In developing Moving Space and my own arts practice I was greatly influenced by work by the arts therapies and arts education doing art as research. It was a revelation. Driven by a need to provide quantitative evidence to demonstrate efficacy of the arts therapies was vital to their being licenced and peascribed. They are still unable to provide the gold standard double blind quantitative evidence. This can be seen as evidence of inefficacy, or that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, or that art making is a creative act so you cannot intrisically say what an outcome is and test it. One suggestion is that art as research is performative research, and an adjuct to quantitative and qualitative research. Indeed, Brad Haseman an artist resercher wrote ‘A Manifesto for Performative Research’ in 2007 avaialable for download here.

When I trained at Central School a therapist called Shaun McNiff had published his first book ‘Art as Research’. It was a lone voice. Now it is one of many. The idea of art making as research, to me in practice, seemed obvious. Making art facillitates finding stuff out about my experience of the world. But ideas about research, beyond personal practice, make the idea less obvious, particularly when judged alongside the hard evidence needed for quantitative research. The practice is also confusingly know by many differesnt epithets, practice based research, studio research, performative research, practice led research, art as research, art based research etc etc. One book that influenced me greatly was ‘Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry’ by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, two Australian artist researchers, here on Amazon.

For a lot of this site I have refered to art as research, it was part of the ‘site identity’ on WordPress, the strapline inder the site name. On reflection however I think art as experience is more accessible than art as research. I think they are interchangeable. Art making can be experienced as personal research. But explaining ‘art as experience’ in which one learns something through experience…’, whilst to my mind is intercahangeable with ‘art as research in which one learns something…’, the latter takes more explaining. Indeed in 2007 Estelle Barrett wrote the article ‘Experiential learning in practice as research: Context, method, knowledge’ available for free download here.

So… on reflection I have made all my ‘art as research’ references into ‘art as experience’ for ease of explanation and accesibility. In my heart of hearts this sound like a slight sellout. I liked the kind of punk feel to the idea of art as research in the kind of DIY way that punk extolled. We only need three chords and some attitude to shake the world up.

But the work done by arts based researcers, in the arts therapies and fine art is now very serious stuff, and changing the arts. So I believe art making as personal research, ‘art as research’ is the same as art making as learning through personal experience ‘art as experience’. But for ease of accessibility of explanation, to themes, and practice, I have changed ‘art as research’ to ‘art as experience’ throughout the site. If I have missed any, let me know. I will also continue to tag posts with experiential learning and/or art as research depending on content and context.

Thanks Chris Reed