For my master’s I attended Boston University and complete my Masters Research Project: through an Arts-Based Research and Practice course in the Spring 2020 with Professor Rébecca Bourgault, MFA, Ed.D., and Facilitator Donna Murray-Tiedge, MFA, Ph.D. My approach to this study is an arts-based research approach where I use my art practice to investigate the internal and external factors of deep concentration in my artist-teachers art process. Through arts-based research, I use my artmaking of Landscape Photography and other mixed media methods to make art that expresses the ways I understand my research questions and experiences. Not only do I provide the reader with descriptions to support my examination, they also have physical artworks to interact with and internalize. I use Autoethnography to frame how I researched, reflected, interrupted my work. Below is breif statement of my that was display through Blackboard’s ePortfolios. The work posted uploaded above share a some of the artwork and support I captured, created, and develops during my masters research project. If you like to know more about my work please email me for further details.
Introductory & Curatorial Statement
In my arts-based research, I used landscape photography to study the immersive experience in artmaking. This investigation was to ascertain the internal and external stimuli to pinpoint that state in my artmaking. I used this analysis to understand if it can be crossed over into my teaching practice. In dissecting my work, I referred to thinking dispositions of Studio Thinking’s Studio Habits of Mind and the conditions between flow and creative flow. As an artist, I connected to landscape photographer Peter Eastway to challenge myself. My final artworks are artist books that account for my interpretations and conclusions on the immersive experience, which I referred to my previous artist book series Beautifully Flawed and the book artist Marlene MacCallum.
Artist Statement
In the timeframe of making art, I find myself so profoundly absorbed that my thoughts and actions merge into a state of intense presence. This body of work uses my landscape photography to explore that immersive experience in my artmaking. I question what internal and or external stimuli cultivate an immersive state? How does one enter and exit episodes of deep concentration? How might one cycle in and out during that deep focus within a single event of artmaking? What affects or sustains the duration? Could the state of immersive artmaking be purposefully reached? Does that affect the quality of the artwork? Moreover, how might I use this ability to transfer from my professional art practice into my teaching practice?
My landscape photography process evoked periods of immersive art experience, and my artist books served as a generative form to compile my observations, interpretations, and reflections. The artist's books analyzed and chronicled my decoding of immersive experience in the various stages of my photography practice. I found my interactions between thinking and making and reflecting reveal how I reach, suspend, exit, and repeated the immersive experiences while making art. The interactions between my artist self and my teaching-artist self metaphorically appear as back and forth journey. Subsequently, I found my photography focused on a particular landscape, which brought forward another metaphorical connection of the lighthouse landscape that linked the artist-teachers relationship with their students.
