One of the things I am passionate about is using embodied research methods to answer embodied research questions.  My recent project exploring embodied academic identity involved meeting academics in studio spaces where we had room to move and access to high quality art materials to reflect on aspects of embodied practice and academic work.  All the meetings were filmed and I gave the 18 hours of footage to a fimographer, Catriona Blackburn  from Althaia Films sonderfilm.wordpress.com and together we’ve been working on a video essay.

This process in itself was really interesting, as I didn’t realise how vulnerable I’d feel handing it all over to someone else and finding out the story they would tell from my work!  The essay will be complementary to and different from the written work that I am working on.

One of the questions we have been batting around is where the lines are between art and research, and research and therapy. We met together with Nicole Brown www.nicole-brown.co.uk to discuss this, the project, and to work together on a collage.

We were discussing how art is art if you determine it to be so, and I think that this determination can happen after the fact.  You don’t have to intend for something to be art when you are doing it (think Tracey Emin’s bed for example). However, this is not true for therapy.  You have to intend to take a therapeutic approach from the outset, and I believe the same is true for research.  But both research and therapy can have outputs that can be determined as art.

So now I have the juxtaposition of a collage within an academic office which brings up issues around dissemination of this art/data and where it should sit…