Visual Art Practice Research Group
Convenor: Chris Smith

The Visual Art Practice Research Group aims:

* To provide a focus for studio-centred research that encourages interdisciplinary enquiry in the visual arts, design and architecture

* To enquire into practitioners' documentation of their practice, examining commonalities and differences in such descriptions; and, by reference to such accounts, to examine generative rules of practice and issues of the relationship between imagination, process, and product, across the visual arts

* To examine debate concerning the autonomy of art objects and their value as institutional critique, placing such enquiry within appropriate debates regarding issues of intention, objecthood and knowledge; and to establish relationships where dialogue between other discipline areas may inform such debate.

* To disseminate the results of such enquiry through symposia, conferences, text and exhibition, thereby becoming a focus for current national and international debates

The objective of the group is to generate from researching practitioners bodies of work in both theory and studio practice. (Studio practice is here considered to be constituted less from specialist methods of conceptual research than from a polymorphous matrix of the conceptual, poetic and practical.) It is hoped that by examining aspects of this and entering experimental modes, practice is illuminated. Such work, initially, may be characterised by an essay-like quality, both in terms of written and visual materials; but the purpose is to generate theoretical and dialogical tools appropriate to the cross-referencing of methods of research across the visual arts.

The members of the group encompass a range of practices, theoretical and studio based, whose practice flows between the two and, to quote an Art and Praxis colloquialism, ''sometimes…may be seen as theoretical and theory as highly practical''.