The Creative Reflective Practitioner

Research Through Making and Practice

Linda Candy

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000761528
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Research in Education

The Creative Reflective Practitioner explores research and practice through the eyes of people with a wholehearted commitment to creative work. It reveals what it means to be a reflective creative practitioner, whether working alone, in collaboration with others, with digital technology or doing research, and what we can learn from listening and observing closely. It gives the reader new insights into the fascinating challenge that having a reflective creative mindset can bring.

Creative reflective practice is seen through practitioner ideas and works which have informed the writing at every level, supported by research studies and historical accounts. The practitioners featured in this book represent a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary creative activities producing works in film, music, drama, dance and interactive installations. Their work is innovative, full of new ideas and exciting to experience, offering engagement and challenge for audiences and participants alike. Practitioner interviews give a direct sense of how they see creative practice from the inside. The ways in which these different situations of practice stimulate and facilitate reflection in practice and how we can learn from this are described. Variations of reflective practice are discussed that extend the original concepts proposed by Donald Schön, and a contemporary dimension is added through the role of the digital in creative reflective practice as a tool, mediator, medium and partner.

This book is relevant to people who wish to understand creativity and reflection in practice and how to learn from the practitioners themselves. This includes researchers in any discipline as well as students, arts professionals and practitioners such as artists, curators, designers, musicians, performers, producers and technologists.

1
Reflection, practice and the creative practitioner

In this first chapter, the main themes, the approach and methods are introduced. Creative reflective practice is seen through the perspective of practitioners whose ideas and works have informed the writing at every level. The approach offers a view ‘from the inside’ of practice itself that is both valuable and distinctive. Practitioner interviews are the primary sources of inspiration and guidance for the insights into creative practice and the role of reflection. These are supported by narratives and diaries, research studies and historical accounts. The challenge has been to present a more general perspective of creative reflective practice at the same time as giving space to the individual practitioner voices.

The book explores reflective practice in different contexts: professional, creative, collaborative, digital and research. Professional practice is differentiated from creative practice in terms of the purpose and manner in which the practice is undertaken. Whilst professional and creative practitioners can be both professional and creative, there are differences to be explored and revealed. As will become clear, it is the context − the situation of practice − that influences the nature of reflection in practice, whether working alone or collaboratively.

Creative practice, creative works

People engage in creative acts by simply doing what is natural to them. Activities like drawing, singing, dancing and thinking, are the essentials of creativity that express who we are as human beings. Creative works on the other hand, in the sense of art, take those activities further. For there to be art, a process that explores, reveals and exhibits creative acts and works is necessary. This is a process that creates experiences that may ultimately lead to a change in how we see ourselves as human beings whether as artists or audiences. Viewed this way, the practitioners who have contributed to this book can be seen as ‘artists’ whose ‘works’ pose searching questions and challenge assumptions that reframe existing activities in a potentially transformational way for themselves and for all of us.¹ However, rather than getting tied up in making distinctions between what is creative and what is art, in the discussion throughout this book, creativity is framed within ‘creative practice’ and art is encompassed within ‘creative works’.

Creative practitioners in different fields and disciplines produce ‘works’ that exhibit ‘artistry’, a feature that is found in creative practice more generally and is characterised in a variety of ways. The motivational forces, the private goals and public service demands drive, shape and constrain creative activities and how practitioners respond to new and unexpected situations. There are distinct elements within a life of practice in which the creation of works is central, be they sculptures, images, compositions, films, installations, performances, exhibitions or events.

Creating ‘things’ (in the broadest sense of the word) is the core activity around which many others take place. The creative process also includes reading inspiring books and exploring the potential of new materials and tools, as well as talking with other people who are directly or indirectly involved in the work either in a formal collaboration or in casual encounters. A single focus on the making of artworks can change over time and other kinds of activity take place in parallel. Many practitioners also work in areas that appear, on the face of it, tangential to the creative practice but provide paid employment and space to create. Others work in organisations that afford opportunities to be creative: for example, as project managers or exhibition curators or teachers. Deciding to live on the proceeds of a creative life is not a practical choice for most, however, and there are many different routes to survival without the established career paths available to the professional practitioner. It is the life-long commitment to creative practice that distinguishes the practitioners in this book. That commitment involves pursuing original ideas relentlessly until they reach tangible form as finished works.

Living creative practice usually begins in early years with a natural facility to draw and paint, compose and perform music, dance and sing, and often this leads to encouragement into formal training. The creative practitioners in this book are all characterised by living creatively throughout their lives. Some mentioned being recognised in childhood as having a talent for some kind of artistic pursuit. It raised the question for me when considering how important living a creative life was to them, whether that early talent had raised expectations in themselves and their families that influenced the direction they took later on. Can we recognise an artist by early signs in childhood proficiency? It seems that the quick answer to this is ‘not necessarily’. Many children are very skilled at drawing and painting, but that does not necessarily mean they will be outstanding artists in adulthood, and in any case, proficiency in drawing strikingly accurate portraits or beautiful landscapes does not always presage a life-long pursuit.² Just ‘being good’ at doing something creative is for some practitioners never quite enough. For many, there is a constant search for deeper understanding that generates personal challenges.

The essence of the creative process is in the minutiae of creating, when lines are drawn, sounds are composed, movements performed and tentative ideas emerge. The ideas spring from multiple sources, all of which are widely available to anyone. However, it is being highly alert to the potential of this material and working closely to exploit its properties in a novel way that sets the creative practitioner apart. When trying to understand the creative process as an observer, it soon becomes clear that this is the nub of it all. And yet, it is the hardest part to convey from the practitioner’s perspective – beyond the obvious mechanics. Sometimes during the creative process, the thinking becomes reflective: these moments can happen as a result of external factors such as interruptions or more frequently, deliberate pauses imposed by uncertainty of what to do next. Sometimes, conscious reflection is seen as undesirable because the practitioner is striving for a different state of mind when brain and body work in unison, as in the case of improvisation discussed in Chapter 3 on reflective creative practice. To achieve this, practitioners devise ways of setting aside conscious reflection using techniques devised for that purpose such as rules for drawing. In other cases, creative actions can seem to come almost automatically from deep within, perhaps from emotional or aesthetically charged forces. This condition is very familiar to creative practitioners.

Placing a value on the outcomes of creative practice is often assumed to be the business of the viewer, the buyer, the critic or historian: the creator’s own perspective is less frequently considered. And yet it is on them we depend for achieving originality and quality. They are the first in line to appraise and evaluate the works, although their voices are somewhat muted when it comes to how they go about doing that.

There are many questions that come to mind in trying to understand creative practice from a practitioner point of view including: What frames of reference do artists use to think about the works they make? What do they say to themselves about whether they like what they see once the making process is done? What kind of things are they looking for? Do they have explicit criteria or standards to judge their works? When appraisal takes place, does it involve asking questions about whether the work has qualities that are pleasing or satisfying or challenging? Over time do they establish criteria for appraising all works or is each work judged by a different set of values? For some practitioners developing a way of judging whether a work is good or not arises from the making process itself. If the intention is to create works that express particular ideas or moods, this will mean using particular criteria that will in themselves determine what the work is like. This assumes that the principal judge is the creator but what happens when there is an explicit intention to involve the viewer or audience? If the aim is to make the audience respond in a particular way, what is the effect of unexpected behaviour?

These are some of the questions that are considered throughout this book in the exploration of reflective practice seen through the eyes of creative practitioners and informed by studies of historical and contemporary practices. My aim is to reveal the diverse ways in which practitioners engage in their creative practices and produce extraordinarily imaginative, stimulating and challenging works of many different forms.

How can we better understand the nature of reflective creative practice through the eyes of the practitioner?

Let us consider different ways of viewing the practitioner’s perspective on their practices and works. We can listen to what they say and write about their work in journals and narratives. We can also read accounts carried out by sensitive facilitators: Katharine Kuh and David Sylvester, for example, show us how to tease out the practitioner’s perspective through conversations around the works themselves.³ These are avenues open to anyone who is curious to learn what lies behind the enormously diverse repertoire of creative works that comprise our cultural wealth. Examples of these approaches are described next. This is followed by an introduction to my general approach in writing this book.

***

Intentions, accidents and meaning

From music people accept pure emotion but from art they expect explanation.

These words by Agnes Martin, the great North American painter, are a challenge to the way that some forms of creative works are presented to the public and what is expected of their experience.⁴ I hear what she says every time I enter an exhibition or attend a performance. They remind me to allow myself to look with open eyes and mind so that I can dwell in the experience of the moment instead of rushing to wonder how to interpret it in the manner I learnt through training and teaching. Too often, when we visit exhibitions we are offered audio guides to provide commentary on the works as we move through the show, encouraging us to listen first rather than look at the visual images. By contrast, when we go to a music or dance performance, we embrace the experience directly and feel the sensations of sound and movement and how they evoke emotion within us. Experiencing the art and ‘explaining’ it, are both important, of course, and once the creators give their work to the world to experience, it becomes open to interpretation by all. Some people focus on the works and their meaning, others want to know more about why and how they came to be.

For an artist of pure abstraction like Agnes Martin, the general desire for ‘explanation’ is problematic. Her beautifully executed paintings, the ultimate expression in surface simple form and colour, are designed using complicated mathematics as their organising structure and painted by hand – an exacting and immersive method. The absence of representation in her painting leaves little room for a narrative to be constructed about its meaning. This opens the door to explanation by analysis of how the work is made- a film of Martin painting is there to help.⁵ But knowing what it is made of and how the material was used does not necessarily offer the viewer a better way of experiencing it, nor does jumping to conclusions about what it ‘means’. If, instead, we resist the urge to find an explanation and see the art work as a path to our inner responses, something that can unlock our senses and spirits, we have made a crucial step towards achieving an understanding of the deeper wells of the art experience. In viewing creative work in this way, we can begin to see that our experience does not have to be shaped by symbolic significance, historical and cultural narratives, at least in the first instance. Our immediate ‘understanding’ can reside principally within our capacity to experience the art directly.

For the writer about creative practice, this first step to understanding by way of experiencing the works does not take you far enough, however. There is a need to find another avenue that reveals the nature of creative practice beyond ‘explaining’ its outcomes. One approach is to change the main focus from the artefact to the artist in a quest to come closer to the thinking and making process. An alternative to interrogating the artwork is to listen to conversations between artists talking or writing about their works or responding to questions from adroit observers like Katharine Kuh and David Sylvester.

Kuh’s approach to understanding the nature of art and art making in her 1960 book The Artist Voice, is to give more space to the words of the practitioners than she allows herself. In the short commentary she provides, she highlights some differences in the way critics have interpreted the work of the celebrated modern artists she interviews. She draws attention to a disparity between those interpretations of artistic intention made by commentators and what artists themselves say regarding intention recollected well after the art has been made. For example, there are those who say that Edward Hopper’s art is related to loneliness and nostalgia: in response Hopper says: ‘If they are, it isn’t at all conscious’.⁶

From Kuh’s account, we learn that the artists come to their work from inside themselves and when audiences see the results ‘from the outside’ so to speak, there is no reason to assume that these realities coincide. Few artists articulate their intentions prior to making works but, when time has allowed for observers to make claims about the work, faced with these viewpoints, they sometimes feel obliged to respond by providing an ‘intention’ of their own. Many artists will say they expect their artworks to speak for themselves and prefer to avoid talking about their intentions. Those who write about their work do so in ways that are important to them but to others can seem tangential to the art itself. Piet Mondrian was deeply interested in theosophy and wrote about that subject.⁷ Paul Klee left a more practical legacy by developing a theory of colours that was intended to help other artists. He wrote about using complementary colours to balance each other out, and how integrating the bold tones of yellow and violet together into an artwork was difficult, a source of valuable advice that is now available online.⁸

What is meant by the word ‘intention’ in relation to creative work can be difficult to pin down and few artists use that word, although they may talk about ‘my idea’, or ‘desire’ or indeed ‘vision’ (this last usually with a self-conscious smile at allowing such a seemingly pompous word to pass their lips). In creative practice, it is perhaps more accurate to think of ‘intention’ as an initial, often vague or loosely conceived aim, goal or objective that evolves as a result of unplanned changes of direction. Intention may in that way actually reside in the thoughts, perceptions and feelings that emerge unanticipated from the process itself almost as if by accident. Experiencing art as the artist intended is possibly the least likely expectation that most people have. Because our ways of seeing art have been mediated by education and cultural expectations, many people are nervous about their capacity to handle the simple question, ‘What did you think of that?’ This often leads to a search for understanding based upon the commentaries of experts in the field whose views ...