Researcher as Artist

The characterization of the researcher as artist is based on the reconciliation between artistic practices and scholarly research as a critical creative activity that employs modes of artistic expression both as methodological tools and as forms of representation. The researcher as artist is open to the experiences and lessons of artistic practices that provide fresh critical and experimental approaches that, among other things, empower research participants by offering alternative, more evocative, and nondominant modes of response to the process of data gathering. Thus, while employing established research techniques and methods, the researcher as artist may also use highly personalized autoethnographic accounts, poetry, storytelling, and nonverbal modes of artistic expression such as collage, dance, and drawing. For example, a researcher might ask informants to visualize responses as well as verbalize responses, a practice commonly used in the gestalt and art therapy context.

The tension in the co-existence of the notions of researcher and artist is resolved in the to and fro among the formation of hypotheses, the flashes of insight, and the operations of imagination in the indefinite nonlinear acts that can accompany the process of analysis. For the researcher as artist, modes of artistic expression become a constituent part of the analysis itself. By conceiving themselves as artists, researchers can avoid reification of consciousness and thinking. Artistic practices allow a higher degree of uncertainty, nonlinearity, and embracing the unpredictable. Thus, for the researcher as artist, the representations of research are not rigidly separated out into material objects or artifacts and the mental world of ideas and concepts; rather, conceptual elaboration is grasped in terms of perception and modes of representation that involve an emphasis on emotional knowledge as well as cognitive knowledge.

There is also the sense in which an artist is at the same time a researcher insofar as his or her research, very often in the form of journals, notebooks, and/or sketchbooks, fosters the production of works suitable for public performance or viewing.

The notion of the researcher as artist has its origins in the dissolution of a hierarchy among the arts, the use of the arts in the context of therapy, the multimode nature of many works of art, and the postmodern relation of the artist to his or her work as only one reception among multiple interpretations. It is a notion that brings both artistic activity and research activity closer together as an expression of the essential tension between tradition and innovation whereby [Page 766]established paradigms are revised or replaced and research becomes a transformative and practical productive force.