Early morning flight on Friday from Bergen to Oslo to give a lecture at the National Academy of the Arts (KHIO). Gave a presentation about my PhD research and answered questions about its process and progress. Doing doctoral research can be very lonely - you are after all, by the very nature of the project, unearthing new knowledge and journeying into previously undocumented spaces, creating new understandings - there won’t be many (any?) who have examined the particular bit of your field before. Many times I wondered if I would be able to complete - to make sense of all I was discovering - did it all fit together? How to distill it into something coherent? At other times I wondered about the very the notion of it ever becoming a PhD - was it all just an illusion, emperors new clothes and all that. Maybe my research wasn’t that original after all, maybe it was all nonsense anyway? Talking to a few others who had completed similar research - Neil Brownsword and Damon Moon amongst them - I found that these feelings are common. In my audience on Friday I found others experiencing similar self doubts.

In spite of the fact that ceramics - in many guises - has played a significant role in human culture for thousands of years, its place as a visual art form within ‘The Academy’ is only recently won. So its important that the field of contemporary ceramics builds upon its historical, theoretical and contextual base. Research within academia is in its infancy, indeed all visual arts research including an element of practice is relatively new - the field is confusing, disputed and does not exude confidence.

Elvis Costello famously pronounced that writing about music was akin to ‘dancing about architecture’ (quote courtesy of Neil Brownsword). The pressure to conform to existent methodologies designed for other disciplines has resulted in the creation of some imitative routes, where artwork functions to test new techniques. Here in the worst case scenarios artistic research becomes the servant of a technique or is simply used for material testing. In other cases artistic research becomes overtly and obsessively self reflective - positing processes that only illuminate the specific body of artistic work undertaken. This may be beneficial for the artist involved - but where is the new knowledge, the new ways of seeing and understanding, where is the communication with the wider ‘academy’?

In order for artistic research to be meaningful and valuable it must be able to withstand critical scrutiny - not only from within the visual arts, but also from those in other fields. Research findings need to be articulated in a way that can be understood, they need to communicate visually and textually - and in so doing affirm the unique nature of artistic research. Although I’m quite sure its not perfect, I do believe my PhD submission - artwork, exhibition and textual thesis - manages to make that synthesis. As well as the institutional support from tutors Steve Dixon and Jane Webb I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my friend Amy Gogarty for her engaging, supportive, and critical dialogues (mostly by email), and to Aslaug Nyrnes for her illuminating research on Rhetoric and Artistic Research which provided the key to unlock an important window on my own working processes.

When I first wrote my little handbook Ceramics and Print one of the main drivers was the feeling that people should’t have endlessly to ‘re-invent the wheel’, so I attempted to create a text which for the first time outlined the core processes involved in ceramic printing - enabling others to build on basic information and develop new methodologies and ways of working. Today when visual arts research is still (relatively) in its infancy its frustrating that so few PhD submissions are readily/easily available. Research advances when we are able to build on existent findings, but if these are elusive and hidden, advances will be slow. Institutions hosting PhDs should make sure that research outcomes are as easy as possible to access - the traditional  ‘black book’  needs to be supplemented with digital alternatives. So, when all the T’s are crossed and the i’s dotted, it is my intention to make my findings (as far as possible) available digitally. Although I passed my viva exam in early December, the award of PhD is subject to my making ‘minor revisions and corrections’ to text. When its all done and accepted I’ll post digital publication details on my blog...

Anyway, a very good day at KHIO - really enjoyed talking with staff and students, seeing the Academy. Great company and hospitality from Ole Lislerud and Marian Heyerdahl.

More from Oslo another day