What is Artography?

Returning from a Christmas break, I am starting the New Year full of enthusiasm for 'The Public Laundry' project as this research project is becoming known. I am finding this to be a helpful short-hand when I talk about the research, rather than the somewhat clunky official title of 'Research practices as sites of research culture: The barriers to, and enablers of, research identified through creative workshops that support researchers to explore research problems'...

Now that we are in the New Year, my thoughts have been about the research method of 'artography', often represented as 'A/r/tography', to represent the different positions adopted by the researcher in using the method. In an earlier post, I explained that the research project will be generating research data through creative workshops that are designed to support researchers to reflect upon research problems using collage and images, using a method called 'collage inquiry'.

Alongside this, I will be making work in response to the themes generated through the collage inquiry, and in response to the research process. Rita Irwin has written about and researched the artography method in great depth, and there is a very interesting blog that functions as an archive for mapping artography related publications, called simply 'A/r/tography'.

This method generates data from a researcher-as-artist in response to a research phenomenon. It invites conversation between visual ways of knowing (through artmaking) and writing through reflective writing. The method has been described as ‘a methodology of embodiment’ ​(La Jevic and Springgay, 2008)​ because it represents the physical engagement of artist-researchers, through making, with the world. Artography has also been described as a ‘border' methodology’ ​(Wright, 2023)​ because it implies positional fluidity in the doing of research, between artist, researcher, and researcher as participant. It also implies fluidity in different forms of knowing, drawing upon both visual and written texts. The process of ‘border crossing’ holds the potential to humanize, rather than abstract and classify, human experience ​(Wright, 2023)​.  

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​Artography raises similar ethical issues to autoethnography. Like artography, autoethnography recognizes self-experience as a social phenomenon valuable and worthy of examination. However, ethical considerations in autoethnography are not confined to the researcher, because writing autoethnographic accounts necessarily involves reference to others ​(Edwards, 2021)​. LaJevic and Springay (2008) have argued that artography problematises ethics, because it represents a transition from ‘understanding ethics as epistemological (what do I need to know about the other)’ to understanding ethics as ‘relationality’. They suggest that this creates a tension between an ethic of the self, where one seeks to be authentic in one’s recollections, and the relational ethic associated with depictions of others in artographic work. 

These observations have caused me to reflect upon my own position in artography. On the question of the ethic of the self, what decisions shape my choice to include my creative work in the research? What is authentic? Am I overly concerned about the aesthetic value of the work I create, or of its relevance to the research? Furthermore, are there very tight distinctions between work I create in general, and work that arises directly from my engagement in the research project?

These questions are prompted by an unfortunate (or fortunate?) chain of events in the run up to the Christmas holiday. A week prior to Christmas week, my husband and I decided to take a break down by the coast. In the rush to leave, I left my sketch book at home. Feeling somewhat bereft, I sought out a small art shop that had a great selection of pen and ink supplies. All week I 'doodled' rather than drew or painted. There is something about the monotone quality of black ink on white paper that draws attention to shape, form and pattern. I am now compelled to explore this in more depth. However, it left me with a conundrum, which is this: If I am not consciously engaging with the themes of the research, but producing art then is the art relevant to the research?

After reading an interesting piece about doodling as 'thinking', I have concluded that it is directly relevant. The doodles seem to mirror the early stages of research when you try to get to grips with the literature, and create shape and form relevant to your research context and questions. As I doodled I allowed my 'end of term brain' to drift and sift through a whole range of things (the research project among them). So artography is not just about ways of representing or exploring the themes that emerge from research data, it is a method that is intimately connected to the research process, and blurs the distinctions between art/life/research. Much of what I doodled was coast and sea related but this was not deliberate suggesting a blurring of the conscious/unconscious in an apparently arbitrary activity of doodling. I recognise that my work moves through different styles and phases and so I am interested to see how the work changes and emerges in response to the first workshop with researchers in February.

Seagrass

Blustery Sea

Mussels

References:
​Edwards, J. (2021) ‘Ethical Autoethnography: Is it Possible?’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, pp. 1–6. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406921995306. 

​La Jevic, L. and Springgay, S. (2008) ‘A/r/tography as an Ethics of Embodiment: Visual Journals in Preservice Education’, Qualitative Inquiry, 14(1), pp. 67–89. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800407304509. 

​Wright, L.C. (2023) ‘Reintegration as Border Pedagogy: A Female Text’, Qualitative Inquiry [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004231176087.