This post is a brief discussion about the descriptor ‘Art as Research.’

Like ‘Art’, ‘Research’ has many notions attached to it. The most well known one would be the notion of research as a scientific activity to seek an objective truth or empirical data. This is useful to ‘Art as Research’ but as a supportive or adjunctive activity.

‘Art as Research’ here means using art making to research your personal experience. It is understood as the intentional act of an individual to attend to something or to seek some unknown thing. You make art and attend to what you make and what happens when you make it. Whatever you find in your research, what comes to your attention, will be entirely subjective.

This approach to research as a subjective phenomenon reflects its older pre-modern form. Etymology Online best sums it up thus…

research (v.) – 1590s, “to investigate or study (a matter) closely, search or examine with continued care,” from French recercher, from Old French recercher “to seek out, search closely,” from re-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see re-), + cercher “to seek for,” from Latin circare “to go about, wander, traverse,” in Late Latin “to wander hither and thither,” from circus “circle” (see circus).

From Etymonline

Research in the sense described above is accessible by anyone with a pencil and a sketchbook. One does not need to be an ‘Artist’, or have a PhD, or access to the Large Hadron Collider. You just need to be curious, and willing to make art, and to attend to yourself making art.

It describes art as a verb, a doing thing. It supports the idea of art making as an intentional and concerted search or investigation. It supports the idea of it being a bit of an adventure, a wandering journey where we don’t know what we are going to find. It also supports the idea of it having a circular or recursive quality. What we find in our search feeds forward into the next act of searching and finding. It also has, through ‘circus’, connections to performance.

It supports the idea of art making as a way of researching personal experience. This emerges directly out of experiential learning and the arts therapies. It focuses on the process of making art rather than the product made. With art making as an activity learned through experience, you learn to make art by making art, so too you learn to find the outcomes of your art as research by making art as research.

Given that what you find will be subjective, I cannot tell you what you will find. But most importantly, No1 in my Top Ten, you learn to make art through your experience of art making, so your art making can be used to learn about your personal experience. You learn about yourself through yourself making art. This is where the benefits lie.