Practising Place: Creative and Critical Reflections on Place
- Submitting institution
-
University of Central Lancashire
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 36321
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Multi-component output summarising five years of curatorial research
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Practicing Place (PP) was a five-year curatorial research project, which I developed to explore how conversation could be used as a method to generate interdisciplinary forms of knowledge about place, and to raise awareness of art practice as a form of research. In contrast to the activity of ‘exhibition-making’, this research presents an alternative model of curating as a generative practice, which is concerned with time rather than space, and facilitates the production of collaborative outputs via open-ended processes of interpersonal exchange.
As a curator, I devised strategies of ‘brokering’ and ‘making public’ to create the conditions through which interdisciplinary investigations of place could develop. I partnered 11 artists with academics from the humanities and social sciences with similar place-based research interests (see Methodology). Following an initial meeting, the partners spent up to twelve months sharing their research through face-to-face and online conversations. Via an iterative process of testing and reflection, I curated three public frameworks within which to extend these conversations: a programme of in-conversation events across the north of England (Documentation for Assessment no.1); an online critical writing project (no.2); and a curated book of collaborative projects (no.3), which I launched via a public symposium at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester.
Participants described how my curatorial approach extended their research by locating it within new critical contexts and connecting them with diverse audiences and networks. It also led to several long-term research partnerships and generated independent outputs including events at the National Science and Media Museum and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and new artworks to be exhibited in 2021 by the Print Council of Australia (see Impacts). In this way, PP not only demonstrates the value of conversation as a productive research method, but also makes the case for curating as a strategic and effective catalyst for interdisciplinary research.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -