Kathleen Vaughan

Actas de la II Conferencia Internacional sobre Investigación basada en Arte e Investigación Artística, Universidad de Granada, 27-30 de enero de 2014.Los tres principales objetivos de la 2ª Conferencia, fueron: 1) explorar y debatir el desarrollo actual de la Investigación basada en las Artes y de la Investigación Artística en las diferentes especialidades artísticas: artes visuales, música, literatura, performance, teatro, etc. 2) profundizar en las intersecciones entre las metodologías cuantitativas, cualitativas y artísticas de investigación en las artes y en las ciencias humanas y sociales. 3) identificar tendencias y problemas en el desarrollo de estrategias de investigación características de la Investigación basada en las Artes y de la Investigación Artística, tales como la A/r/tografía, Investigación basada en la Práctica Artística, etc.El presente 4º volumen, dedicado a las especialidades artísticas, presenta un total de veinte aportaciones. Han sido ordenadas en función de...

This article presents a reflective consideration of the author’s design and implementation of the Iceland Field School for Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), describing her desire to bring her teaching, research and art-making practices in line with her posthuman values. Named “Imagining Iceland,” this course provided 13 senior undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to spend the month of June 2016 in the small north Iceland community of Blönduós, making art according to their individual practices. The course aimed to support both the professionalization of the students’ artistic practices and their engagement with the particularities of Iceland as an ethically complicated place to visit, learn and make art, touching on environmental and posthumanist themes. Offering a case study of the Iceland Field School, the text articulates the problems and contradictions the author finds in implementing her posthuman values in her teaching, and offers four examples of st...

What does it mean for artists within academia to make art, teach and learn with and in community, in particular the challenged and challenging Montreal neighborhood of Pointe-St-Charles? This article addresses community engagement in "The Point" from the perspectives of a doctoral student and two instructors involved in "The Right to the City" (TRTC), a three-year, interdisciplinary, placed-based teaching initiative of Concordia University (Montreal). Showcasing the student’s graphic novella, based on the oral history interview of a longtime resident, this article affirms the importance of reciprocity—learning with rather than about—within academic and artistic outreach.

This article presents a reflective consideration of the author’s design and implementation of the Iceland Field School for Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), describing her desire to bring her teaching, research and art-making practices in line with her posthuman values. Named “Imagining Iceland,” this course provided 13 senior undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to spend the month of June 2016 in the small north Iceland community of Blönduós, making art according to their individual practices. The course aimed to support both the professionalization of the students’ artistic practices and their engagement with the particularities of Iceland as an ethically complicated place to visit, learn and make art, touching on environmental and posthumanist themes. Offering a case study of the Iceland Field School, the text articulates the problems and contradictions the author finds in implementing her posthuman values in her teaching, and offers four examples of student work for consideration as to whether their artmaking and experiential learning begins to connect them to the world around, dismantling humanist hierarchies. The author ends with short list of questions that will guide her future work and that may be of value to others striving to implement arts-oriented teaching in the north.

We invite you to join us as we explore our co-mentorship through walking, artmaking and writing, all core aspects of our practices as artists. While meandering through the rich sensorial environment of Montreal’s waterside Parc-nature de l’Île-de-la-Visitation, our reactions to the surroundings played an influential role in shaping the character of this article. Our ideas emerged through the quiet heat of the early spring sunshine and amidst intermittent remarks about the birds flying by, the directionality of the flowing river, the strength of the wind, the sounds of lapping water, the families enjoying picnics, the demographics of the neighbourhood surrounding the park, and even the roar of a hydro dam we encountered for the first time. Drawing on a posthumanist framework, notions of shared authority borrowed from oral history, methods of call-and-response, and co-mentorship, the authors – a doctoral supervisor and a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University in Montreal – reflect on their hopes for and experiences of their work together as complementary, convergent, concurrent and symbiotic.

As a visual artist undertaking doctoral studies in education, the author required a research method that integrated her studio practice into her research process, giving equal weight to the visual and the linguistic. Her process of finding such a method is outlined in this article, which touches on arts-based research and practice-led research, and her ultimate approach of choice, collage. Collage, a versatile art form that accommodates multiple texts and visuals in a single work, has been proposed as a model for a "borderlands epistemology": one that values multiple distinctive understandings and that deliberately incorporates nondominant modes of knowing, such as visual arts. As such, collage is par- ticularly suited to a feminist, postmodern, postcolonial inquiry. This article offers a preliminary theoriz- ing of collage as a method and is illustrated with images from the author's research/visual practice.

Today, I am speaking to you on the subject of “Making it up as we go along: Reflections from artists learning to teach.” The artists in question are a group of 41 professionals of all disciplines—dancers, musicians, dramatists, visual artists—who during the 2002-03 ...

What do you do when a beloved creature dies? Such loss is the norm of life, but is still a rupture, a breach, an un-making. How does one understand that loss? How does one reclaim the lost one? This book chapter indicates how as an artist and academic the author responds visually to the death of her dog, creating a graphic novel called “Made Flesh: Art as Resurrection After Auggie’s Death”. In an interplay of visual panels and running text, the author ponders the links between loss and representation, suggesting that art may be a way of representing a possibility, a hope, a wish or even a belief for an antidote to loss in which the lost beloved has a new form.

For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with the shifting patterns of light through the leaves of trees. Could this be a reflection of a happy early memory, when as a toddler I was lifted up towards the leafy bower of our backyard oak tree? I remember my father’s hands on my ribs, my small hands rising to grasp the unexpectedly cool strength of the oak’s horizontal branch, normally so far above my head, and my eyes up to the shifting cathedral of greens and blues, the branches and creatures even further above me. Perhaps more recent happy encounters reinforce this early touchstone: I have been nourished by years of habitual walks with my dogs in the urban forests of the cities where I have lived. These experiences bring together the thematics that are core to my creative and research practices as an artist and academic: mobility, corporeality, relationality, identity, place, urbanity, the role of the more-than-human in the city, the place of the wildish in contemporary western life. Embedded within these are considerations both ethical and aesthetic.

Currently, I am developing a series of artworks about my walks in urban woods, each work a reflection of multiple engagements with a single place that has been officially designated or unofficially claimed as a wildish preserve.

With reference to Made Flesh, the artist-author’s graphic-novel-in-progress, this illustrated paper outlines the author’s methodological explorations using the möbius as an image of the art-research dynamic, and collage as a conceptualization of a method of practice. The author proposes the ‘uncanny’ as the aesthetic and affective modalities of both the möbius and collage, and also as an essential quality of a dynamically charged artistic practice.
The möbius is geometry's paradoxical looped form that appears to have two sides, but in fact has just one – which the author suggests is a productive way of construing the entwining of art and research. Playing with this notion of the strangeness-of-two-that-are-one, the author further suggests how concepts of the uncanny (associated with artistic practice) and cognitive rigor (aligned with qualitative practice) must both figure into the development of an artistic research practice that is methodologically robust and personally/culturally resonant.
With respect to collage, the paper notes that the generativity of its juxtapositions may facilitate productive engagement with fundamental questions of method in artistic research: how to inflect the intuitive choices of artmaking with research-oriented rigor, and how to make transparent and useful to others the hands-on stages of creation ­– specifically, how to find appropriate equivalents to qualitative research's 'data collection and analysis.' In demonstration, the author juxtaposes her own work Made Flesh (digital collage) with the conceptually and formally aligned creative work of two contemporary artists, Eija-Liisa Ahtila (expanded cinema) and Susan Rothenberg (painting).

Published in the Conference Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Arts-based Research and Artistic Research, 2014, with the full document available for download at http://hdl.handle.net/10481/34215