Painting

To speak of painting as an engaged research practice is to shift it away from expression or representation and toward method: a way of producing knowledge through situated, material, and temporal inquiry.

Painting, in this sense, is not a medium that illustrates prior ideas but a site of investigation. Its materials—surface, pigment, binders, supports, rhythms of application—operate as variables within an experimental system. Knowledge emerges immanently, through trial, resistance, sedimentation, failure. What is “known” is not fully propositional; it is embodied, procedural, and often non-translatable without loss.

The engagement is double. First, painting engages the world materially: it is embedded in economies of labour, histories of technique, infrastructures of display, and regimes of visibility. Second, it engages perception itself. Painting researches how seeing is produced—how surfaces organise attention, how duration and repetition condition sense, how meaning flickers without stabilising. In this respect, painting functions as a perceptual laboratory, testing the limits of recognition and habit.

As research, painting is cumulative rather than illustrative. Works do not “stand alone” but form sequences, series, and problematics. Each painting modifies the conditions of the next. This aligns painting with practice-based research models (ref. Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge — “we know more than we can tell”, Donald Schön’s reflection-in-action — “thinking on your feet”), but also with Marxist and Maoist accounts of practice: knowledge arises from activity, from engagement with contradictions internal to the process itself.

An engaged research practice does not collapse into pure formalism, its autonomy is relative, not absolute. Painting remains responsive to social conditions—modes of production, institutional framing, collective spectatorship—without reducing itself to messaging. Its politics lies in how it reorganises experience: how it trains perception, redistributes attention, and opens a space in which the world might be sensed otherwise.

Painting, then, is research not because it explains, but because it tests. It poses problems it cannot solve in advance, and in doing so, produces forms of knowledge that only sustained, material practice can yield.

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Counter-Capture Strategies in Practice-Based PhDs

1. Reframe Research Outputs

• Strategy: Define the artwork itself (in its lived relationality) as the primary site of knowledge, with writing as accompaniment rather than translation.
• How: Use the exegesis or written component to situate rather than subordinate practice. Let it document process, relational encounters, or shifts in sensibility rather than just “findings.”

2. Maintain Process Visibility

• Strategy: Resist final-product fetishism by foregrounding process as knowledge.
• How: Archive fragments, failures, and provisional forms; allow what is usually invisible (care, labour, relational adjustments) to be legible within the research. This protects self-emptying from being rewritten as “error” or “gap.”

3. Ethical–Aesthetic Criteria

• Strategy: Explicitly articulate beneficial practice criteria alongside academic criteria.
• How: Frame evaluation not only in terms of “rigour” and “contribution” but also in terms of care, relational sensitivity, and attentiveness to context. Some supervisors already use dual rubrics (academic + practice-sensitive).

4. Situated Knowledge Practices

• Strategy: Anchor research in the particularity of contexts rather than universal claims.
• How: Borrow from feminist and decolonial epistemologies (e.g., Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges”). This resists capture by refusing the demand for totalising or abstract generalisation.

5. Collaborative/Collective Modes

• Strategy: Embed co-production, dialogue, or relational encounters into the work.
• How: PhD projects that are with communities, peers, or publics distribute authorship and authority. This destabilises capture by keeping the project ecological rather than individualised and extractive.

6. Generative Writing Forms

• Strategy: Use non-traditional writing that mirrors the ethos of the practice.
• How: Fragmentary writing, dialogical transcripts, poetic forms, performative scripts — forms that resist over-securing meaning and allow openness, ambiguity, and beauty to remain part of the research record.

7. Supervisory Alignment

• Strategy: Choose (or cultivate) supervisors who understand the risks of capture and can advocate for expanded forms of rigour.
• How: Build supervisory teams with balance: one academic fluent in institutional requirements, one practice-oriented mentor who protects the ethical–aesthetic integrity.

8. Refusal as Method

• Strategy: Consciously decline certain framing devices or institutional requests that would betray the work’s integrity.
• How: Practice strategic opacity (Glissant)*, or “minimal compliance” — give the system enough to satisfy procedural requirements while holding open space for relationality and self-emptying.

* strategic opacity (Glissant) = the right to remain partially unassimilable — a protective tactic for keeping the ethical–aesthetic alive within structures that demand total legibility. [Édouard Glissant: ‘Poetics of Relation’, 1990]

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Guiding the Ethical–Aesthetic in Practice-Based PhDs

1. Keep Ethics and Aesthetics Together

• Treat form and responsibility as inseparable.
• Ask: How does this way of making also shape how I live, act, and relate?

2. Position Writing as Companion

• Let the written component accompany the practice rather than explain or justify it.
• Use writing to share process, relation, and discovery — not just conclusions.

3. Honour Process as Knowledge

• Recognise fragments, trials, and provisional works as knowledge events.
• Avoid presenting only polished products; keep care and risk visible.

4. Value Situatedness

• Root research in its particular contexts and relations.
• Resist pressure to make universal claims that flatten nuance or fragility.

5. Cultivate Relational Sensitivity

• Make space for dialogue, collaboration, and co-production.
• See research as with and through others, not only about something.

6. Balance Supervision

• Supervisory teams should combine academic fluency with practice sensitivity.
• Protect the project’s integrity while meeting institutional requirements.

7. Use Strategic Opacity

• Meet necessary formal demands without over-explaining or closing down the work.
• Leave room for ambiguity, openness, and sensibility to remain active.

In practice:
A strong practice-based PhD doesn’t separate making from reflecting, or aesthetics from ethics. It nurtures skill, care, and openness as one movement — allowing knowledge to emerge in ways that are rigorous because they are situated, relational, and alive.