International Centre for Fine Art Research

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Anita Ponton Artist Statement

Location

2pm - 5pm

What does it mean to an artists to undertake and complete a PhD? What can PhD students who are themselves practicing artists learn from artists who have undergone the doctoral process?This academic year ICFAR and RNUAL will be running four workshops that address questions of practice within the context of doctoral work. Each workshop will be led by an artist who has undertaken a PhD project. Artists will introduce their own work, and talk about the ways in which they approached their own PhD, reflecting on how the doctoral work has informed their current intellectual and creative practice.

Anita Ponton:

Using my own experience as a starting point for a seminar on practice based research strategies, I will discuss the relationship of artistic practice to research interests. Drawing on personal experience, I will speak to how an artist/researcher develops a language or strategy that enables and facilitates effective and rigorous practice-based/practice-led research. I will focus on developing methodologies and examine how one creates a useful research plan and talk about the pitfalls and difficulties one encounters in this kind of research, and how one might solve or deal with them. I see the first part of my session as being an introduction to my work and research, followed by a broad discussion or informal seminar where we discuss various issues pertaining to artists and research. The final part of the session will hopefully allow for a few short one-to-one sessions with students.

Details of Anita's research:

In my practice I work across multiple disciplines, with an emphasis on the performative, I seek to interrogate the relationship of the female body to visibility, to representation and to space. My research, originating with my PhD project, considers the impact of technology on the body in performance. As well as discussing aspects of my practice, I will discuss my methodology as a practice based researcher.

I will briefly outline a strategy that made it possible for me to somehow ‘speak through the practice’ and into the theory, in the form of academic writing. In my understanding of practice-based research, the artist/researcher has to develop a highly specific and personal methodology, according to the specifics of their practice. For me, a constant involvement with technology (both hi and lo-fi) demanded that I find a methodology that could address both the ramifications and impact of these technologies upon the work (after all, no material, no technology is neutral within any artwork), as well as some of the philosophical issues raised with regard to representation and self-hood (a by-blow of my performances).

Technophenomenology (from Amelia Jones, first used in her book ‘Body Art: Performing the Subject’) is a term that articulates the enworlded nature of the relationships between bodies, machines and media, and it provides a structure that recognises how it subjectively feels to be objectively embodied within a world saturated by technology. As an artist, working performatively with different technologies, I found this term/idea invaluable in enabling me to articulate my discourse fully in relation to my work and to speak of some of the philosophical issues raised by the intersection of new technologies and the 21st century body.

TO BOOK A PLACE AT THIS PHD MASTER CLASS PLEASE CONTACT CHRIS RALLS AT c.ralls@csm.arts.ac.uk OR BY CALLING 020 7514 8546