W.F. Garrett-Petts

Visualizing Writing Project

Howard Gardner's concept of multiple intelligences and the work of Project Zero and Arts Propel (in the United States); Artsmart, the National Heritage Fair Program, and the Reading the Museum project (in Canada); and Reggio Emilia's integration of the arts as central to early childhood education (in Italy) all attest that sensory experience, especially the involvement of art, provides an essential route to learning. In the Italian pre-schools, the teachers (or pedagogiste) refer to the children as "little researchers" exploring the world through 100 languages--of which print is only one.

Ironically, though there's ample evidence that we need to integrate visual ways of knowing and representing knowledge throughout life, universities have, until recently, singled out print as the privileged medium for intellectual work. Things are changing, however. Cultural theorists, and especially those involved in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies, are beginning to acknowledge a "visual turn" in academic and creative work. The pressure to accommodate "non-linguistic" ways of knowing and communicating has become particularly urgent in Canada, since the major funding agency for the humanities and social sciences (SSHRC) is now considering funding artist-researchers alongside more traditional academics.

I am interested in how this "artists-as-researchers" model extends and complicates the practice of interdisciplinary research and collaborative writing in the humanities and social sciences. There is a rich tradition of research on the visual arts, but we know relatively little about research for visual art (the array of practices that both inform and constitute artistic production) or research through visual art (where artistic practice becomes a vehicle for producing and presenting new knowledge). My present project, "Visualizing Writing: On Artists' Statements and the Artist-as-Researcher," seeks (1) to examine the role of research and writing in contemporary visual arts culture, and (2) to research the consequences of integrating non-linguistic modes, strategies, assumptions, and traditions into academic research and collaborative writing.

I've begun, with Rachel Nash, a study of "artists' statements," formal verbal descriptions written by artists to introduce and explain their visual work. We see the artist's statement is a key document for understanding how artists translate visual thinking and production into verbal form. British Columbia's three principal art galleries have given us access to their respective collections for this purpose. Finally, working with community partners from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and a major community-university research alliance, allied with a process of personal artistic inquiry, we have begun to expand our findings from the study of artists' statements and artists' writing to the broader set of issues posed by the role of visual artists as collaborative researchers. The results of this study will be of interest to scholarly and general audiences, including language researche rs, art educators, curators, artists, and those working in interdisciplinary collaborations.

Writing is my own principal practice: my recent work, "Catch & Release," was featured as part of the Witness Marks exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria--my contribution involved poetic wall text, a cabinet of artifacts, and an accompanying video (including archival 8mm family footage).