detailing this attempt to generate understanding at the boundary between different practices forms the focus of the next section, before I present two case studies that illustrate the additional insights generated by the practice-based research sessions compared to the retrospective interviews.
Generating boundary understanding: a method
The research explored subjectivity and spatiality in artistic practice from a non-representational perspective, with a focus on the performative and affective aspects of artistic practice rather than the interpretation of finished artworks. In total, I worked with 12 participants, all of whom were currently engaged in artistic practice, and 10 of whom did so professionally. Participants were identified and contacted through promotional material for a local annual arts festival. Artists whose practice focused upon two-dimensional media, such as drawing, painting, pastels and embroidery, were invited to participate, as the need to vary the spatial location of participants’ practices made it impractical to work with artists whose practice involved heavy equipment such as lathes or kilns. Some artists participated individually and others in groups. In this article, I refer to participants as artists, irrespective of their career status and whether they identify themselves as artists, as a means of distinguishing their practices from my own.
While the detailed arrangements for the participants whose practices feature in the case studies are provided in the next section, the research design can be described by reference to three primary features: an action–reflection cycle, co-experimentation between researcher and participant/s and the establishment of discordant situations. My research method combined practice-based and discursive research methods in an action–reflection cycle, adopting Galman’s process of interview-draw-discuss, 20 with semi-structured interviews held at the start and end of each participant’s involvement with the research, and two practice-based production sessions between the interviews. In the preliminary interviews, I discussed with participants their artistic practices and preferences, including their artistic background, the materials and equipment that they use and the places where they normally conduct their practice. During the two production sessions, researcher and artist/s worked alongside each other on their respective artworks and discussed their activity at intervals during the sessions. In the closing interviews, I reviewed with participants their experience of the research process and pursued topics that emerged in the preceding sessions. All sessions were voice-recorded; production sessions were also video-recorded.
During the production sessions, researcher and participant were co-experimenters: immersed in the same location of action in which they reflected both on and in action. 21 Such research settings have been afforded an explicitly spatial referent, described as an inter-subjective or third space in which both shared activity and distance aid understanding. 22 Co-experimenting allowed researcher and participant to reveal and support each other’s reflection in action, generating additional understanding at the boundary between their respective practices.
Discordant situations were used within production sessions as a means of unearthing aspects of co-experimenters’ practices that might otherwise go unnoticed and unvoiced by changing the circumstances of an artist’s practice, so that in some way, it was out of the ordinary for them. Discordance was introduced by varying the spatial and/or material aspects of research encounters. Artists were asked to relocate their practice in order to provide a contrast between artistic practices conducted in familiar versus unfamiliar production environments. Similarly, artists were asked to use materials and equipment that they do not habitually use, for example, changing from watercolour to oil or from stitch to pastel, and where possible, I used materials different to those used by the participating artist/s in a session in order to maximize the contrast between our respective practices. A discordant situation, then, is a set of circumstances of practice that includes one or more element that is out of the ordinary for one or more co-experimenter. In this vein, my work follows the spirit of Hurdley and Dicks, for whom the purpose of social inquiry is to unsettle and question the taken-for-granted, and of Nigel Thrift who argued for the production of ‘moments’ in which people are encouraged to think differently. 23 At variance to a practitioner’s customary practice, discordance is concerned with difference. Here, I exemplify Marston and de Leeuw’s 24 assertion that difference does matter, and their advocacy that geographers interrogate the tensions and productive forces resulting from connections between geographic and artistic practices. By changing the conditions of our artistic practices, I sought to stimulate the generation of different artistic spatialities and subjectivities, such that these differences become productive of understanding at the boundaries between the co-experimenters’ respective practices and between the artists’ customary and experimental practices.
In summary then, through the employment of discordant situations in co-experimental production sessions, I sought to produce some of Thrift’s moments by stimulating a sense of something being different, bringing into relief habitual, taken-for-granted or pre-reflective aspects of artistic practice and experience, and to encourage deeper reflection upon rather than straightforward reporting of their practices. 25 In the next section, I present two case studies within which this boundary understanding revealed varied, complex and dynamic participant accounts of their artistic practices, contributing to debates concerning our ability to talk about our practices and with implications for geographic–artistic research through the disturbance of the boundaries at which I sought to work.
Case studies
Interview versus practice-based accounts
This case study reports on the interviews and production sessions of three participants who know each other through attendance at the same monthly art class, under the guidance of their tutor, Norman. Each of these participants practices a different medium. Philippa Redman (age 66) is an early career artist working in watercolour and oil who, with a life-long interest in art, took up her practice professionally following a previous teaching career. Marnie Watson (age 50) is a hobbyist in pastels who only took up her hobby in the past few years. Yoko Jones (age 61) is a long-standing hobbyist working with pen, pencil and watercolour.
Philippa, Yoko and Marnie undertook their preliminary interviews individually, but thereafter participated as a group. The production sessions were held at Philippa’s home-studio, a site that was familiar as a location of practice to Philippa but unfamiliar to the rest of us. In the first production session, all artists used familiar materials: Philippa used watercolour, Yoko worked in pencil and pen and Marnie worked in soft pastel. In the second production session, all artists used materials that were unfamiliar to them: Philippa used acrylic and chalk, Yoko used oil pastel and watercolour and Marnie used watercolour. In contrast to my own hobby practice of hand embroidery, I used watercolour in the first session and soft pastels in the second.
The production sessions provided much evidence in support of these artists’ interview accounts of their practices with regard to the materials used, the methods or techniques employed and the processes or procedures enacted. However, these production sessions also provided data that contradicted or complicated those artist accounts, suggesting that there are solid grounds for the reported increasing hesitancy about interviews as a means of gathering information on everyday practices. 26
From the interview transcripts, the artistic practices of Philippa, Yoko and Marnie appeared to be guided by rules or accepted norms as to the appropriate use of certain materials and equipment. Philippa commented that ‘you should mix no more than three colours’ (my emphasis), while Marnie asserted that ‘you just have to leave watercolours and then go back to them’ (my emphasis). Although to a degree this was reinforced during the production sessions, there was also evidence in these sessions that all three participants routinely failed to conform to the accepted artistic practice for their particular medium. Philippa’s statement that ‘I don’t normally do that, I’m doing it the correct way today’ indicates that following procedure is the exception rather than the rule in her practice. Likewise, Marnie’s comment that she uses her fingers to mix her pastels even though it would be ‘good discipline’ not to and ‘a lot of people don’t’ indicates that she is aware that her own technique is at odds with practice norms. These artists’ relationships to the rules that they say govern their practice are thus more complex in practice than seemed apparent from the interview transcripts alone.
This complexity became even more interesting in the review interview. When I asked what made a particular way of using materials appropriate or inappropriate, all three participants said that they did not pay any attention to what is appropriate. For Yoko, ‘technique sort of comes with the mood’, while Marnie said that ‘I’ve only ever just bodged it myself really’ and Philippa stated that ‘I don’t think there are any should or shouldn’ts are there?’ Of particular note here are other comments made by Yoko and Marnie during the same interview: Yoko had previously said that ‘watercolours should be very clear’ (my emphasis) and Marnie asserted that ‘I’m very much still in the learning curve I haven’t found the right technique’ (my emphasis), suggesting that they both have a sense of there being a ‘correct’ way to do things despite their assertions to the contrary.
The following conversation between Yoko, Marnie and Philippa about a painting of Yoko’s further highlights this contradictory stance, in relation to guidance provided by their art tutor (Norman):
I did that deliberately because if you do it just sketching outdoors you do it with just quite a limited palette.
Yes it’s a nice sky.
A very nice sky.
Did you do the apricot business?
Yes I did and umm before completely dried (all laugh).
You’re like me I can’t do Norman’s painting either.
I haven’t got the patience I haven’t got the patience.
This extract is revealing in several ways. First, they all understand that ‘the apricot business’ refers to a recommended way in which to paint skies, which they learnt in their art classes. Second, Yoko initially confirms that she did adopt the accepted practice in this instance. Third, Yoko immediately qualifies this, saying that she did not completely follow the accepted practice because she did not wait until one layer had dried before applying the next. Fourth, both Philippa and Marnie echo Yoko’s sentiment and admit that they too try but fail to follow Norman’s guidelines on painting skies. Here, the production sessions brought to light features consistent across participant practices despite each artist’s different level of tuition, career status, duration of practice and medium of choice. Identifying the same variability in rule-boundedness irrespective of many of the indicators of proficiency by which we might ordinarily distinguish artists’ practices illustrates the insubstantial nature of many of those distinctions and boundaries that we presume to exist between or impose upon practices.
These participants are aware of certain norms and have a sense of how things should be done, and sometimes they follow these guidelines and sometimes they do not. They reflect this awareness in the course of their practice, yet when asked about these norms retrospectively, they are seemingly either oblivious to them or claim to disregard them. It is not that their knowledge of those norms only operates implicitly during their practice because they discuss their adherence or otherwise to those norms while they do their practice. Rather, it would appear that their explicit awareness of their tacit understanding of their own practices is greater when in the throes of that practice than when discussing it retrospectively, supporting assertions that practice-based approaches facilitate access to and articulation of tacit understanding, and casting doubt on the capacity of conventional qualitative interviews to capture the totality and intricacy of practices. 27
It could be argued that psycho-social factors are at work here, reflecting participants’ multiple and fluctuating subject positions 28 throughout the research process, with emerging conformity to group identification accounting for the practice consistencies identified. This emerging conformity might reflect acceptance on the part of Yoko and Marnie of views expressed by Philippa by virtue of her higher level of art education, or it might reflect encouragement provided by Philippa to the others to enhance their artistic self-confidence. Equally, reflecting on shared experiences of particular art classes might have instilled a sense of camaraderie or belonging that became increasingly expressed through conformity of opinion.
However, this does not explain why the group conformed around a depiction of their practices in the production sessions that contrasted with the depiction of their practices in their preliminary interviews. It also does not seem consistent with other evidence in the transcripts that suggests intra-group differentiation rather than identification, such as Philippa’s comment that her art education gave her an advantage in the research because she knew how to use a sketchbook effectively. Philippa’s experience of art education granted her a particular understanding of the role and value of a sketchbook, to the extent that she had anticipated that the provision of a sketchbook at the start of the research project indicated that the sketchbook held research significance. While this could be interpreted as self-promotion, it could also be interpreted differently. Philippa had commented in her individual opening interview on the lack of encouragement and support that she felt she had received from the college during her art degree, and her self-differentiation from Yoko and Marnie in relation to the sketchbook might reflect empathy towards the others and an expression of encouragement and support to them. Psycho-social factors, always at play in research settings, have the potential to become more complicated in group-based, practice-based research; in research conducted over a number of sessions; and in discordant situations in which customary practices and relations are challenged. Consequently, while a number of psycho-social factors might be influencing these accounts of artistic practice, the consistent manner in which each artist’s account diverges when articulated in practice compared to when articulated in an interview suggests that it is also plausible that real-time accounts of practices do afford greater explicit awareness of tacit understanding than retrospective interview accounts.
While strong support has been garnered for the view that people, in this case artists, can talk about their practices both retrospectively and during that practice, what people say about those practices when asked to reflect on them and what they say about those practices while in the throes of doing them might be very different. The fact that interviews might only capture partial accounts of practices may not be surprising given that interviews are an exercise in sense-making in which we often become aware of our own position only when asked about it, and thus, our accounts relate to those aspects of the issue or practice of concern that we recall at the time rather than necessarily its full breadth and complexity. 29 However, this only serves to underscore the value of practice-based research in generating richer information than that afforded by retrospective interviews alone. The current analysis illustrates that practice-based research can reinforce and elaborate but can also complicate and challenge retrospective interview accounts of practitioners, unsettling the status of the semi-structured interview as a stand-alone method in research into practices.
Shifting accounts during practice
The deeper reflection by participants on their practices afforded by the production sessions also gave rise to unstable and dynamic participant conceptions of their practice, leading to a progressive disintegration of boundaries and distinctions on the basis of which participants originally differentiated their own practice from that of their co-experimenters. This is highlighted particularly clearly in the following extracts taken from two different production sessions with Polly Woolstone (age 62), who is an established artist in textiles and stitch. Polly pursued a career in teaching, alongside which she practised her art as a hobby but took up her own practice professionally after retiring from teaching. Polly took part in the research as an individual participant.
The production sessions were held at my home, a location of practice familiar to me but not to Polly. Both of our customary practices are stitch and textile based. Polly used oil pastel in the first session, a medium that was unfamiliar to her, and machine stitching in the second session, which was familiar to her. I used hand stitching in both sessions, a technique with which I am familiar. The extracts presented below feature Polly’s comparison of our respective practices, and indicate that scale became an additional and unexpected source of discordance for both of us:
it’s interesting you’ve got a very preconceived idea of where your work’s going haven’t you and what you want from it? I have no idea I mean I’ve got a bit of a sketch I did before I came out, I did a couple of days ago, which is going to be the basis of it, but I have no idea what the surface of it is going to look like at all whereas, umm, you know what you want. It’s interesting I mean they’re two very different ways of working.
the area I’m least certain about is this central aspect because I was planning on for all the woodwork using fabric for that, but I’m not sure how I’m going to pull that together yet, and also I have none of the detail from these windows because they were too bright, so I don’t know whether I’m going to want to go back and get that detail or whether I’ll choose to leave it.
as a focal point so that they stand out from your other windows.
yes, so some aspects I’m very clear on, but how the suggestive stained glass is going to come out we’ll see.
yeah I suppose, you know, in different ways we’ve both got a lot of decision making to make haven’t we? We’ve both got some idea of where we’re going err but not, you know, I mean I might reject all of this, I suppose that’s the difference. You probably won’t reject what you’ve got, you’ll probably work into it, this might go in a sketchbook and other things might come, on the other [hand] it may, because I quite like it, appear that that’s the size I’ve got to work, which is very unusual for me, I tend to work bigger, so it’s quite good to be constrained to very small bits.
so that’s interesting as well because I don’t normally work this size, I normally work much smaller.
Polly initially conceives of our practices as ‘two very different ways of working’ in which she has no idea where her work is going, but I have a strong idea of how my work will develop. However, this is quickly modified to a conception of our practices in which we both have some idea of where our work is going and we both have decisions to make, with the distinction drawn between our practices now resting upon the relative reject-ability of the respective artworks. This also introduces the issue of scale, with Polly expressing the benefits of being constrained to work on a smaller scale than usual, and the realization that we were both working on a scale unfamiliar to us. However, whereas Polly was effectively miniaturizing her practice, I was trying to magnify mine. The conversation continued:
oh really.
yes I normally, because everything would normally be stitched by hand so it’s.
yes to stitch on that scale to hand stitch is quite daunting isn’t it? I think to hand stitch on that scale.
yes because my temptation is to think I really need to be detailed with the figures on the stained glass, but I’m not going to be able to, but on the other hand I’m not used to working suggestively so it might all end up just looking like a royal mess, but never mind (laugh) it’s all part of the process.
but it’s the process isn’t it? It is the process that’s important isn’t it rather than the umm, well as well as, the end result?
and also because of wanting to work with fabric here, my perspective’s not great with it, even at the moment, but once there’s texture lifted out.
because your eyes will be drawn to that bit.
and yet the suggestive figure is going to mess about with the perspective in that sense, so it’s not necessarily a problem but I’m mindful of it at the moment, and I don’t know whether to play with it and really emphasize it or to downplay it, so I’m not sure how it will come out.
yes, yes, in fact talking it through you’ve got as many decisions to make but I suppose what you’ve done is you’ve committed.
yes.
umm into something whereas I’ve, other than an idea, I’ve not committed anything to a final piece if you like, it’s all at the experimental stage.
In this latter part of the extract, the similarity that Polly had acknowledged with regard to the need for decision-making is restated, and the issue of reject-ability is rephrased in terms of commitment in the context of an uncertain process. Through the course of this extract, the differences between our respective practices that initially seemed so prominent become distilled into a characterization of Polly’s work as experimental in contrast to my own which is not. Also, in this extract, our respective experiences of working on a scale different to that which we would normally employ seem to be notably different, as in contrast to Polly’s earlier statement that it is good to be constrained to work smaller than usual, I identify a number of difficulties that I am trying to resolve in working on a larger scale than usual. This comparative discussion continues, and Polly’s characterization of our respective practices continues to change, through the second production session, as illustrated in extract two:
how are you getting on? Is it working? It oh it’s getting some form into it isn’t it?
yeah it’s only very basic at the moment. I don’t know how much detail I’m going to want to put into it because I don’t want to, it’s not going to be accurate anyway, which is not necessarily a problem, but if I try and put a lot of stitching into it, the more I’m increasingly going to think that it should actually look right.
yes I suppose it’s the same as this, the leaving the suggested as opposed to going into the detail, as long as you’ve got enough elements so that the eye can make, then begin to draw its own conclusions.
I think one of the tricky things for me because I wanted to get the sticky-out bit (laugh) technical term, there’s actually a bit of plastic in there.
I wondered what, it’s got real form to it.
it has.
it’s not just umm sort of umm soft sculpture is it.
but it’s going to make stitching anything into that bit really difficult, so I have to be mindful of that all along that top bit, so that’s the bit I’m grappling with next I think.
yes, yes and a lot of them are problems that you can’t solve, you have to solve along the way don’t you? It’s not something you know in advance.
Despite the contrasting ways in which we are each working on a different scale to our normal practice and the apparent difference in our affective responses to this change in our practice, the challenge involved in working this way is perceived by Polly to be the same for each of us. The need to strike a balance between detail and suggestion applies irrespective of whether we work on a larger or on a smaller scale than we normally would. In addition, Polly’s acknowledgement here that in textile art many problems cannot be foreseen belies her earlier perception of my work as not being experimental: we both encounter difficulties that we have to solve experimentally along the way. However, this distinction is also reconfigured as the conversation unfolds, as evident in the next and final extract:
no I had a very similar thing with Victory as well with the masts and cannon, it took me ages to figure out how to do those, but eventually you find the right thing, sometimes in some very unusual places.
and do you tend to resolve your problems on your final canvas?
yeah I only tend to do one.
yeah well I do, I tend to do lots but they’re all experimental if you like, and then it’s, I decide I mean I’m unusual in this way in just working on one piece, I usually have several pieces on the go and then pick and choose and chop and change err as opposed to just having the one.
The experimental nature of my own practice is again articulated here, in terms of the unexpected source of solutions to artistic difficulties. At the same time, although Polly says that her work is experimental because she works on a number of pieces simultaneously, she comments that unusually, she is only working on one at present. My own work is now established as being experimental by virtue of the nature of problem solving involved, and at the same time, the reason that Polly now states for describing her own work as experimental (working on several pieces simultaneously) is rendered redundant. While this might appear to be a reversal in the characterization of our respective practices as experimental, our practices are actually rendered equivalent because the experimental nature of Polly’s work is secured by the nature of problem solving involved. In this manner, any distinction initially drawn between our practices in terms of our commitment to the final piece evaporates because we are equally experimental. In this instance, the use of discordant situations in practice-based research facilitated a more thorough-going consideration of the respective practices of the co-experimenters. Seemingly divergent practices were rediscovered and reframed through the enactment of those practices in discordant situations, with subsequent enhancement of both parties’ understandings of those practices in relation to both their experimental and customary enactment.
To summarize, co-experimentation in these case studies reinforced, elaborated and complicated artist accounts of their practices, highlighting the fact that practices that might on the surface appear distinct are not necessarily so, and alerting us to the variety, complexity and dynamism of the relation between retrospective and practice-based accounts of practices. The introduction of discordance had a levelling effect on co-experimenters characterized by different indicators of proficiency. Discordance disrupted boundaries and confused distinctions that might otherwise be assumed and on which basis practices and practitioners are conventionally either validated or invalidated. Introducing discordance into artistic practices to generate understanding at the boundaries between those practices led to many of the differences originally assumed to distinguish those practices effectively evaporating. The productive introduction of difference into practices undermined assumed differences between practices. Whereas Lafrenière and Cox and Marston and de Leeuw advocate the acquisition of arts skills and expertise by geographers seeking to undertake arts-based research, 30 here, I suggest that this need not be the case. Both comparing artistic practices across supposed distinctions of proficiency and the deliberate disturbance of artist proficiency through the introduction of discordance can constitute valid research methods. Given the productivity of these methods in generating additional perspectives on artistic practices, and the effective evaporation of many assumed distinctions between practices, de-skilling as much as up-skilling warrants consideration as a valid research method, contingent upon the nature and purposes of the research.
Conclusion
Inspired by the recent reinvigoration of geographical engagements with art and particularly artistic practice, this article has outlined my own efforts to generate boundary understanding or ‘knowing between’ different practices through the development and implementation of a research method that combined interview and practice-based elements. I set out to contribute to two current debates in geography. The first concerns the degree to which people are able to talk about their practices and, associated with this, the value of qualitative interviews in research into practices. The case study involving Marnie, Philippa and Yoko indicated that people are able to talk about their practices in qualitative interviews, but how they do so retrospectively and how they do so during practice might be consistent, divergent or contradictory. In particular, the increased explicit awareness of implicit knowledge during practice identified in case study 1 and the change in Polly’s understanding and articulation of our respective practices in case study 2 emphasize the value of practice-based research in generating a richer sense of the complexities of those practices. This is not to say that the qualitative interview has no role to play in research into practices, but it does present a challenge to the status of the qualitative interview in such research, particularly where the interview is the only research method employed.
The second contemporary debate to which I sought to contribute concerns the level of proficiency considered necessary on the part of geographers seeking to use artistic practice as a research method. My own hobby practice provided a basis for comparison with co-experimenters’ practices, while the use of discordant situations – which in effect reduced artists’ proficiency by modifying their practices – enabled comparison between artists’ customary and experimental practices. These methods encouraged articulation of aspects of artists’ customary practices of which they would not normally be aware, generating greater understanding of the intricacies of those practices and illustrating that inexpert or less proficient practice can be of research value. Specifically, the group-based sessions suggested characteristics of practice that are blind to traditional distinctions drawn between artistic media and indicators of proficiency, including ambivalence towards official instruction and practice norms, and greater awareness of tacit understanding during practice than retrospectively. Furthermore, Polly’s unfolding comparison of our respective practices led to the dissipation of all supposed distinctions between those practices.
This destabilizing of distinctions also informs broader debates in the social sciences concerning the relative benefits of qualitative versus collaborative methods, as it is unclear whether the distinction between them is either necessary or helpful. The comings together of qualitative and collaborative methods in the social sciences and of arts- and practice-based methods in qualitative research provide fertile methodological ground for the continuing evolution of geographical engagement with art. My own hybrid research design reflects and perpetuates this ongoing integration of qualitative, collaborative and practice-based research in geographies of art. In this research, I sought to generate understanding at the boundary between the respective practices of co-experimenters. In the various ways outlined in this article, co-experimenting in discordant situations generated fuller understanding of the intricacies of these artists’ practices than would have been the case with qualitative interviews alone, and ultimately led to the dissipation of the very boundaries at the heart of the research: those between practices and levels of proficiency.
The additional understanding of practices arising from my own hobby practice as co-experimenter and the introduction of discordance into artists’ practices suggests that artistic proficiency need not be a requirement for geographers employing artistic practice as a research method, and that de-skilling as much as enskilling warrants consideration as a legitimate method in research into practices. The current analysis suggests that research designs combining and comparing qualitative interviews and practice-based research, with or without the introduction of discordance, invite particular attention.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
With thanks to participating artists who gave of their time so generously, to Derek McCormack for advising on the development of this article and to contributors to the discussion of an earlier draft of this article when presented at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual International Conference in 2013. Thank you also to the reviewers who provided such thoughtful and constructive feedback on an earlier draft.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.