I have received further funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Clore Leadership to review the impact and value of Glass House as an examination of art and policy and a case study of practice-based research.
I created and ran Glass House in September 2021. This exhibition/experience/event acted as the nexus of the practice-based research for a project considering the role that art could play in policy. The broader research project - A Role for Art in Policy? - was funded by the AHRC and Clore Leadership in 2020-21. You can read about the original project and its findings here.
Practice-based research?
Lucy Bayliss, a participant at Glass House, reviewing Layers of East of England whilst annotating a card
I created Glass House in a parallel and iterative process alongside more traditional forms of research which included a literature review, analysis of case studies and interviews with policymakers, artists and theorists. The practice-based research allowed me to consider the relationship between art and policy in a different, more tactile and experiential way. This included:
Material research for the artefacts which were ultimately exhibited in Glass House;
Conceptual research into how artefacts and experiences relate to the emerging findings of a research project;
The exhibition itself including materials and documents co-created with participants;
Video interviews with participants who had just been part of an immersive art and science experience. You can see examples of these from 1:27 in this video.
The participatory component of the exhibition comprised an exploration of two questions written on cards, shown in the first and second images in this blog. For the first card participants provided an answer, in their own time, to the question “Which visual information is most striking - and why?” For the second card participants provided an answer to the question “What policy needs to happen - by whom?” - but only after they had discussed the artefacts and questions with other participants, as a group, for 30 minutes. The final twist came right at the end as I took these cards and engraved the handwriting onto shards of broken glass to exhibit for future visitors - see the image below.
After each group experienced Glass House, I engraved the notes from their annotated cards onto shards of glass
WHAT NEXT?
Once again I am fortunate to benefit from the supervision of Patrycja Kaszynska at the University of the Arts London, co-author of the game-changing 2016 Cultural Value report. Over the coming months, with Patrycja’s supervision, I will be:
Analysing and consolidating the evidence base obtained through Glass House, including the participatory materials and the video interviews;
Cross referencing these practice-based research findings with the initial conceptual frameworks developed in the A Role for Art in Policy? research project including the ‘art-policy matrix’;
Re-interviewing participants to obtain a longer term view of their assessment of the value of Glass House for using artistic methods in policymaking;
Disseminating the findings through events, online channels and a newly commissioned interactive online artwork developed with an UAL student.
The blogs will appear on the project home page. Subscribe here to find out when they land.