Creative Practitioners Research Articles

Creativity and the Trauma of COVID‐19: How do Foundation Level Art and Design Students Navigate a Liminal Journey during a Pandemic?

This article explores the impact of COVID‐19 on the physical learning spaces of art and design students to consider how this has informed and influenced the creative process, emotional resilience and engagement with learning during this difficult year of restrictions. More specifically, it draws on the experiences of students in a Foundation Art and Design programme in a Further Education college in the North of England as a case study. As a transitional year between Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE), this programme is designed to be transformative in terms of theoretical knowledge, practical skills and shaping student identities through ‘becoming’ creative practitioners. Concepts of liminality and liminal spaces provide a lens through which to offer an account of the nature and scope of these transformative experiences over the past year. As an accidental ethnography (Levitan et al. 2017), aspects discussed suggest that whilst COVID‐19 had a significant negative impact on the experiences and progression of this cohort of students, there have also been many positive outcomes suggesting that this particular programme has maintained its transformative ambitions.

PERCEPTION OF CREATIVE ARTS PRACTITIONERS ON THE USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR CREATIVE PROJECTS AMONG CREATIVE ARTS STUDENTS IN INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER LEARNING

Innovation and continuous development of digital technologies have brought significant changes to learning. The use of digital technologies allows accessibility to a vast array of information and provides students with the opportunities to learn and grow in different ways. While the Malaysian government has constantly put in huge investments for developing Information Communication Technology (ICT) facilities in higher learning institutions to prepare students for new technologies and ‘new’ workplaces, information which focus on creative arts students’ digital competency in staying relevant to creative arts is still limited. This paper aims to explore the use of digital technologies by creative arts students for creative project development. This study employed qualitative methodology where in-depth interview was conducted with five well-known Malaysian creative arts practitioners. Perceptions and views of creative practitioners on creative arts students’ digital competency are gathered and analysed. While students in this day and age are known as ‘digital natives’, creative arts practitioners have different views on creative arts students’ digital competency in creative project development. Majority of the informants noted that digital technologies are helpful for creative arts students, but they also expressed their concerns on the challenges faced by the students. The interviews revealed that practitioners associated several issues in students’ creative projects, such as building collaboration, obtaining constructive and helpful information, as well as identifying goals and copyright concerns. The data collection outcome will enable policymakers and practitioners to identify actions that should be taken to prepare creative arts students with better skills, knowledge and attitudes for meaningful participation in the digital world. This article is written to generate and facilitate discussion on how creative arts students’ digital competency can be further improved for productivity and efficiency in accomplishing their tasks.

Remaking Home: Creative Practice as Part of Domesticity’s Changing Significance

ABSTRACT While the home has a history of being overlooked as a site of great social impact, this is clearly shifting as it becomes a site for diverse and significant social participation. Technological connectivity is reshaping the household towards an increasingly public life, remarkable for a domain that until relatively recently had been thought of primarily in terms of privatised care and leisure. This article brings together literature from creative industries, feminist and new domesticity fields with empirical data from interviews with home-based creative practitioners to generate insights into new work models, the coincidence of paid work and unpaid care work, and creative work at home as a locus for connecting to surrounding communities and natural environments. These lived examples are explored as signs of an altering domestic space where paid work and non-economic values are more balanced and the home itself is moving from the periphery towards the centre of social life.

Contributors

Contributors

Regional Innovation in Arts Provision Spawned by COVID-19: "It Became a Lifeline for a Lot of People Who Are Stuck at Home".

Although the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and cultural sector due to the closure of galleries, museums, arts venues, and other cultural assets represents a significant health risk, new opportunities for arts and cultural engagement have arisen. Interviews with 24 representatives including service providers and creative practitioners from 15 arts and cultural organizations within the Liverpool City Region were conducted. The aim was to examine the impact of COVID-19 on arts and cultural provision and on organizations and people providing these services, as well as to understand the perceptions of service providers and practitioners of the effects on those whom arts and cultural organizations serve, including those who would usually access arts through formal healthcare routes (e.g., through collaboration with health partners). Interview data were analyzed using framework analysis. Four overarching themes were identified: Response: Closures, adaptations, and new directions; Challenges of online provision; Value of online provision; and the future of the arts. The arts and cultural sector has innovated rapidly, notably with accelerated digitalisation. Alternative provision has been “a lifeline” for vulnerable groups, such as those with mental health difficulties. Arts organizations have been most effective in reaching vulnerable, isolated and disadvantaged populations when they have worked in close collaboration with health and social care providers. The implementation of hybrid provision is an important move forward for the sector in light of our findings that alternative modes of provision are advantageous additions to service as usual. Given the increasing concerns about the mental health sequelae of the pandemic in the UK, arts and cultural engagement could play a pivotal role in the future recovery period.

Exegesis as manifesto

ABSTRACT There is an increasing need for creative practitioners in higher education to justify their creative works as measurable research outputs. The impact, worth, relevance and contribution to new knowledge of such works is evaluated by tools such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the U.K., or the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA), and each creative work, or Non-Traditional Research Output (NTRO) is to be accompanied by a REF or ERA research statement in order to be counted as research. Similarly, any creative work (or artefact) presented for a Higher Degree in the U.K. and Australia, New Zealand and Canada needs an accompanying exegesis or critical component, a contextual declaration that justifies and grounds the work in a theoretical, historical context of artistic practice. These ERA/REF statements, and especially the exegetical component, can be seen as a form of manifesto, a declaration of the artist's intention and outcome. Equating the exegesis (or REF/ERA statement) as manifesto frees the creative practitioner from a prescriptive, mechanistic account of the work's impact and towards a more performative declaration of artistic endeavour. The exegesis as manifesto allows the artist in the academy to declare themselves, create presence and subvert traditional discourse binaries of academic/creative.

Decolonising design practices and research in unceded Australia: reframing design-led research methods

Much of design teaching, learning and research in Australia is determined by Eurocentric traditions and the ongoing colonial project. In this context Indigenous Peoples continue to experience erasure, silencing and appropriation of practices and knowledges. The Visual Communication Design Program, situated in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), is committed to disrupting this trajectory. In this article we describe an immersive model that seeks to challenge the role of the design educator, creative practitioner and researcher on unceded Gadigal Lands in the city of Sydney, Australia. We reflect on the challenges of facilitating Visual Communication Design and Emergent Practices, for a third iteration as an online studio experience, during COVID-19 in the context of the climate crisis, bushfires and Black Lives Matter. This iteration is the result of four years of deep collaboration with local First Nation Elders, Indigenous scholars and practitioners. The research-focused studio for 180 final-year visual communication design students is led by Local Elders, cultural and research advisers with the support of studio leaders. The consideration of design-led research methods through a process that infuses Indigenous research principles builds on the longitudinal research into the role of the emplaced designer in Indigenous-led projects on Country. Our studio, titled ‘In Our Own Backyard’, provides students with strength-based design capabilities and understandings of the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples Rights (UNDRIP), Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights (ICIP) and the Australian Indigenous Design Charter. As a studio experience, the aim is to create conditions which spark possibilities for re-orientation towards relational and respectful negotiation of difference, and the capacity to action Indigenous self-determination in complex practitioner scenarios.

Nocturnal Imaginaries

How do the multi-sensory experiences and aesthetics of nocturnal places enable us to reimagine how those environments might be? In addition, how do those who inhabit the urban night through their labour engage with its aesthetics and develop knowledge of specific geographies? This paper draws upon ongoing autoethnographic fieldwork including encounters and exchanges with a range of night workers and creative practitioners based in the city of Manchester, UK, to explore the entanglements between light and dark, work and respite, creativity and place. This paper proposes that understanding how nightscapes are used differently by various people is valuable to shaping how they may evolve. This is of critical importance if we are to develop wider and deeper knowledges of the situated, relational, and practised nature of the city after dark, and be able to rethink and reclaim it as a time and place that considers accessibility and equity.

‘It was hard before and it’s even harder now’

This article offers reflections on the impact of COVID-19 on the arts and entertainment industries in Australia, with a specific focus on the music industry. The pandemic has placed added financial and psychological strain on the industry’s workers and performing artists, many of whom were already struggling emotionally with financial instability and job insecurity prior to the pandemic. The federal government’s inadequate financial support for arts workers, and its failure to protect Australia’s cultural and economic assets of live music and entertainment during the pandemic, are discussed. There is a need for a COVID-19 recovery plan that addresses the impacts of the pandemic and pre-existing issues of financial instability as well as the federal government’s undervaluing and underfunding of arts industries in Australia. The article is written from the perspective of the authors’ personal experiences as creative practitioners and researchers in the creative industries, and is based on media articles and research reports published prior to and during the pandemic (2018–2021).

Rethinking creative research methods in response to COVID-19: Creating a remote research kit.

The 'Sensing Spaces of Healthcare: Rethinking the NHS Hospital' project involves working with National Health Service (NHS) staff, patients and visitors to explore their experiences of hospital environments. Over the course of the project, creative approaches centred on art-based and design-led practices are employed to research people's experiences. Such approaches often involve working closely with participants during sessions. As COVID-19 infection control measures have affected in-person research, it has been necessary to develop and adopt alternative low-contact approaches. This article presents the development of a remote creative research kit designed to be used without a researcher/practitioner present. The kit has been developed through work with creative practitioners, hospital arts organizations, patient and public contributors and learning from public engagement events. The remote creative research kit has led to rethinking and reimagining the ways in which such approaches may be of benefit more broadly in healthcare settings.

Communicating efficacy: How the IPCC, scientists, and other communicators can facilitate adaptive responses to climate change without compromising on policy neutrality

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopts a solution-oriented approach to communicating climate change, but does not advocate any specific mitigation or adaptation options. While this helps to maintain a neutral stance in relation to policy advocacy, this approach may also create reluctance amongst IPCC scientists to communicate affective information about climate change, which could help to facilitate behavioural and societal transitions to manage climate risks. Research from the social sciences demonstrates that communications can influence cognitive, affective, and behavioural engagement with climate change. Specifically, there is ample evidence that people’s sense of ‘efficacy’ — beliefs about personal or collective capacity to respond, and effectiveness of responses — must be appealed to sufficiently alongside communication about the threats posed by climate change, to help facilitate mitigation and adaptation responses. This essay draws on a range of research findings to argue that the IPCC’s scientists and communications personnel can nurture efficacy beliefs about climate change, without compromising on values of policy neutrality, or undermining public trust. Specifically, the essay draws on communications strategies related to vicarious learning, mastery experiences, highlighting success stories, and use of language and imagery, which have been shown to increase efficacy. The essay has implications for how IPCC scientists and the organisation as a whole engages with a range of audiences, and suggestions also have relevance for other communicators of climate change, such as governments, academics, journalists, health professionals, community leaders, and creative practitioners.

Promoting Water Efficiency and Hydrocitizenship in Young People’s Learning about Drought Risk in a Temperate Maritime Country

Engaging young citizens with drought risk and positive water behaviours is essential in domestic water demand management within the wider climate crisis. This paper evaluates a new research-informed, picture book—‘DRY: The Diary of a Water Superhero’—that explores UK drought. The book’s development was underpinned by research within the Drought Risk and You (DRY) project. The book’s concept and storyline were co-produced by an interdisciplinary team, including a creative practitioner. This focused on key themes: drought definitions and types; drought myths; adaptation and young people’s (YP) agency. Characters and storyline were co-created to promote YP’s autonomy as change agents, and to encourage intergenerational and community learning. This paper evaluates the book from three perspectives: of YP, trainee teachers (TT) and teachers. Emergent themes are triangulated: drought as a sensitive issue, subject knowledge and changes in behaviour, and YP’s misconceptions about drought and place. TT also contemplated their improved subject knowledge and barriers to engaging with positive water behaviours. Teachers reflected on classroom use of the book, prior experiences about teaching drought, curriculum context and st/age of YP engaged. This paper reflects on how these insights feed into school practice and water industry outreach, in developing effective learning resources that promote a valuing of water, behaviour change and wider hydrocitizenship among YP and their communities.

Critical Co-Design and Agency of the Real

This article explores research that was undertaken in a PhD project that investigated the creation and effectiveness of Critical Co-Design as a methodology. In particular, it explores how this methodology enabled successful outcomes from a workshop that was conducted with young Indigenous Australian women. The methodology and workshop aimed to create a platform for the researcher to work alongside Indigenous peoples in Australia in order to create mutually beneficial ways of working. Here, the authors reflect upon this research and postulate the importance of privileging Indigenous ways of knowing as a way of shifting approaches to design thinking. By examining the interconnectedness between these Indigenous ways of knowing and design thinking epistemology, the authors offer a paradigm for design thinking that engages the politics and the broader promise of (de)coloniality. This article reconfigures how design scholars and creative practitioners ascribe value to Indigeneity and practice by positioning Indigenous ontologies at the forefront of design thinking in general.

Leveraging collaboration: script development processes in low budget Australian feature filmmaking

ABSTRACT For independent Australian filmmakers working outside traditional funding sources, the script often provides the sole means of raising finance to take the film into production. In the case of the low budget Australian feature films Pimped ([2018], “Directed by David Barker. Playground Films.” Apple TV) and Watch the Sunset ([2017], “Directed by Tristan Barr and Michael Gosden.” Barr Lipp Productions. STAN), however, script development was elevated and sustained by the filmmakers resisting a rigid adherence to writing, directing, and producing roles and opening up input from actors. This research employs case study analysis supported by interviews with the writers/director of Pimped and co-writer of Watch the Sunset to examine the script development processes that led to the successful completion and distribution of two low budget Australian feature films. Born out of the necessity to self-fund development, Pimped and Watch the Sunset provide insight into script development processes that value flexibility and receptiveness to the contributions of creative practitioners traditionally divided by above and below-the-line roles and exemplify how creative collaboration can facilitate successful development of low budget films operating beyond the constraints of screen funding bodies.

Wuthigrai Siriphon: Highlighting tradition

The innovative output of Wuthigrai Siriphon draws on his Thai heritage and extensive knowledge and practical experience of regional textile craft techniques. But whilst his work often references historical forms and colour palettes, his studio textiles are far from staid, exhibiting a modernist sensibility frequently verging on the spectacular. Securely pigeonholing such a creative practitioner is always problematic, but any attempt at categorization is made even more difficult so once the viewer acknowledges the layered nature of South East Asian textile practice. This is a region where traditional understandings of fabric and colour still compete with modernist perspectives on design, material selection and colour application and rural craft weavers continue to make a living alongside industrial factories. Wuthigrai and his ouvre is a product of this complex and vibrant material culture, highlighting tradition whilst retaining its contemporary relevance.

Extra-interior

This article responds to the challenges facing creative practitioners whose work engages with aspects of ‘public’ provoked by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The temporary physical closures of established creative infrastructures such as galleries, museums and festivals have disrupted the traditional dynamics of production and reception. This presents both challenges and opportunities for artists and designers to develop new forms of creative engagement with public audiences and spaces. The confinement of people to a 5-kilometre radius during extended lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia in 2020 prompted a reflection on the opportunities of the ‘local’ as a particular context for creative practice. This restriction imposed a perimeter that brought people’s day- to-day lives into an enclosed loop and produced what could be thought of as a form of interior. In this period, ordinary domestic and local spaces — for example the home office or studio gained manifold functions for many creative practitioners, including as a space for self- initiated public presentations of their work. In several cases, windows, balconies, and doorways became thresholds for interaction with passers-by. This self-broadcasting situation provided an opportunity for practitioners to play an active role in cultivating new relations and forms of publicity from a localised setting. In this article, these shifts in practice are investigated through a critical reflection on a series of spatial interventions within a street-facing window of a studio space in Brunswick, Melbourne, an inner-city suburb where residential streets mix with spaces of industrial and creative production. The liminal space of the window became a way to speculate on the concept of thresholds between diverse conditions, including public and private, art and the everyday, urban and local, and interior and exterior. These investigations engaged with a ‘makeshift’ mode of practice, leading to the production of extra-ordinary interior conditions.

Life Disrupted and Regenerated: Coping With the ‘New Normal’ Creative Arts in the Time of Coronavirus

A global pandemic caused by COVID-19 virus since December 2019 has developed into a fearsome situation more than any common global contagion. In combating COVID-19 worldwide, governments instigated a precautionary cordon sanitaire in various degrees. Live music, cinema and film festivals were inevitably cancelled, causing artists to become alienated from their audience. This paper aims to illuminate how practitioners of the creative industry cope with the drastic disruption due to the COVID-19 outbreak as well as the means of regenerating ‘life’, which refers to that of a creative artist in a narrower sense, and to that of the industry in a broader sense. Adopting a combined methodology of autoethnography and virtual ethnography, the authors explore their encounters with the informants and the development of the creative arts scene. The subject of disruption and regeneration in the creative arts industry is approached through feasible methods and tools they could render in this unique lived experience. They hope to construct a view containing some perspectives on the transcendence of creative practitioners from the disruption to the survival of the pandemic’s impact, as well as the regeneration of how creative arts would persevere in the ‘new normal’ of the post-COVID-19 era.

\u201cWe are not hard to reach, but we may find it hard to trust\u201d \u2026. Involving and engaging \u2018seldom listened to\u2019 community voices in clinical translational health research: a social innovation approach

BackgroundPublic involvement in clinical translational research is increasingly recognised as essential for relevant and reliable research. Public involvement must be diverse and inclusive to enable research that has the potential to reach those that stand to benefit from it the most, and thus address issues of health equity. Several recent reports, however, indicate that public involvement is exclusive, including in its interactions with ethnic groups. This paper outlines a novel community-led methodology – a community sandpit – to address the inclusion of ethnic groups in public involvement in research, reports on its evaluation, findings, legacy and impact.MethodsThrough detailed planning – thinking through and taking into account all stakeholders perspectives in the planning and design of the sandpit, relationship-building, co-design and co-delivery between the Public Programmes team based at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust and the Greater Manchester Black and Minority Ethnic Network - the community sandpit was held in July 2018.ResultsFifteen community organisations took part in the two-day event, as well as six researchers, and six creative practitioners. Six community-based partnership projects were seed-funded; four of these received additional funding from other sources also.ConclusionsEvaluation of the sandpit showed the format to be well-received by all: it levelled power relationships between community organisations, health researchers and research infrastructure; it developed capacity amongst researchers about the accessibility, role and potential of community organisations. Described as “not another community seed fund” by community partners, the sandpit offered community partners, equitable avenues for collaboration within Greater Manchester translational research and led to the formation of the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Research Advisory Group (BRAG Vocal Website information, - https://www.wearevocal.org/opportunities/black-asian-and-minority-ethnic-research-advisory-group-brag/, 2021). The method has the potential to be replicated elsewhere to support inclusive public involvement in research and inclusive research.

Creative Practice through Teleconferencing in the Era of COVID-19

Creative Practice through Teleconferencing in the Era of COVID-19

Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen

Embracing Liminality and "Staying with the Trouble" on (and off) Screen