Making Art for Making Place, a joint education and research project, engaged post-secondary fine arts students in the creation of paintings for residents of a transitional care facility. The purpose of the project was to explore how improving the living environment through art could
benefit the residents with dementia while considering the impact this had on the students themselves. This article draws from participant observations and follow-up interviews to examine the learning experiences of students who created paintings for the facility. Further, it explores the impact
on their learning through interactions with nurses and expert researchers who joined the class to participate in group discussions and share their expertise working with people living with dementia. The research revealed that the project fostered positive community building; engaged students
in discussions and reflections about how art affects people; prompted consideration of experiences of the elderly ‐ particularly those with dementia; and expanded understandings of the roles of art in the society.
This article examines the role of spending time with others in and through artistic research and practice. I draw from my doctoral work which took me on a cross‐Canada journey visiting 125 artists in their studios. Following the studio visits, I made a series of paintings of artists’ studios, however a year later these same paintings were cut up and rearranged to create collaborative studio assemblages on the walls of the Tate Exchange Gallery in Liverpool. Drawing on the metaphor of a never‐ending‐painting to examine never‐ending pedagogies, this article examines the evolution of this project through three iterations of the studio paintings. With each iteration, I explore different ways of knowing others through making thus proposing the performative and relational qualities of artistic research. The first iteration allowed me to spend time with artists even in their absence, as I engaged with our conversations through painting their studios, thus blurring the lines between solitary and social art practices. The second iteration allowed me to give up my art to others through asking them to create collages with fragments of my studio paintings. And the third iteration allowed my work to merge with other arts‐based researchers. Through this process, I propose that making art allows for multiple conversations to emerge through spending time getting to know others through art making.
In 2014, I embarked on a cross-Canada journey, visiting artists in their studios. Through interviews with artists and photograph documentation of the studios, I sought to understand the creative processes that occur within these spaces through art making. This visual essay draws from
metaphors used by artists to describe a studio alongside photographs that I took to reveal my visual exploration of the space and my visual analysis and interpretation of the metaphors. Through the use of these metaphors alongside the photographs, I propose that a studio is more than a room,
but rather a way of thinking. Furthermore, I reflect on how we might embrace these metaphors to imagine ways of fostering a creative educational space.
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