Thinking of Place iii brings artists together to reflect on geographical culture, exchange stories and reflect on themes of story and myth through the spectrum of contemporary printmaking. The international collaboration has extended vital debates around how practice-based research is measured.
Researchers
- Dr Catherine Baker
- Jennifer Wright
- Jonnie Turpie
- Lucy Parris
- Taiba Ahktar
Research background
Thinking of Place iii is the evolution of a 2014 printmaking project which involved collaborations with five print groups from Australia and New Zealand and is still on tour at various sites across the world
Thinking of Place iii project seeks to build on this success by exploring heritage and invoking cultural exchange through contemporary printmaking. As an artist/researcher in Printmaking Dr Catherine Baker was approached by the organisers to develop a second UK group of five artists interested in Printmaking research to be involved in the project.
Research aims
The overarching theme for Thinking of Place iii invites artists to invoke a legend, myth, story or an aspect of ancestral heritage in relation to their personal identification with geography and environment. Cultural associations with concepts of land, country, colonisation and collective memories that adhere to places are thus layered in potentially complex ways. The international collaboration that forms Thinking of Place iii represents individual responses to both specific localities and shared cultural legacies.
The project constitutes an ambitious cultural exchange, involving groups from Argentina, Australia (x3), Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Guam, New Zealand (x2), Turkey, United Kingdom (x2) and United States of America (x3).
The impacts that a project of this scale is difficult to measure due to it size and ambition, however the sharing of practice within and beyond the global print research community adds to the crucial international dialogue around research in arts practice and how knowledge is formed and shared through making.
Research methods
There are 95 artists from across the world involved in producing artistic outcomes using Printmaking methodologies that explore its diverse traditional and contemporary possibilities. They are unified by the conceptual basis for the individual components as well as size and format though methodological approaches will be highly individual. There is a lead coordination team in Australia with each group having a dedicated coordinator. The developmental work is shared via various formats electronically and a substantial catalogue publication is under development that will capture the final outcomes from all 95 artists plus a website is also under construction.
Outcomes
The work produced contributes to the growing global discourse around collaboration in arts practice extending vital debates around how practice-based research is measured. Practice-based research provides an insight into artistic investigation that seeks an original intervention cultivated through curiosity as an essential way of thinking and doing and as such it demands us to think about its impact in far broader, richer terms.
The project will be shown at various international venues from 2020 onwards and will be part of IMPACT 11 in Hong Kong in 2021 and the Thinking of Place iii Facebook page features project updates and visuals captured throughout the project.