Dr Anne Douglas

Principal Researcher of On the Edge research

Chris Fremantle

Cultural Historian and partner to the On the Edge research programme

Heather Delday

Doctoral Research Student of the On the Edge research

On the Edge: Practice Led Research into the Value of the Arts in Marginal Spaces

Download The Dynamic of the Edge (1,95 MB)

Through this paper we would like to articulate an approach to art and design practice that questions two fundamental assumptions

• It is not framed by the creative practice of an individual artist delivering an authored artwork to a public or audience.
• It involves, in a creative process, people who do not necessarily or readily define themselves as creative in relation to their everyday life.

So we will talk about the practice of individual artists in relation to how they operate as one of a group of people. Creative practice is developed as a vehicle for engaging a range of people (artists and non artists, researchers and non researchers, professionals and lay people) in the development of a set of experiences. These experiences are different ways of responding to change. They demonstrate the act of forming and reforming community in response to the push and pull of everyday life. The research and related projects form the conditions for a different set of exchanges between the players who together alter perceptions of what is possible.

In developing an effective relationship between the artistic process and culture, we aim to contribute to understanding sustainability. One of the key characteristics of sustainability is resilience within (different from a luddite resistance to) cultural change. Resilience in this sense means having the capacity to retain a degree of integrity, self organization and self awareness by engaging a process of finding value in the constant flux of everyday life.

Another key characteristic of sustainability that is relevant to the On the Edge research programme and to this project, INTHROW, is the development of a rich mixed ecology through multiple creative strategies. INTHROW is one of five projects within the programme. This rich mixed ecology relates specifically to a fundamental positioning within this work of not relying on artists to be the sole creator, and positively engaging a range of people in creative endeavour. We will focus on process or tactics, as opposed to output or goals. We will attempt to draw out from the experiences that are constructed as a key part of the research, their significance to giving aesthetic form to everyday experience. Research and artistic practice come together to address a ‘gap’ in knowledge articulated by Michel De Certeau.

“‘We know poorly of the types of operations at stake in ordinary practices, their registers and their combinations, because our instruments of analysis, modelling and formalisation were constructed for other objects and with other aims.” (de Certeau et al 1998: 256)’

Through the project, INTHROW, we will describe tools and methods and their use by different artists. We will describe how these tools and methods reveal aspects of the world in a particular way by engaging the senses. We will show how traditional knowledge is significant as a point of resistance by engaging multiple hands, eyes and minds in shared strategies.

The research provides grounded case study material of how art practice operates within culture, rather than operating in isolation – the isolation of academic practice as well as artistic practice. We are trying to take practice somewhere different from the modernist paradigm of the individual as creative genius set apart form everyday life. We are also trying to move beyond the fragmentation of meaning and relativity of values of postmodernism. We believe in the principal of a ‘local aesthetic’, making art with people at the interstice of what is known and comfortable and what is unknown and challenging.