Category Archives: Source Material

Posts linking to realted, useful and informative source material including work of practicing artists, theorists and commentators, research of anecdotal evidence, magazine or news items.

Art as personal research. Walk your talk.

I read this excellent article in The Independent.

Click the image below to read it.

‘Inside the scandal that rocked behavioural science – and paved the way for revolution’ : Helen Coffey – The Independent – June 29, 2025.

It is about behavioural science, that branch of science that studies human behaviour. In the article it addresses a crisis, that of reproducibility in research.

To be ‘objective’ or have quantitative or qualitative rigour, research results must show reproducibility. That is, that other scientists do the same research and get the same results or that the results may be generally or universally applied, not be shown to apply to one person, or just the people studied in the research. There is talk, as alluded to here, that many old research and new research findings may, on reflection, be a bit ‘subjective’. That is applied to just the subject of study, not the general population.

There is reference throughout to sample size. To be objective, research findings of people are best done with a large sample size.

But if you alone are the subject and object of your own research, it can still be research, but research simply about you and your behaviour, your experience. You are the sample. A sample size of one.

Art as research produces a subjective outcome, thus is open to interpretation. But in conducting research through art making, you make yourself open to interpretation. Your sample size is small, but as such it may be taken to apply to you alone. In showing and sharing, your art may resonate with other people, but again, subjectively. There is no better way. You own your subjectivity, and it owns you. You walk your talk. You have made yourself both object and subject.

The point is that through art making thou art approaching a state and inhabiting a process in which thou may, through art making, come to better ‘Know Thyself’. In this, there are health benefits.

The Experience of Plants & Imagination in Science

The work of Zoe Schlanger and Monica Gagliano.

Two related videos. I am reading The Light Eaters at the moment, and it clicks with ideas about the variety of experience. Our experience rests in our Umwelt, our lived environment based on our bodies and ways of sensing. Plants and animals just have different umwelts. These two women tell us about the umwelt and the experience of plants. In her part Monica also talks about the importance of imagination in scientific research.

Forest, Field & Sky: Art out of Nature

A BBC series now only available on YouTube

Dr James Fox takes a journey through six different landscapes across Britain, meeting artists whose work explores our relationship to the natural world. From Andy Goldsworthy’s beautiful stone sculptures to James Turrell’s extraordinary sky spaces, this is a film about art made out of nature itself. Featuring spectacular images of landscape and art, James travels from the furthest reaches of the Scottish coast and the farmlands of Cumbria to woods of north Wales. In each location he marvels at how artists’ interactions with the landscape have created a very different kind of modern art – and make us look again at the world around us.

First broadcast: May 2016.

Doing and making stuff…

…yourself, for yourself, let’s you learn how you learn and learn something at the same time…

educate(v.)

From educar, French éduquer), which is a frequentative of or otherwise related to educere “bring out, lead forth,” from ex- “out” (see ex-) + ducere “to lead” (from PIE root *deuk- “to lead”).

Learn to lead and educate yourself.