33 Doing and Disseminating Visual Research: Visual Arts-Based Approaches

Introduction

I begin this chapter by considering some of the more obvious connections between visual research and the work and practices of artists who engage documentary methods in their work. I focus specifically on Tacita Dean's 2005 artwork, Presentation Sisters. Following that, I examine, in some detail, the work practices of Willie Doherty, an Irish conceptual artist who works mainly with photography and video. I do this to make visible the ways in which he inquires into issues of social, cultural, and political significance, and to show how he creates opportunities for specific understandings to emerge in and from his work. I focus on his installation Same Difference (1990) to raise questions about how meaning is produced, first in the production of an artwork and subsequently in an encounter with the work. This analysis of Doherty's installation suggests some ways that visual researchers might think about how stories are recorded and constructed, visually and spatially. I discuss how conditions for knowing, and knowing differently, are created in the form of an artwork, and show how meaning is made and empathic understandings are generated in encounters with that artwork. I demonstrate how the choice of medium is closely linked with the types of [Page 639]understanding that can be gleaned from an artwork.

Following the analysis of Doherty's installation, I discuss how his forms of expression used might be taken up in a visual research project. I describe how I created an installation to disseminate findings of a research study that investigated the masculinizing practices of a male single-sex residential teacher training college in Ireland during the opening decades of the twentieth century.1 Similar to Doherty's Same Difference, this installation, which combined visual and textual data from the research study, disseminated the outcomes of the study to a wider and more diverse, largely non-academic, audience. It provided opportunities for relational understanding, and served a further role in the inquiry process by creating new configurations of image and text in an enclosed space while generating new questions about the topic under investigation. As an artwork, it extended and reinterpreted the narratives it depicted (Bourriaud, 2005).

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