Amateur, professional and proto‐practices: a contribution to ‘the proficiency debate’

Abstract

With increasing disciplinary interest in amateur practice, and growing geographical use of artistic practice as a research method, ideas of proficiency are increasingly coming under scrutiny. In this paper, I explore and unsettle different classifications of proficiency in relation to empirical data from practice‐based research with art practitioners. I focus on the role and nature of experimentation within artistic practices across different levels of proficiency, and suggest that this leads to increasingly individualised practices over time, which can be characterised by features from outside the conventions of a field (proto‐practices) irrespective of formal attributions of proficiency. I suggest an alternative understanding of proficiency that characterises the practice rather than the practitioner in terms of experimental style rather than skill, which has theoretical and methodological implications for geographical research into both amateur and artistic practices.