You may already have a clear idea of what your ‘practice’ is, however, this project seeks to test the boundaries of your work and disrupt your common processes. By taking a wide and open view as to what is meant by ‘practice’, you will begin to define the parameter of your practical application and weave more complex relationships between your research and practice.
Is your practice distinct from your research’? Do they speak to each other? How can you create greater synergy between the elements of your practice? Do the themes in your critical analysis complement and support your practical work in a constructive and sustainable way? The following content and exercises focus on strengthening the relationships between research interests and your practical processes and ideas.
Crossing the Boundary: Summer Showcase Exhibition Padlet
Praxis and Process
“It takes time, “it” being a kind of recognition of ease between myself and the proposed work, or the debris of try-outs, results of the desperate need to engage with physical stuff, without any clear idea of what to do.”
Barlow (2004) pg. 83.
Practice frequently entails not knowing entirely what you are doing. You may start off with an idea, or theory, but as soon as you begin the process of trying to realise it, everything changes.
Thinking about something, or observing it, is not the same as acting on it, handling it, or making it. According to German-born American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, as soon as you take the initiative to act, something is put into motion that leads to the unexpected. As the abstract or hypothetical becomes real, something new is revealed.
Practice (or praxis) has been an important concept for philosophers, which continues to endure. In ancient Greece, Aristotle proposed that there were three basic activities that humans take part in: theoria (thinking/theory), poiesis (making/producing), and praxis (acting/doing). Arendt argues in her book The Human Condition that Western philosophy focuses on the contemplative life and neglects the active life, which has led to philosophical ideas becoming abstract and irrelevant within everyday life. For Arendt, praxis is the highest and most important level of active life and she posits that our capacity to analyse ideas, grapple with them, and engage in praxis is what makes us uniquely human.
For the ancient Greeks, in contrast to poiesis, praxis indicated an action that was considered to be valuable in itself. It had an “ethical dimension concerned with self-shaping or a decision as to how to live, as well as a political dimension concerned with the form in which one lived with other people.” (Boon, Levine, 2018:13). Whereas, poiesis refers to activities that are a means to an end or goal. The differentiation of human activity in this way is not observed in non-Western traditions. In Western culture, practice can be applied to political, educational, spiritual and medical spheres.
Within a creative context, it is common to talk about a ‘practitioner’s practice’ rather than their ‘work’. Critics argue that this development is a way to professionalise what creative practitioners do and shifts the focus from the outcome to the process. However, increasingly it is the case that practitioners no longer produce work as a singular entity but are involved in the wide range of activities that constitute the work.
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