Searching and re-searching for a practice: an appetite
Couch, Amanda (2014) Searching and re-searching for a practice: an appetite. In: Higher Education Academy (HEA): The Artist as Researcher Seminar, 14 May 2014, Manchester Museum. (Unpublished)
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I am Amanda Couch, an artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) Farnham. In 2011, I completed a Post-Graduate Certificate in Teaching (PGC) at UCA. Over two years the course invaded my time and completely transformed me; the way I approached my art making, writing and teaching, and introduced to me the notion of artist-researcher with all the issues and problems that go with it.
During the course, my research projects explored embodied knowledge, phenomenology, the personal, and the body, and in particular my digestive system which acted as a metaphor for critical reflection. But when I finished the PGC, with all this new learning, I was lost. I was adrift in the woods and overwhelmed by words. I looked back along the path I had come hoping to find a trail of breadcrumbs that would take me back to my art practice. But there were no crumbs. I couldn't see the way back to it. It wasn't where I'd left it.
My presentation for 'The Artist as Researcher' seminar, 'Searching and Re-Searching for a Practice: An Appetite' explored the new place I found myself in after the PGC. It referred to what started as a year-long ethnographic research project funded by the Teaching and Learning department at UCA to navigate my new terrain: I find myself the edges of things and of identities: artist, teacher, practitioner, researcher; of territories: fine art, performance, social science, biological science, art practice, cooking, artistic research, qualitative research, linguistic, visual, spatial, embodied, and phenomenological ways of knowing.
My presentation explored some of what happened as a result and where I am now; what it means for my art practice; how it might be framed as research; and how this all impacts on my identity as an artist.
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