You Can’t Get There From Here: Discovering Where to Begin a Practice-led Inquiry – Notes and Reflections from Thailand

Abstract

This article focuses critical attention on an often-overlooked aspect of practice-led research in art and design – how and where practice-led research projects begin. In particular, the article describes and discusses an MFA class in Visual Communication at a Thai University that provides a structured approach to producing what the author describes as good beginnings. Rather than resulting from the decision to continue existing approaches to practice or selecting a new topic for inquiry, the author argues that good beginnings emerge from an intensive period of pre-inquiry that, at one and the same time, invites students to engage with and unpack the motivations and concerns that underly their practices, explore these through practical experimentation, locate them within relevant theoretical contexts, and by so doing, begin the process of reimaging their practice-in-itself as a form of practice-as-inquiry. Working in a situation where artistic inquiry is dominated by conventional understandings of research and the hegemony of linguistic forms of the presentation of knowledge, the author pays particular attention to addressing the complex entanglements of words and works in the development of practice-led projects in a university setting.