The first session is in Graduate Studio Northumbria (GSN) at 10.00 am on Wednesday, 27th September 2017. We now have this blog to complement the online Basecamp organizer. Talkstudio is a forum that explores the outer limits of practice-based research, but how shall we use the blog in relation to this idea? One thought is that, in the first instance, a few anecdotes about past meetings would help to get things going. Please take this as an open invitation. Participants may recall experiences that demonstrate how far studio talking can sit outside an academic curriculum and yet still prompt intellectual encounters that contribute to being an art student. Yes, we have often talked about ‘theoretical’ books and Talkstudio sessions accept that academic publications can lead artists to think interesting things and write persuasive essays, but not many of our ideas end up as neatly packaged as this:
Rather, my own experiences of Talkstudio suggest that our thinking is really embedded in something quite unlike the smug photographs in Imagination's chamber: artists and their studios by Alice Bellony-Rewald and Michael Peppiatt.
In a recent article for the academic journal Studies in Material Thinking I debated how this kind of scholarly writing about art occludes the actual states of mind encountered in studio work [https://www.materialthinking.org/people/chris-dorsett]. I built my discussion on photographs of studio mess made during ‘health and safety’ inspections at our University. So come along on Wednesday to find out more about the dilemmas of writing about the actual outer limits of creative practice. Hopefully this will get the new year of Talkstudio under way.