Unseen Art

Invisible Artists

What is art? The never ending question. What are the classes, league tables of art? Its something I have struggled with. I am a painter, I began painting my home / birth town because I was moving to live away. So yes, pictures. Works that evoked in me memories, emotions, ideas. But what were they to others?

Mertyn Crewe 1975 (?) (oil on board) Welsh Arts Council Collection, held at Bangor University. Yvonne Jones (after Pamela Johnson Hutchings)

As i felt increasingly at home with visual media i cam to understand I 'thought through seeing', that many concepts and understandings of mine were visual first and verbal second. Paint what you see not what you think you see (Johnson Hutchings) stood me in good stead. What happened as I painted what i saw and not what i thought i saw was that other ingredients came in, they were inseparable, before reflection, from what I saw.
Jumping across decades my path developed into my being an artist researcher. Researching ideas through my art, testing them against current knowledge, discussing and arguing a case that came into being through artpractice research.

PIRG is agroup of artist researchers, each with their own area of expertise, each working through art paractice and discussing, testing their work against our current knowledge base. Adding onto and building onto this base. PIRG is leading a move to make the artwork, that is art in its own right, of these practitoners, into the public realm. Through our group we are bringing together rigorous research executed through artworks. Here are notes on our most recent session

http://blog.soton.ac.uk/wsapgr/2015/07/17/conversation-as-a-collaborative-research-method/