You are an artist! It’s not about an image or a finished product. It’s about acknowledging the layers: the depth of who you are, within your process. (Sarah Pirrie)
For the past 10 years I have been developing a growing body of internationally recognised art-based research in the emerging field of Practice-led Theological Inquiry. My work addresses the nature and significance of art, both made and received, in the process of healing and the experience of living with illness and in healing
So what is, Reflexive Studio Practice-led research?
The imaginative and intellectual work undertaken by artists is a form of research capable of creating knowledge that can help us understand the world we live in and how we learn to make sense of it.[1] Reflexive studio practice is a qualitative method of inquiry employed by artists to systematically consider and explore a question that has captured their attention. The artist is engaged with multiple levels of experience, welcoming seemingly disparate ideas into the practice and requiring them to wait until the ways in which they are connected become evident. This form of inquiry typically involves the production of a cohesive body of artwork and an accompanying exegesis that is primarily in written form.[2] The success of the art-making practice is often illuminated by the degree to which the process sheds new light upon the questions that have been posed and explored.
[1] Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005). xi.
[2] Cora Marshall, “A Research Design for Studio-Based Research in Art,” Teaching Artist Journal 8, no. 2 (2010). 77-87.
In the pages that follow you can track some of the research that I have been conducting in the studio over recent years.
Unless something goes wrong, 2023
Reimagining person-centred care – in the public square, 2022
What is left of the studio in the absence of a room to share, 2021
Risk, rupture and change, 2021
Drawing in church and drawing in to joy, 2019
Living and healing in faith communities, 2019
Healing in the absence of a cure, 2018
Mystery, Becoming, Identity and Desire, 2015
Dr Libby Byrne, Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Honorary Research Associate, University of Divinity, Whitley College, Kew East, Australia. Email: E.Byrne@latrobe.edu.au Orchid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3306-0929