Efflorescence: how art transforms research

In these challenging times of devastating social and environmental injustices, academic research is more crucial than ever, but only research that is in touch with the shifting, messy, complexity of the contemporary world and committed to more equitable, symbiotic forms of co-evolvement; art practice can contribute to such research and can transform it. This chapter draws on posthumanist concepts to explore the untapped potentialities of the PhD in art practice. Erin Manning’s concept of artfulness is explored for its generative and enlivening effect, attending to the details of how art comes into being, artfulness encourages the artist-researcher to remain open to the processes of practising, allowing art to evolve and encourage encounters with the intricacies of the more-than world without expectations or assumptions, to expand notions of self and to acknowledge relationality through lively entanglements and to seek rigour through the unfurlings of the material and discursive that is art. Drawing on the work of four of my PhD art research students, I show the range of inventiveness that can emerge from such scholarship; Jennifer’s devastatingly moving stories, Laurie’s brilliant fieldwork experiments which meld science and art, Sian’s dynamic nonrepresentational practice and Kate’s quietly persuasive, careful activism. This is slow research; a commitment of time that allows practice to flow, to accrete, to proliferate according to its own temporal rhythms. Finally, I relate an encounter with Erin Manning that has inspired a hopefulness in learning as a shared practice of mutual affiliation.