Imaginative Investigations

An exhibition of research student work in art, design and media.

Students undertaking research in the arts will exhibit work at Grand Parade this March. The works, in a range of media, demonstrate the many ways through which original, rigorous inquiries can be conducted and communicated, offering insights into the processes and discoveries of the institution’s student researchers in the arts.

Download the Imaginative Investigations brochure [pdf 3.7Mb] 

Art and Creative Practice as Research

“Imaginative investigators are working beyond the restriction of defined discipline parameters and are guided by questions, issues, and abstractions where new knowledge is seen as a function of creation and critiquing human experience” (Sullivan, 2005:181).

In the groundbreaking book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, the artist, educator and writer Graham Sullivan provides strong evidence on the transformative potential of practice-based research (2005). 

These include approaches from empiricist, interpretative and critical traditions. Key to making in systems is the exploration of interactions and intersections; making in communities is about communication, connection and interpretation. Making in cultures acknowledges dissonance, collaboration, criticality and the visual. Images and artefacts are interrogated as ‘visual sources of knowledge’ (2005:158) or activated to challenge ‘perceptions through visual encounters’ (2005:150). Questioning, self-reflexivity, dialogue and critical engagement are part of these processes (Haysom, 2005).

Sullivan explores the communicative capacity of artists and practitioners as theorists and relates transformative, reflexive, relational, site-based research practices. He considers art and creative practices as research that are ‘grounded in traditions of making [and] can be seen as a viable way to reveal the kind of artistic knowledge that [has] the capacity to change us’ (2005:180).