Alec Shepley
Head of Lincoln School of Art and Design, Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, University of Lincoln, UK
My Road to Ruin: The Studio Without Walls
This paper is about a strand of current research. The aims of the main research project are as follows:
Aims
1. To identify examples of ‘ruin’ in contemporary visual art
2. To examine the prevalence of fracture, fragmentation and provisionality in contemporary installation art practice
3. To demonstrate areas of commonality and difference and to provide a critical framework of concepts
4. To establish a taxonomy of potential source material
5. To contribute to the understanding of the reflective practitioner
6. To increase understanding about fragmentation and ruin within contemporary visual art
Download the whole paper as PDF
Alec Sheply – SK5 presentation
Introduction
Someone once said that when the floor of your studio is becoming more interesting than what is going on in your work then you really need to think about what it is you are doing. I myself noticed this problem, and to cut a long story short, did a PhD to explore the problem that I’d found.
In this presentation I wish to tell you about my research and practice and afterwards explore with you some of the issues and tensions surrounding artistic practice and academic research and hopefully gain some useful perspectives about current thinking. I will also reflect on the work of Gordon Matta-Clark.
When I completed my PhD in Fine Art in 2000, my supervisor asked me what I was going to do next – to which I responded ‘make art!’ It occurred to me sometime later on that although an honest answer, my response seemed to imply that in some way I might not have been making art over the past four years of my research programme – and yet I had. I was anxious for my practice to be included as a part of the PhD (I wouldn’t have done it if I couldn’t include practice) and I tend to think that doing it refreshed my appetite for more creative work and enabled me to engage with my practice more reflectively and on a different level. Anxiety can be detected, especially among new research students in Art & Design about the need to make a contribution to new knowledge and in addition worries often surface at some point about the possible distorting effects the academic research process can have on art practice. I am also aware that my own relatively positive experience does not always seem to be collectively shared by peers who have also done PhD’s in Art & Design. And yet can the same level of unease with the relationship between art practice and knowledge be detected amongst students who have just completed their bachelors or masters degrees? I often wonder why this should be so? Now working as a supervisor I frequently spend time with research students negotiating the often-tense relationship between the sensuousness of their creative production and artistic research, and the perceived restrictions of the framework of academic knowledge and need to ‘produce new knowledge’.
In my own artistic practice I am involved in exploring the ‘sensuality’ of the ruin; I am pre-occupied with the acts of cutting, rejoining, inverting and reflecting, to reveal a ‘potential space’ (perhaps within the ‘joins’ themselves) and I often find myself deliberately relating this experience to ‘academic’ research processes through the notion of the reflective practitioner.
The ‘semi-calculated’ acts of ruination which befall any intended ‘outcome’ in my creative practice alter the genetic structure of ‘the thing’ forming a new combination which at once opens a door to new knowledge and in this way is analogous to my ‘semi-structured’ (and often totally unstructured!) approach to the research process.
