Corkscrew: Practice Research Beyond the PhD

On Tuesday 28th June 2022, The School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London, held its inaugural Postgraduate Research (PGR) Showcase at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on The Mall in London. Heralded as an opportunity to discover where creative curiosity meets critical thinking, Birkbeck doctoral researchers and alumni shared and presented their creative practice research. Talks and exhibits on view to the public included poetry, photography, film curation, audio-visual essays, and radio.

Katy Beinart completed her PhD in 2019 at University College, London. It was called Détour and retour: practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton. Lizzie Lloyd also completed her PhD in 2019, but at the University of Bristol. Hers was titled Art writing and subjectivity: critical association in art-historical practice

Katy and Lizzy began a collaboration together immediately after handing in their PhD theses. They had much in common, both having been studying and researching whilst parenting, but each had her own academic specialism too. Lizzie’s research for her PhD had focused on ‘how we navigate art history with our own baggage’. She explored how our backgrounds influence our understandings of what we see around us; we interpret everything based on pre-existing associations.

Katy’s doctoral research had been a continuation of a project inspired by a container ship residency with her sister during which they explored family histories and issues of migration and place. She had undertaken a collaboration in Brixton making art installations and performances around the rituals and material qualities of salt. Wanting to continue challenging the top-down imposition of cultural and spatial meanings, she wanted to embark on a new project with a writer to revisit socially engaged art practices through a series of ‘unmapping’ experiments. After three attempts to get funding and a COVID-induced pause, Katy and Lizzie have been very busy recently talking to artists, producing a film, planning and opening an exhibition and they have a publication due out early 2022.

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Equipped with a diploma in Drama, Libro Levi was originally planning to be a performer and was writing plays and novels before taking a break to do an MA, and then being encouraged to do a funded PhD at the University of East Anglia. Completing in 2009, they had aimed to write an 80,000-word novel with a 15,000-word critical piece, as a counterpoint. Acknowledging the struggle to articulate something that is inarticulate, they had tried to understand and analyse the logic of the imagined world they had created by focusing on techniques and the writing process. Libro developed a closer link between writing creatively and critically analysing the works produced because they were dealing with real-life subjects: interviewing people and writing about identity and gender.

In Libro's experience, the artistic, 'writerly' creative form is underestimated, for instance, short stories are very hard to do yet the rigour required is not respected as much as academic writing. For written pieces to be accessible, Libro believes they should be easy on the eye or ear, and that enabling people to step into other worlds requires a great deal of effort and skill.

Top tips: don't underestimate the great undertaking that is 'doing a PhD'. That opportunity to sink into and sit with your practice is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It can be isolating and frustrating; you need to be resourceful and resilient and beware of the rabbit holes. A strong relationship with your supervisor is key. It's an amazing opportunity not for the fainthearted!

This interview was originally recorded in August 2018.

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This is the first time that curator, Sunshine Wong, has reflected on her PhD: Beside engagement: a queer and feminist reading of socially negotiated art through dialogue, love, and praxis. Completed in 2019 at the University of Wolverhampton, this is a theoretical exploration of curatorial practice and commissioning inspired in part by some bad experiences Sunshine had when working as a freelancer. She had hoped doing a PhD would provide her with clarity but also some camaraderie since she had recently moved to the UK. But in fact, she found the doctoral process isolating, more anti-social than social. She also felt ‘unmoored from her practice’ and suffered impostor syndrome. Focusing on reading about theories such as relational aesthetics disengaged her from curatorial practice, however as she worked through her ideas, she developed a perspective that resonated with her own experiences: embodied criticality. She realised that whatever you do as an artist in social spaces you will never fit in; it's all about negotiating for your place.

The relief upon completion was like ‘taking skates off after a long time and realizing you've forgotten how to walk’. Knowing she needed to plot coordinates closer to home, she started a group for slow reading called 'too long; didn't read' (tl;dr) Sunshine still wants to do research but slower and more collaboratively, and as a parent now, she faces a different kind of time pressure. She’s enjoying working on BLOC Projects in Sheffield and so her PhD does have an afterlife in that it is infusing her practice and has helped her to think through agile responses to COVID-19. Her reading group has inspired a webinar series, Harsh Light, encouraging artists/practitioners to talk about the work behind their work. Another theme that she has been developing is taken from her third chapter on taking a critical look at care, and its urgency; how care is part and parcel of social practice, and how art projects can fill in some of the gaps. 

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In this episode, Rob Watson discusses how his PhD in participation and advocacy in community media came about, having been inspired through his engineering expertise in digital technologies to set up radio production courses and to run De Montford University’s student-led station as local community radio. Not coming from a social sciences background, Rob had a steep learning curve, settling on a symbolic interactionism framing and employing immersive participant observation in the field. In 2018, just six weeks after completing his doctorate, he was made redundant from his lecturing job. He has since developed a business in community communications training based on the principles of civic democracy and empowerment. Rob runs projects using radio and podcasting to facilitate community development, drawing on Jungian philosophy to construct a social economy model based on the belief that people should be empowered to tell their own stories.

Rob and Sophie talk about researcher positionality, the importance of authentic participation in socially engaged research, and what positive steps should be taken to ensure the effective communication of important messages for ensuring meaningful engagement, improving trust in our institutions, and building a better society.

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Nina’s first degree was in performing arts in the 1990s. She then did a Masters in composing and became a sound artist working on radio features and documentaries. She started teaching at university in 2007 and began discussing a PhD in 2014, inspired by experimental projects for the BBC through which she was developing a way of working through musical storytelling. She completed her PhD by publication in 2018 at Bournemouth. It was entitled "Music, Narrative, Voice and Presence". What she had published was not written texts, but five composed audio features aired on BBC radio between 2009 and 2013. She explored the difference between practice research in academia and artistic inquiry, drawing on Robin Nelson's ‘Practice as Research’ methodology. Looking at authorial presence and embodied practice, Nina brought the role of music to the fore. The PhD process provided a grounding for her continuing exploration of freedom in creativity and different ways of knowing. She continues also to explore how to make the transition from practitioner to practice researcher when still relying on that practice for a living and negotiating the challenges involved in submitting to the REF when institutional support is limited.

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Cara completed her PhD in 2017 at the University of Bristol which houses one of the largest British theatre collections in the world. Her thesis was called Activating Archives and involved interrogating the integration of archival theory with performance art. It was an AHRC-funded project aimed at modelling strategies for engaging with archive material on three levels: artists dealing with their own material; artists dealing with others’ work; and how institutions recontextualise such materials through exhibitions.

Cara’s own performance history and her curatorial archiving experience informed her research and practice. Whilst living at home during her studies, she was inspired to undertake her own practice research by broadcasting online about why and how we keep or store objects in domestic environments: engaging audience members in a wider social discourse on the subject. Post-PhD she has applied her deep reading and critical analysis skills to everyday business uses as well as continuing to contribute to academia and participating in art collectives on social projects.

Please note, this episode was recorded in 2018.

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Fiona is Professor of Museology in the History of Art department at Birkbeck, University of London. She did her PhD at Keele University between 1993 and 1998; it was called “Artwork and the boundaries of academia”. Fiona’s was one of the first art practice as research (or theory/practice) doctorates in the UK and she admits to finding the whole process a very difficult experience because of this. Her grounding was a degree in fine art from Leeds where social and feminist history informed her studies, a Masters in critical theory at Sussex, and years of working in Tate Liverpool organising educational art programmes.

Fiona regards all aspects of research as practice, from reading to fieldwork, and from analysis to writing-up. Her latest small museums investigation is a case in point, and she describes driving around the country in a camper van, dropping in for conversations with museum owners/curators, the re-iterative nature of classification modelling, and developing a database through working with computer scientists.

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Four more speakers from our training event:

Dr Agata Lulkowska

https://www.staffs.ac.uk/people/agata-lulkowska

In this episode, Sophie talks to Lucy Lyons whose passion for drawing and the process she calls ‘slow looking’ converges with a fascination for anatomy and pathology. Her PhD, entitled Delineating Disease, was completed at Sheffield Hallam in 2009 involved investigating medicine through the methodology of artistic practice. She has continued to pursue this path and is now a registered medical illustrator and teaches at City & Guilds of London Art School. Likening the exploratory dimensions of academic artistic practice to sending canaries down a mine, she is frustrated that we still have to justify this approach. She believes that research can be subversive and that the value of not knowing something should be reasserted.

Please note: This episode was recorded in 2018.

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Becky Shaw’s PhD, completed in 1998, was rooted in nursing research exploring sculpture as a ‘significant occupation’ for patients in palliative care. Through this collaborative work with occupational therapists, nurses and patients, Becky considered aspects such as the value of time spent with others on creative activity and the permanence of personal identity as carried through objects when the creator is no longer present. After further research on death and dying, Becky returned to working as an artist in social contexts and under Blair's government was busy with commissions. She later refocussed on teaching, having built a relationship with Sheffield Hallam, which Becky describes as seeing itself as an applied university where art design as a research method and interdisciplinarity are taken for granted. As well as continuing her art practice, Becky currently leads the PhD cohort in the Art and Design Research Centre – bringing together her interests in how arts practice meets the academy.

Following an anthropology degree, Emile began doing site specific performance; this led to an MFA in digital media and then a PhD in media philosophy. While his PhD was not practice-based, Emile continued doing interventions, participatory projects and performances as a way to research through practice. Emile retuned to academia after the life changing experience of working in New York during 9/11. He found an academic home in the interdisciplinary research context of the media studies department at Sussex University.

In this episode Sophie talks to Lucy Wright who, in 2014, completed her PhD titled 'Making traditions, practising folk : contemporary folk performance in the Northwest of England : a practice-led enquiry'. They discuss the importance of creative uncertainty and how often people are talking at cross purposes when discussing practice research. Lucy reflects on her turn from ethnographer to artist. She talk about her precarious career in short term academic jobs, which rarely recognised her practice-led approach, and her recent decision to leave academia and become a freelance socially engaged artist and researcher. 

In this episode Sophie talks to Professor Anne Douglas, who completed her practice-based PhD in 1992 from Newcastle University. Anne reflects on the practical and philosophical backdrop to how her sculptural work as public art developed into a PhD in the late 1980s. Anne introduces some of the precedents to practice-based PhDs in music and visual arts from the 1970s and 1980s and her 22 year career at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. Anne shares how she developed a focused research programme on the relationship between artists and public life at Grays from where she has supervised many artists to develop their PhDs, including Suzanne Lacy and Newton Harrison. Sophie and Anne conclude by discussing the capacity of universities to support practice-research and the need for long-term partnerships beyond the academy. 

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