Portrait of an Artist as Collaborator: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of an Artist.

Ian Hocking

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00251

Abstract

The subjective experience of being an artist was examined using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), focusing on the perspective of the artist but interpreted by me, a psychologist, from my perspective as an artistic collaborator. Building upon a literature that has hitherto focused on clinical, elderly, or vulnerable participants, I interpreted superordinate themes of Process (Constraint, Playfulness, Movement) and Identity (The Ill-Defined Artist, Becoming, Mixing Identities, Choosing an Identity, Calling, Collaboration, and Outsider). These themes are broadly similar to the existing literature, but emphasise identity while de-emphasising self reflection and the need to become an “insider.”

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
The present study looked at the way in which one contemporary artist sees herself and her work, taken from the perspective of her collaborator
I’ve broken down identity into several elements, the first of which is the ill-defined artist: what we mean by art, artist, and creativity are questions that Jane touched upon throughout her interviews and our collaboration

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Building upon a literature that has hitherto focused on clinical, elderly, or vulnerable participants, I interpreted superordinate themes of Process (Constraint, Playfulness, Movement) and Identity (The Ill-Defined Artist, Becoming, Mixing Identities, Choosing an Identity, Calling, Collaboration, and Outsider). These themes are broadly similar to the existing literature, but emphasise identity while de-emphasising self reflection and the need to become an “insider.”. The positivist approach, which characterises much of contemporary psychology, argues that observation and experiment are the only sources of substantive knowledge (Colman, 2015). In the case of creativity, if the parameters of a creative task are set by experimenters—and the motivational and emotional aspects creativity are rendered

Methods

Results

Conclusion