Research Catalogue

This exposition forms part of the research project exploring the often-overlooked sensory and material facets of photographic production, challenging the traditional focus solely on the visual aspect of photographs. The research questions the prevailing view that understanding photography is limited to analysing the final image, suggesting instead that the process of making a photograph—its production in real-world environments such as laboratories, factories, and manufacturing spaces—holds equal aesthetic significance. The aim is twofold: to redirect attention to processes of photographic making, exploring the aesthetic dimension beyond the photograph itself, and to examine how this shift influences the overall understanding of photographic practice. Employing practice-based research across diverse photographic settings, this study uncovers the aesthetic nuances of C-type printing processes, including the tensioning, fogging, and tearing of photosensitive paper. It adopts an event-centric viewpoint, moving beyond the visual to explore multisensory handlings—listening, touching, and feeling—that are integral to photographic production, and acknowledges the contributions of more-than-human agency in photographic making. This approach allows for a multi-modal presentation of findings, combining traditional written analysis with experiential expositions to highlight the importance of non-visual outputs in photographic making. The contributions of this research are manifold. Firstly, it critically reviews the dominant focus on the visual analysis of photographs, advocating for a broader understanding that includes the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic making. Secondly, by immersing in the physical environments of photographic production, it provides empirical insights into the everyday practices that remain hidden from view. Thirdly, the study pioneers an artistic research methodology that emphasises showing over telling, utilising a variety of exhibition formats to convey the embodied nature of photographic making. Lastly, through in-depth case examples, it uncovers the complex interplay of materials, technology, and both human and non-human agency, suggesting a more nuanced concept of photographic practice that surpasses the conventional visual-centric, human-centric and photograph-centric paradigm. By advocating for a comprehensive view that embraces the sensory and material complexities of photography, this thesis enriches the medium's aesthetic understanding beyond the photograph as centre.

Illustration as research from within the field is of relatively new practice. The illustrators discourse on representation (Yannicopoulou & Alaca 2018 ), theory (Doyle, Grove and Sherman 2018, Male 2019, Gannon and Fauchon 2021), and critical writing on illustration practice was hardly found before The Journal of Illustration was first issued in 2014, followed by artistic research through illustration (Black, 2014; Rysjedal, 2019; Spicer, 2019). This research project developed as response to a rise in hate crime towards refugees and the targeting of European Jews in recent decade. A pilot project (This Is a Human Being 2016-2019) treated how narratives of the Holocaust may avoid contributing to overwriting of history or cultural appropriation. Asking how illustration in an expanded approach may communicate profound human issues typically considered unrepresentable, this new project hopes to explore representation and the narratives of “us” and “the others” in the contemporary world through illustration as starting-point for cross-disciplinary projects. The participants from different disciplines, have interacted democratically on common humanist themes to explore the transformative role of illustration in contemporary communication. our projects should afford contemplation of illustration as an enhanced, decelerated way of looking; and drawing as a process for understanding - a way of engaging in understanding the other, as much as expressing one’s own needs (McCartney, 2016). This AR project consisted of three symposia and three work packages, and the artistic research unfolded in the symbiosis of these elements. Our investigation of illustration across media and materials continues as dissemination and exhibitions even after the conclusion of the work packages in 2024.

Artist, actress and writer Nina Goedegebure conducts artistic research into the polyphony of a disease process at the Master Crossover Creativity @HKU, with two transdisciplinary projects; Fertility and 'Will You Carry Me?!' Starting from the question: How are we carried within a disease process? she investigates the effect of art during a disease process, and/or treatment. She is driven by the idea that in destruction lies creation. 'Through Research Catalogue I want to provide an open insight into this artistic process including my sources of inspiration, questions and finds.'

This page is a diagrammatic visualisation of my doctoral thesis. Originally presented as a digital PDF and at just under 50,000 words, it was important that it comprised all the collages, photographs, diagrams and films (as hyperlinks) that made it practice-based artistic research. This space allows the work and ideas to be experienced less sequentially and more relationally, befitting a nonlinear research practice assemblage.

Elena Cirkovic is conducting a transdisciplinary research project at Aarhus University, the University of Lapland, the University of Helsinki, and the BioArt Society Finland on the complex interactions between Earth and outer space systems, as well as the limitations in communicating with the unknown and unpredictable. The associated artwork is aiming for simplicity, placemaking, and "non-disruptive" BioArt (to the extent possible).

This publication presents the outcomes of the Connective Symposium, which took place at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, in November 2022. The symposium was the first time that the professorship and research group Artistic Connective Practices, initiated in 2021, opened its work to the international field: We invited practitioners from all over the world to share their work and exchange about the concept of "artistic connectivity". "Artistic Connectivity Unfolding" is an attempt to share the experiences during the symposium with the broader artistic research audience, and to contribute to the body of artistic research work that is socially engaged. The exposition is potentially many things: In part, it is a piece of documentation of the symposium, in part reflections on and proceedings of it. It is also an explorative contribution to our emerging and unfolding discourse of artistic connectivity, — unfinished, fluid and moving — and thus a springboard for our future work on artistic connectivity.