Residency-as-method: a process-based approach to developing artistic ways of knowing within sites of informal learning

Pool, Steven (2023) Residency-as-method: a process-based approach to developing artistic ways of knowing within sites of informal learning. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This study makes the proposition that an artist’s residency-is-method. By method, I mean a specific way of doing research. Residency I define as an artist working within a practice within a site. I identify the relations between personal art practice and its agency through telling the story of an experiment in research-creation that crosses three sites. The study builds a platform and in so doing creates a territory where multiple trajectories collide. The study employs propositions from the field of research-creation as an approach that pays attention to the individual subjective and a singular arts practice. The intention is to acknowledge the difficulties and contradictions that emerge when artistic ways of thinking are diffracted through the lens of research methods and brought to written language. This study is written for artists and researchers who are working on cross-disciplinary research projects that are not located within university fine art departments. It contributes from an individual and personal perspective to the growing fields of research-creation in that it pragmatically layers the approach into the complex relation of work within sites of collective community action. Where necessary the study draws on theoretical and ontological thinking of post-philosophies, specifically Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and the nomadic. However, it remains deeply immersed in the thinking-making-doing process of art within the ongoing creative-event. It applies research-creation as an approach to open a space for art to do things differently and enunciate newsense challenging multiple disciplinary boundaries and sedimented ways of knowing. This study interrogates thoughts, observations and the concepts that emerged from the interactions between doing research and maintaining an artist's identity through thinking-making-doing within multiple sites of practice. I recognise that the work of this study is a further ravelling and as such a coming together. It is not a systematic untangling, the undoing of knots, or an unravelling. There are no conclusions, only thoughts and movement in process.